Richard Hofstadter: Politics

Richard Hofstadter was American historian. Explore interesting quotes on politics.
Richard Hofstadter: 68 quotes0 likes

“It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.”

Richard Hofstadter

Introduction, p. 16
The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955)

“Anti-intellectualism … first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 22-23

“There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 37

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

“The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter I, part II, p. 44

“Clearly, the need for political and economic reform was now felt more widely in the country at large. Another, more obscure process, traceable to the flexibility and opportunism of the American political system, was also at work: successful resistance to reform demands required a partial incorporation of the reform program.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter IV, part I, p. 132

“Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there. Minor parties have been attached to some special idea or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions through firm and identifiable programs and principles. Their function has not been to win or govern, but to agitate, educate, generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our political life. When a third party's demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter III, part I, p. 97

“If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: the intellectual function can be overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference.”

Richard Hofstadter

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

“The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)