Quotes from work
The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Richard Hofstadter

"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is an essay by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964; it served as the title essay of a book by the author in the same year.

“In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

“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 higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

“One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.”

Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

“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)

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