Introduction

Abstract

At the turn towards the twenty-first century, the protagonists of the so-called populist movement were dubbed political dandies. European newspapers, whether from France, Holland, the UK, Germany, Italy or Austria, spoke about the return of the Polit-Dandy. But how could this figure, that is otherwise known to have stayed away from any involvement with politics, suddenly become politicized? Was the dandy perhaps already the protagonist of a political imagination? Could it be that over the past two centuries an entirely new political paradigm emerged around the figure of the dandy? To answer these questions, it is necessary to reconstruct the genealogy of this paradigm.