The new evidence concerning the artisanal origins of working-class radicalism, its "producerist" ideology, its defense of an earlier way of life against an innovating industrialism, and its strong sense of local, regional, and national identity suggests that working-class radicalism in the nineteenth century should be seen as a form of populism, not as the first, halting step toward "mature" trade unionism and socialism. E. P. Thompson began his work on the assumption that nineteenth-century radicalism reflected the interests and outlook of a rising class. The historical scholarship his work inspired now makes it clear that the "making of the working class" can better be described as the unmaking of a class of small proprietors having more in common with hard-pressed yeoman farmers than with industrial workers. Instead of regarding populism itself as a purely agrarian impulse, we now have to regard the agrarian version of populism as part of a broader movement that appealed to small producers of all kinds. Artisans and even many shopkeepers shared with farmers the fear that the new order threatened their working conditions, their communities, and their ability to pass on both their technical skills and their moral economy to their offspring. In the nineteenth century, "agrarianism" served as a generic term for popular radicalism, and this usage reminds us that opposition to monopolists, middlemen, public creditors, mechanization, and the erosion of craftsmanship by the division of labor was by no means confined to those who worked on the soil.

To speak of populism in such general terms admittedly carries the risk of imprecision. In recent years, journalists and politicians have used the term so loosely that "populism," like every other term in the political vocabulary, seems compromised almost beyond hope of redemption. At one time or another, it has been applied to Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Jackson, among others. It has been applied both to the new left and to the new right.

Historians too have used the label carelessly; and revisionist scholarship therefore had to begin, a few years ago, by distinguishing the free

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