ernment to protect and advance the “democracy of the
common man” against the craftiness of elites. This
causes its image of ignorant “country bumpkins”
reacting against MODERNtechnology, science, and eco-
nomic progress. Consequently, populism is often por-
trayed by the media as unsophisticated and potentially
FASCIST. Its appeal to religious FUNDAMENTALISMand its
following of demagogue leadership further alienates
many educated and urban people.
Populism has occurred in many cultures around
the world, usually among rural populations. NAZIGer-
many appealed to the Volk(folk) or traditional Ger-
man peasant mentality (simple morality, nationalistic
pride, authoritarian attitudes); Russian populism in
the 19th century extolled traditional peasant life;
India under GANDHIemphasized ordinary Indian peo-
ple. ISLAMICfundamentalism in the Arab Middle East-
ern countries has a strong populist sentiment (as in
Iran) against Western and international, secular elites.
Some CATHOLICsocial thought (as in Poland) and the
Green Party in Europe contain populist sentiments.
When the U.S. Democratic Party claims to represent
“the people” and accuses the REPUBLICANParty of rep-
resenting “the rich” or “business,” it is drawing on
populist ideas. President Ronald REAGAN’s popularity
was partly attributed to his populist appeal to average
Americans.
As more citizens in Western nations become city
dwellers and better educated, populism diminishes as
a strong movement.
Further Readings
Godwyn, L. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in Ameri-
can.New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Ionescu, G., and Gellner, E. Populism: Its Meanings and National
Characteristics.New York: Macmillan, 1969.
positivism/positivistic
The term is first used by COMTEto describe his theory
that human society evolved through religious and
metaphysical stages, culminating in a scientific stage.
More generally, positivism refers to an assemblage of
related ideas and doctrines that claim that (1) knowl-
edge is obtained through sense experience; (2) knowl-
edge of the natural world and of human behavior and
society can be obtained through a single scientific
methodology; and (3) any claim not based on sense
experience and the methods of scientific inquiry is
metaphysical nonsense.
The origin of the word positivismcan be found in
the writings of Francis BACON, the English philosopher
and experimental scientist. Bacon (1561–1626) advo-
cated the idea that sense experience is the foundation
of knowledge, a new and radical idea at the time.
Within the scholastic environment in which he set out
these ideas, he described this source of knowledge as
“positive” because it required no previous cause to
explain it. We thus begin with sense experience and
build knowledge from a natural, positive base.
Auguste COMTEcoins the world sociology to de-
scribe his scientific approach to understanding how
societies work and function and his normative
account of how they should be structured and organ-
ized. He argues that there is a single methodology
governing all inquiry of correlating observation-based
facts and that this applies as equally to human society
as it does in the area of astronomy, for example. He
went on to argue that scientists should form a ruling
class and that science itself should be the object of
spiritual admiration. His ideas are set out in his
Course on the Positive Philosophy.Although the partic-
ulars of Comte’s theory are no longer well regarded,
his determination to see society as falling within the
scope of natural science and the baptizing of this posi-
tion as positivist has had a great influence through to
the present age.
Positivism is thus closely connected to the episte-
mological doctrine of empiricism and to the unified
view of science, as well as to the sharp division
between metaphysics and science. Most particularly, it
is connected to the disposition to understand social
phenomena by the methods of natural science.
Logical positivism was an early 20th-century philo-
sophical movement that embraced these doctrines and
that used the power of modern logic to articulate a
specific form of empiricism and to reject, as literally
meaningless, nonscientific, metaphysical theories.
Logic positivism is associated with the Vienna Circle, a
group of philosophers and logicians who met as a dis-
cussion group at the University of Vienna in the 1920s
and 1930s. The leading members of this group were
Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolp Carnap, and
Friedrich Waismann. Others who attended some of the
circle’s discussions and were influenced by its philoso-
phy were A. J. Ayer and Karl POPPER. The intellectual
ancestor of the Vienna Circle was David HUME, who
distinguished between two kinds of knowledge—
knowledge based on sense experience and knowledge
based on reason (as found, for example, in mathemat-positivism/positivistic 237