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The Paranoid Style in American Politics Paperback – June 10, 2008

4.6 out of 5 stars 218

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This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

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Editorial Reviews

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“[Hofstadter's] account stands as the most balanced and authoritative analysis we have of a formidable and apparently permanent force in American politics.” —The New York Times Book Review“Hofstadter's essays . . .are calm, clear, dispassionate and devastating-a joy to read.” —Harper's“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

From the Back Cover

These essays deal with the conditions that have given rise to the extreme right of the 1950s and the 1960s, and the origins of certain characteristic problems of the earlier modern era when the American mind was beginning to respond to the facts of industrialism and world power.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (June 10, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 330 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307388441
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307388445
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.81 x 7.96 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 218

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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2021
I've read some of Hofstadter's more popular books, and picked this up because it was cited in something else I was reading on the current state of American politics. The historical perspective he weaves is, I'm sure, accurate, but very depressing - nativism and paranoid conspiracy theories seem to be part of the basic tool kit of all aspiring demagogues since time immemorial. By the time you have worked your way from the Illuminati through the Masonic conspiracy, labor unions and communists the pattern is pretty clear, and I'm sure if he was still alive he would be both horrified and a bit pleased to have been so prescient in his predictions.

All and all, a very interesting, if not happy, read. Be aware that this is serious slogging - Hofstedter's writing, while clear and well-organized, is dense and full of stuff you actually have to think about.
10 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2021
This was a treat - the collection lectures far more insightful than the book. I never thought Paranoid was a good term, if only because social science is constantly kn tension with psychological beliefs based on autonomous monads. Ego is the moronic go to for root cause. Did not know of Hofstadter's fame. Refreshing intro.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2023
Exactly as I expected, holds up well and looks great
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2013
This book, which actually consists of several essays written in the 1950s and 60s, deals with the sometimes prevalent phenomena of conspiracy theories in American popular culture, something that has been more prominent in our society than elsewhere. While Hofstadter focuses primarily on Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes in the 1950s and the emergence of the John Birch Society in the late 50s and early 60s and the influence of that milieu in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, he examines other examples of this paranoid, sometimes almost lynch mob mentality, going back to Know-Nothing campaigns against Roman Catholics and conspiracy hysteria about Masons and "the Illuminati" in the pre-Civil War era and the anti-semitic conspiracism of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin before World War 2 that saw Jews and Bolsheviks as acting in unison behind the scenes. While much of this involves disgruntled ultra-conservative cranks, he sees it not limited to them, discussing at some length aspects of the "free silver" movement around "Coin" Harvey and others which evolved into conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, embraced by certain extremists on both the Left and the Right.

A common feature he sees in this syndrome is a Manichean black and white view of the world coupled with a paranoid mind set, in which nothing of any importance is the result of social and demographic trends with deep historical roots, or the vicissitudes of life or of big events playing out in broad daylight for good or ill, but rather is invariably the product of the secret machinations of some demonic cabal of evil men acting as puppet masters over weak-kneed accomplices and bumbling dupes, a category often including our highest and most respected officials like General Eisenhower, to manipulate a credulous public. And of course any mistake committed by these leaders can not really be a mistake, but an act behind which the spectre of an evil design is always present. Hofstadter sees the material basis of this psychology in what he describes as the social status anxiety or insecurity of certain people and groups, feeling their status and aspirations threatened by a changing society in flux, a situation that to them in reality can only be the result of the secret intrigues of some nefarious cabal that they as the True Believers are alone in heroically opposing; a mentality, naive and credulous in its own way, that a section of the rich elite sometimes unscrupulously exploits to deflect social discontent towards scapegoats and create a faux populism to buttress their privileges and interests, something we see today with the Tea Party. Hofstadter also distinguishes the fascist leaning "psuedo-conservatism" that constitutes the principal iteration of this mentality from traditional conservatism rooted in the tradition of Edmund Burke.
20 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2015
Hofstadter's classic study of the roots of the American radical right wing ideology may be 50 years old, but it couldn't be more current in terms of today's Republican ideology. Writing at the time of Barry Goldwater's victory over the "establishment" Republican party, Hofstadter went back into American history to trace the emergence of political beliefs founded on status -- what might today be called identity -- rather than on the "normal" polical push and pull of contending interests. He shows that right wing extremism was inimical to compromise, and to the process of government itself. In this study, he quotes comments he made a decade earlier, when he said that the American right could best be understood as "a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was its power to create 'a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible'".

