Considered by many scholars to be principally a catch-all or a useless concept, populism has rarely gone hand-in-hand with historical reflection. Building upon ‘the need to return populism to history’, this article offers an overview of the reasons why populism as a concept and as a potential sequence of historical events seems to fit well in post-Second World War Italy, and aims to suggest areas for further research. At the intersection between conceptual history, democratic theory and discourse-historical analysis, the article explores the continuities and discontinuities of Italian populisms, focusing on the resemioticisation of the concept of civil society and its legacy within historical Italian Fascism, especially during the transition to the so-called Second Republic.

许多学者认为，民粹主义主要是一个包罗万象或无用的概念，但很少与历史反思齐头并进。基于“将民粹主义回归历史的必要性”，本文概述了民粹主义作为一个概念和作为一系列历史事件的潜在序列似乎很适合二战后意大利的原因，并旨在提出一些领域的建议以供进一步研究。在概念史、民主理论和话语历史分析之间的交叉点上，本文探讨了意大利民粹主义的连续性和不连续性，重点关注公民社会概念的再符号化及其在意大利历史法西斯主义中的遗产，特别是在向所谓的第二共和国。