ABSTRACT
This chapter traces US politics evolution in the work of Cold War historians and social scientists, among them Richard Hofstadter, a writer who owed two of his best-known concepts, the 'paranoid style' and 'pseudo-conservatism', to The Authoritarian Personality. Hofstadter bridged the gap between historiography, political science, psychology, and cultural analysis like few others in postwar academia, yet this 'archetypal intellectual of his times' is still read along disciplinary lines. The American Political Tradition, Hofstadter's second book, established him as a leading intellectual and understood US history as unified by a central consensus. Hofstadter's preoccupation with the far right culminated in the volume of essays The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Over time, the 'paranoid style' would become a catch phrase in political debate, and its equation of conspiracy theory with psychopathology dominates public discussion until today. The Paranoid Style completes what David Brown has called Hofstadter's social-psychological trilogy, begun in 1955 with The Age of Reform.