What is most impressive about Hofstadter's analysis -- and most depressing -- is that a half-century after Hofstadter wrote, the ideology which he described has been used by special interests to take over one of our major parties, giving it at times control of the goverment, and at other times the ability to prevent almost any government action towards "the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety". Hofstadter defined the problem presciently, but what is the solution?
26 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2019
The book includes old essays on political history (with some social psychology). It is amazing how analysis of many disturbing issues in the politics of the 1950's and 1960's help one understand the current political climate. Hofstadter writes with insight, understanding and breadth. It was difficult then, as now, to understand what the label "Conservative" means. Hofstadter lists and explains many ways that the term is used and MISUSED!
11 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2023
Hofstadter did his homework. If you think those on the far right fringe (and some on the left) are unhinged and unique to the twenty-first century, think again. The crazies have been around since man stopped painting his buttocks blue and swinging from the trees.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2018
If you are trying to figure out what is going on today with what is left of the GOP (the sane ones having already left) or whether the United States has ever had to deal with political morons in the recent past, or just how we got to our present political situation, then reading this will give you some comfort (those people have been around for a while) or more agita (our base of truly uninformed, uneducated, and downright stupid seems only to be growing), then this is worth reading. Hofstadter is a realist, not a snake oil salesman. Be advised.
23 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Ursula S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Thema wieder top-aktuell
Reviewed in Germany on August 18, 2019
Der Essay zum Paranoid Style in American Politics liest sich, als wäre er erst kürzlich verfasst worden. Sehr interessant und bezogen auf die USA - leider - aktueller denn je.
One person found this helpful
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Libreria Prampolini
5.0 out of 5 stars ottimo venditore
Reviewed in Italy on September 3, 2014
Ottimo venditore, consigliatissimo. La spedizione è stata veramente rapida, l'imballaggio robusto e adeguato al contenuto. Sono rimasto particolarmente soddisfatto dell'acquisto.
Anglian Traveller
5.0 out of 5 stars Richard Hofstadter's pertinent analysis of the `paranoid style' & `pseudo-conservative' fringe in American politics
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 28, 2013
Twice Pulitzer-Prize winner Richard Hofstadter was Professor of American History at Columbia University and a radical independent thinker on the liberal-left, whose incisive analyses of the American political landscape were expounded in several essays. This book collects together seven, including possibly the most enduring and prophetic of them all `The Paranoid Style in American Politics' originally delivered as a lecture at Oxford University in November 1963, and then published in a slightly modified form in Harper's Magazine a year later.

Hofstadter uses the phrase `the paranoid style' advisedly. Commonly observable characteristics make the style instantly recognisable in the same way (for example) you might recognise art painted in the cubist style, or rock music made in the style of the `punk' movement. A ubiquitous narrative component of `the paranoid style' is the casting of some scheming and secretive `elite' planning to do the nation down for their own ends, to seize the reins of power by subterfuge and deceit, to demolish `hard-won freedoms' to satisfy their own cravings for wealth, power and control:

"The enemy is clearly delineated: a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman -- sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional)..."

Hofstadter describes a long history of the paranoid style before it became a defining characteristic of what he terms the "pseudo-conservatives" in the 1950s and early 1960s. Back in the 1700s there were waves of paranoia about the Bavarian Illuminati taking over America, similar paranoia in the early 1800s about the Masons, then "a sinister conspiracy by Roman Catholics" to covertly take over Protestant America spearheaded by Irish immigrants whose evil plan was to "deliver the Republic to papal tyranny". Later the bogey-man transmuted into the imagined `slaveholders' conspiracy' promoted by some abolitionists, then `international bankers', then the Jews, then the Rothschild family, then communists (Senator Joe McCarthy actually proclaimed President Dwight Eisenhower to be an "agent of the international communist conspiracy"). No matter the identity of the chosen villain of the day, the narrative style never varies:

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him"

Other trademark indicators of the style include the amassing of (often fraudulent) `evidence' to persuade a skeptical public that the secret super-conspiracy is real - what Daniel Pipes later referred to as "a deluge of overabundant learned factoids & pedantic references" - and parading supposed `whistleblowers' or `insiders' to confirm the dastardly conspiracy to be true (Hofstadter cites the famous `convent escapee' Maria Monk who claimed to have witnessed alleged sexual debauchery and child murder in Roman Catholic convents; when the fraud was revealed, Monk turned out to be a hooker and petty thief, who had never seen the inside of a convent but was paid to play the role).

If you're interested in the origin of right-wing political conspiracy theories in America, how and why and by whom they are manufactured and want to understand the essential components of the style, then getting to know Hofstadter's classic work is a must. The essay explains such modern phenomena as the so-called `9/11 Truth Movement' precisely and with a level of detail that is almost spooky, 40 years before it appeared as a cultural artifact. Although he died in 1970 aged only 54, Richard Hofstadter's enlightening analysis seems prophetic in its description of the shrillness and apocalyptic ranting characteristic of the Tea Baggers and other extremist pseudo-right-wing movements of the 21st century.

The remaining essays in this collection examine the `pseudo-conservative revolt' up to 1965, and its catastrophic effect on the Goldwater campaign against LBJ in the 1964 Presidential election.

This excellent writer was one of the great intellects of the 20th century, whose lucid and engaging prose never fails to enlighten and entertain.
5 people found this helpful
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Samuel E. Wagar
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on December 30, 2016
Classic work. See Trump.
MauMau2000
5.0 out of 5 stars Timeless
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 4, 2016
I've read a lot of books on conspiracy theories recently, this particular one was very helpful in comprehending how the modern conspiracy landscape was constructed. This work has certainly stood the test of time, whilst it was written over half a century ago the hallmarks of "the paranoid style" are just as clearly identifiable in modern culture as they were in 1963; his commentary on Goldwater's campaign is particularly relevant at a time when Donald Trump is running for the US presidency!
3 people found this helpful
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