This dissertation offers an intellectual history of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement. From the 1870s to the 1900s, Populists in the People's Party and Farmers’ Alliances built a bi-racial movement which knit workers and farmers together in a broad 'producerist' coalition. This coalition radically redrew their country’s republican tradition through notions of a ‘cooperative commonwealth’, breaking with the proprietary individualism that characterised American agrarianism before. Some of the most celebrated works of American historiography have been produced on this movement. Often enough however, its intellectual roots have been neglected in favour of purely organisational, cultural, religious, or political narratives. This thesis aims for a linking of history and political theory by offering a comprehensive intellectual history of American Populism.

At the heart of this thesis project is the populist reinvention of republican democracy. Since its inception in the 'Age of Revolutions', this tradition insisted on the centrality of the small, male, white farmer to a political economy oriented on agriculture. At times hostile to mediation, this vision was strengthened by the settler expansion of the Jackson presidency. But in the late 1870s this 'producerist' vision faced three new challenges: corporations emerged as the primary actors in a new capitalist economy, new subjects emerged to loosen previous definitions of the ‘producer’, and a tightening land supply removed the last safety valves which had shielded farmers from the market economy before. The dissertation tracks the Populist response to this triple crisis. Populist theorists began by recuperating the artificial person of the corporation to counter existing monopolies in railroads, credit provision, and banking. These put forward ideals of cooperative association as fresh safeguards for republican government. When these efforts ground to a halt in the late 1880s, Populists moved to the level of the state. By focusing on the writings of Populists such as Thomas E. Watson, James B. Weaver, John B. Rayner, Benjamin O. Flower, and Charles E. Macune, this thesis investigates how Populism reimagined republican democracy for a corporate age, and how this ‘returning of populism to history’ can reframe our current populist moment.