In New English Review, Dalrymple reviews Frank Furedi’s book on populism, drawing on his acquaintance with three brilliant sociologists—Christie Davies, Kenneth Minogue, and Furedi himself—to explore why the word “populist” has become a term of denunciation rather than description, and why the technocratic alternative is no less dangerous than the populism it claims to oppose.
The demand that we should eschew all nostalgia as a harmful emotion is a demand that we should never compare the past—which is, after all, one of the great teachers of humanity—with the present, except in the triumphalist spirit that we know best and that therefore we have nothing to learn from the past.