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Populism, understood as an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values, should not be dismissed as a pathological form of politics of no interest to the political theorist, for its democratic pretensions raise important issues. Adapting Michael Oakeshott's distinction between ‘the politics of faith’ and ‘the politics of scepticism’, the paper offers an analysis of democracy in terms of two opposing faces, one ‘pragmatic’ and the other ‘redemptive’, and argues that it is the inescapable tension between them that makes populism a perennial possibility.

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This article analyses the notion of the ‘the people’ in contemporary political theory. It explains that the people's authority is considered to confer legitimacy upon constitutions, new regimes, and changes to the borders of states. It discusses the attribution of ultimate political authority to the people and investigates how the people came to have an authoritative status. It also analyses whether the repository of the ultimate political authority is a collective entity, a collection of individuals, or both.