Political theorists do not in general pay much attention to populism; are there any good reasons why they should do so? This paper will consider a number of positive answers to this question. Most attention has so far been paid to issues of methodology—can we define ‘populism’? Recently there has also been some interest in the relation between populism and democracy, but there are two further topics that may be worth investigating, first the possibility of a distinctive political ideology that might be called ‘populist’, and second the meanings and significance of populism's core concept, the elusive ‘people’.