This course examines the postwar and contemporary dispute over the liberal, popular, and authoritarian aspects of populism in several countries of the central core (USA, Britain, France, Italy) and the peripheral fringe (Argentina, India), as exemplified in landmark works by several insightful scholars: Seymour M. Lipset, Margaret Canovan, Nadia Urbinati, Pierre Rosanvallon, Gino Germani, Guillermo O’Donnell, Ernesto Laclau, and Partha Chatterjee. Some of them rely on abstract truths and decontextualized concepts to depict populism as a mirror-like reflection of them; others construe it as a practical response to changing historical contingencies; and still others combine key elements from each to make sense of populism. Our course offers an alternative to these ‘theoreticist’ and ‘historicist’ accounts of populism based on the primacy and centrality of the following ethical-political traditions: functionalism, skepticism, anti-totalitarianism, liberal socialism, a-synchronic modernization, delegative democracy, post-marxian hegemony, and biopolitical governmentality. Following the Cold War, scholars identified with one of these traditions sometimes disagreed with like-minded thinkers that differed in their conception of populism due in large part to their divergent way of analyzing political life, with the following two approaches predominating among them: rationalism vs. judgment. Combining these modes of analyzing political life with the tradition-centered perspective on populism provides a more differentiated, nuanced, and convincing framework for making sense of the current debate which has become increasingly predictable, rigid, and stale.