In this contribution I will try to relate some of the categories that characterize the philosophical-political reflection of German classical philosophy with some issues related to our contemporaneity and in particular with that set of phenomena that are catalogued under the label of “populism”. I move from a brief analysis of populism; then I will try to show how it is a coherent declination of the typically modern way of thinking politics. Therefore, not the intrusion of an anti-modern movement into the folds of the modern political dispositive, but rather one of the possible outcomes of it, perhaps the outcome more consistent with the organization of political institutions that characterizes neoliberal societies. Leaning above all on some Hegelian analyses, I therefore intend to show that what we call populism is one of the derivations of an abstract and intellectualistic way of thinking the State rooted in modern political thought.
