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Political developments in the United States and Europe have generated a resurgence in the use of the terms fascism and populism across multiple media. Fascism is a historically specific term that Benito Mussolini coined in Italy to define his regime. Over time, political analysts erased the historical specificity of fascism and deployed it as an analytic category. In contrast, populism is an analytic category that, depending on context, includes varying aggregates of popular preferences that often lack a coherent and unifying ideology. This review draws upon interdisciplinary scholarship and empirical cases to revisit the terms fascism and populism, focusing on institutionalized politics. Contemporary fascist and populist politics are increasingly global. This review argues that comparative political and historical sociologists need to develop an analytically cogent approach to researching this encroaching political phenomenon. The review suggests a research agenda that treats fascism and populism as more than conceptual categories.

As the 2020 American presidential election approaches, it is worth thinking about the current electoral moment in terms of lessons from the recent and not‐so‐recent past. This article begins with an unlikely analysis. Ordinary life captures the attention of citizens who vote but do not spend their lives 24/7 on social media or cable news or public radio. Ordinary people do not spend their time discussing social policy over dinner. Ordinary people go to dinner—not dinner parties. The ordinary people are the path to victory in any political contest. This article explores the “ordinary” and its relation to politics.

Donald Trump’s election has forced a collective re-evaluation of who the “ordinary citizen” or “forgotten man or woman” is. Level of education distinguished Trump voters from Clinton voters. In spring 2016, Trump exuberantly shouted, “I love the poorly educated!” The ordinary citizens who voted for Trump did not care about his well-documented outrageous statements. This article asks what made Donald Trump so attractive to the constituency of the “poorly educated”? Using a method of bricolage – the assemblage of diverse facts, slogans and visual images that dominated the electoral campaign – I develop an interpretation of Trump’s victory that is cultural and also speaks to profound structural changes that began in the United States in the 1970s. The evidence for this article comes from over 50 hours of watching Donald Trump on television – during the debates, the primary season and the election; the Republican convention and a series of speeches during the campaign season, as well as popular culture from the 1970s through the present.

Adding the question of culture--and culture and meaning are in many respects interchangeable--to sociological analysis brings richness, but it also brings methodological dilemmas that other sub-fields do not tend to encounter.

A review essay on Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets' book, \"Identity Theory.\".

“Emotion and economy” describes a relation that social scientists have recently begun to acknowledge and valorize. Outside of various fields of psychology, sociologists and economists often treat emotions as residual categories. It is arguable that the project of modern social science from its European nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary variations defines emotion out of social action in general and economic action in particular. In contrast to other contributions to this volume that discuss more or less established literatures, this chapter suggests plausible analytic frames that reinscribe emotion in social and economic action. Even though strong, let alone competing, paradigms have

The language of fear, stress, panic that has permeated discussion of the 2008 financial crisis in various media from the press to the blogosphere underscores a salient feature of the essays that follow. Emotion is a constitutive dimension of the economy -- even if we only collectively recognize it in times of crisis. Moreover, the metaphors of emotion that dominate descriptions of the current crisis remind us of what social scientists (& some economists) have been arguing for the last ten years or so -- the rationality & the economy more often represent an odd coupling than a harmonious marriage. Yet a paradox remains. Despite evidence to the contrary, the idea that the economy displays rationality & regularity remains powerful. The power of this economic idea provides the central problematic that this special issue attempts to address. The assumption of equilibrium & self regulation colored my initial perception of the \"fear index\" as a joke. Beginning with Freud's (1905) classic essay on wit & the unconscious, jokes are a staple of psychological, sociological & anthropological theorizing. Jokes are instructive when attempting to theorize the relation between macro level structures & micro level perceptions. Adapted from the source document.