State and corporation in American populist political philosophy, 1877-1902

Abstract

This article examines the political theory of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement, with a particular focus on its theories of state and corporation. Recent scholarship on populism has tended to present the phenomenon as a variant of direct democracy intrinsically opposed to intermediary bodies, a feature consistently traced back to American Populism as well. In this account, American Populists opposed new discourses of corporate personhood and free incorporation in the late nineteenth century owing to their tendency to distort natural bonds between peoples and leaders and to disperse the popular will. This article questions the tenability of this opposition through a close contextual engagement with original Populist texts. As the first self-declared 'populist' movement in modern history, Populists theorized about the usage of corporate personality for their own co-operatives and put forward ambitious visions of American statecraft, breaking with the proprietary individualism that characterized Jeffersonian agrarianism before. The article focuses on two particular genres of Populist thinking: first, their advocacy of the corporate form for their co-operative farm organizing and, secondly, a specifically statutory vision of state reform. It concludes with reflections on how these findings destabilize assumptions governing the current populism debate in political theory and American historiography.