Paul D. Kenny’s impressive and engaging book is a corrective to the well-established body of work on populism. This corpus grew in tandem with the most recent successes of populism that have been a feature of contemporary liberal democracies in the past decade, and are a source of anxiety to many who care about democracy and value pluralism.

An explanatory orthodoxy about populism has emerged that Kenny seeks to engage by shifting our focus to the ‘supply side’ of politics. Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of explaining the success of populism. The first is that it’s cultural. In this account, populism is driven by what we might call identity-based concerns over issues like immigration, threats to the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, and the fate of a sense of community at the local and national levels. The second explanation is that it’s economic. Populism is a symptom rather than a cause. In this analysis, populism appeals to those whose sense of security has been undermined by the dysfunction of neoliberalism, which is now seen – like communism before it – as something that worked better in theory than in practice.