Considered by many scholars to be principally a catch-all or a useless concept, populism has rarely gone hand-in-hand with historical reflection. Building upon ‘the need to return populism to history’, this article offers an overview of the reasons why populism as a concept and as a potential sequence of historical events seems to fit well in post-Second World War Italy, and aims to suggest areas for further research. At the intersection between conceptual history, democratic theory and discourse-historical analysis, the article explores the continuities and discontinuities of Italian populisms, focusing on the resemioticisation of the concept of civil society and its legacy within historical Italian Fascism, especially during the transition to the so-called Second Republic.

This paper argues that, in terms of their view of the ‘people’, leaderistic plebiscitarism and corporative organicism are two sides of the same coin, which resulted in aspirational fascist totalitarian democracy. The binary – and intrinsically ambiguous – view of the ‘people’ is examined first in the passive and indeterminate qualities attributed to the Italian population, then in the institutional device designed to lead it. The resulting twofold paradigm of corporative populism is reviewed with reference to the model put together and popularised by Giuseppe Bottai, which is presented in three different forms.

The essay investigates the occupation of the city of Rijeka (1919–20) by an irregular army led by Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, focusing on the concepts of sovereignism and populism. While people with different mentalities and ideological horizons took part in the endeavour, it was d'Annunzio that gave the occupation its profound meaning. The poet attempted to put into practice his political vision centered around a ‘noble people’, composed of warriors and producers, opposed to the liberal elites and in competition with revolutionary socialist movements. In this sense, the Free State of Rijeka grew into the prototype of a new society based on the integration of racial, plebiscitary, corporate, aesthetic, and political themes. At the same time, the city became a beacon of opposition to the new international order proposed by US president Woodrow Wilson, since it advocated and worked towards the birth of sovereignty for small countries resisting new supranational bodies such as the League of Nations.

The aim of this article is to illustrate some key points that will hopefully encourage further reflection on the cinematic representations and meanings of populism in both an Italian and international context. Firstly, we attempt a definition of populism as applied to cinema, drawing on both political science and the literature on film history. Secondly, we turn to film critics and directors, discussing the views some of them hold on populism and film in relation to the Italian cinema of recent years. Thirdly, we discuss how the star system provides a useful point of convergence for our analysis of cinema and populism, looking in particular at postwar commedia all'italiana and the role of Totò in this context. Finally, we draw some conclusions and suggest what directions future research on the issue of populism and Italian cinema could take.

Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, New York. He is one of the leading scholars on fascism and populism. Professor Finchelstein is the author of many books that have been translated into several languages, including the successful From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017). His new monograph, Fascist Mythologies. The History and Politics of Unreason in Borges, Freud, and Schmitt, is forthcoming in June 2022 from Columbia University Press. Given this, he is a natural starting point to discuss the global dimension of populism and its historical experiences from Latin America to Italy. Andrea Mammone, co-editor of Modern Italy, interviewed him in December 2021.