The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Recent months have witnessed an attack of unprecedented passion and ferocity against the national government. The Republican Party has apparently embarked on a crusade to destroy national standards, national projects, and national regulations and to transfer domestic governing authority from the national government to the states...Unbridled rhetoric is having consequences far beyond anything that antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of angry words seems to have activated and, in a sense, legitimized what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the `paranoid strain' in American politics.
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Wall Street Journal 19950607)

The crank and his following have attracted a gifted historian in Richard Hofstadter...His account stands as the most balanced and authoritative analysis we have of a formidable and apparently permanent force in American politic.
--C. Vann Woodward (New York Times Book Review )

Here are a series of episodes in the American imagination--from anti-Masonry and Populism to McCarthyism and the Birch Society--each of them informed with a distinctive intelligence...Hofstadter's status theory helps us understand a political history that goes far beyond the issues of the fifties and sixties which it was invoked to explain. (New Republic )

Professor Hofstadter...casts an incandescent light on the tactics of the Far Right which we crucially need to understand and to counter if we are to debate and formulate foreign policy equal to the needs of the times...Professor Hofstadter's essays...are calm, clear, dispassionate and devastating--a joy to read. (Harper's )

About the Author

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was De Witt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674654617
• ISBN-13: 978-0674654617
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #442,185 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Differentiating Conservatism from Fringe Lunacy, December 5, 2001

By	William Hare (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

During the fifties, and up to the time of his death in the sixties, Richard Hofstadter was one of America's most renowned historians with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit. He was at his intellectual peak when, as one of America's eminent authorities of his country's political ideologies, he tackled the developing phenomenon of the early sixties' right wing extremism under the guise of conservatism. He differentiates between the traditional American conservatism espoused by the likes of President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft alongside the venom of Robert Welch's John Birch Society, in which, as the group's idea man, Welch referred to Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "dedicated and conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy."

Hoftstadter delineates how fringe rightist elements took over the Republican Party and rallied behind the banner of Arizona's Senator Barry M. Goldwater, resulting in one of the party's most calamitous losses in the 1964 presidential election against incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The work has a timely ring as an historical analytical measuring rod in comprehending the activities of current right wing movements, such as the Christian Right behind the banners of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and its link to the militant anti-abortion movement, alongside earlier rightist political philosophies and their vigorous adherents such as Welch and television commentator Dan Smoot.

67 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Devastating, yes; clairvoyant, no, April 27, 2001

By	Carl Hoffman (Cleveland Heights,, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Granted that Prof. Hofstadter's evaluation of the "pseudo-conservatism" of the Goldwater campaign is rather patronizing, and that, too optimistically, he predicted that the paranoid style was condemned to permanent minority status. Otherwise, the book is a prescient and devastating analysis of the breathless mindset on display, mainly from the Right, over the last ten years or so. Just last November right-wing commentators as bright and well-educated as George F. Will were fulminating against Gore's "slow-motion coup" in Florida, and lesser conservatives were passing the word that President Clinton was about to seize dictatorial powers. The fact that the most conservative president since Reagan--maybe since the Roaring 20s--is currently sitting in the Oval Office, courtesy of a hypocritical decision by a quintet of conservative Supreme Court justices, means nothing to the conservatives immersed in the paranoid style. THEY didn't subvert the system; they saved the U.S. from the liberals, the liberals, the liberals.

Back in 1964, Prof. Hofstadter noted that people who think like this tend to imitate the massive conspiracies they imagine threatening themselves. Writing in an era that still resembled the stereotypical 1950s more than the stereotypical 1960s, Hofstadter did not forsee the current power of the paranoid style. But the title essay of his book nails it right to the wall. Reading it, I feared for my country.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Politics as pathology, November 7, 2006

By	Thomas W. Blakey "Master Sergeant, US Army (r... (Severn, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This book is as relevant now as it was when it was first written. An excellent blend of accuracy and eloquence.