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From Status Politics to the Paranoid Style: Richard Hofstadter and the Pitfalls of Psychologizing History

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Abstract:The decade extending from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in the career of the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was marked by a series of engagements with American right-wing politics.… Click to show full abstract

Abstract:The decade extending from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in the career of the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was marked by a series of engagements with American right-wing politics. This article seeks to re-evaluate the evolution of Hofstadter's thinking over this decade, in part by drawing upon the recently discovered transcript of a BBC radio lecture that Hofstadter recorded in 1959 and that represents the first occasion on which he developed the notion of a "paranoid style" as a pattern of thought and action recurring through American political history.

Keywords: hofstadter; richard hofstadter; history; paranoid style

Journal Title: Journal of the History of Ideas
Year Published: 2022

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