Richard Hofstadter

In the debates around populism, theorists and analysts are not and cannot be neutral and detached observers. Nor is the political world and public debates immune to the influence of scientific discourse. What we have here, in other words, is a case of what Giddens has called a double hermeneutic – in the social sciences, scientific inquiry not only needs to take into account the meaning that social actors ascribe to their actions and the social world at large; in addition, the ‘findings’ of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they purport to describe. This has been especially the case in debates around populism throughout the 20th century. And yet, although social-scientific construction has been instrumental in the sedimentation of the pejorative, negative connotations of populism in many international
contexts, the way this has been effected is rarely discussed and the validity – or not – of the association and its ideological functions are rarely highlighted.

Within the framework of the POPULISMUS research project, we have traced the anti-populist matrix of academic discourses back to the work of Richard Hofstadter. Indeed, the year 1955 marks in the US the publication of a very influential book, Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform, which includes his famous attack on American Populism of the 1890s. This text is emblematic of a revisionist turn in American historiography of the populist movement. Most importantly, although the argumentative basis of Hofstadter’s arguments has been thoroughly deconstructed by a host of American historians and political scientists, many stereotypes plaguing debates around populism still emanate from Hofstadter’s work. In this paper, we purport to construct a genealogy of the global influence of this discourse, placing particular emphasis on its links with theories of modernization and its appeal in semi-peripheral contexts like Latin America and Southern Europe.

This dissertation considers the first half of the life and times of Christopher Lasch. A leading historian, social critic, social theorist, and intellectual of the middle and late twentieth century, Lasch published widely, and for an eager public. His essays and books demonstrated the great potential of wedding history with social criticism, of diagnosing at
their broadest levels the social maladies afflicting America during the Cold War era. As this dissertation argues, Lasch's trenchant writings, occasionally coupled with radical prescriptions for his country, remain widely read and relevant today, to the point where they have become staples in the modern cultural canon.

Wann immer von Populismus die Rede ist, wird auch Hofstadter, direkt oder indirekt, von Autoren zitiert. Er war, neben Edward Shils, der erste, der die People’s Party, und mit ihr den Populismus, in einem anderen Licht sah und definierte. Hofstadters Buch „The Age of Reform“, in dem er den Populismus 1955 beschrieb, war ein Wendepunkt in der Geschichtsforschung der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und löste heftige Kontroversen aus, die bis heute andauern. Hofstadter erhielt als Historiker für „The Age of Reform“ den Pulitzer-Preis, doch sein Werk gilt unter manchen seiner Historikerkollegen immer noch als umstritten, während es von Akademikern sowohl der Politikwissenschaft / politischen Theorie als auch Soziologie bis heute als Grundlage der Definition des Populismus, speziell der negativen Ausprägung, zitiert wird. Somit ist sein Buch einer der Auslöser der „semantic drift“ (Jäger 2017) in der Populismusforschung. Hofstadter erweiterte seine Analyse Mitte der sechziger Jahre durch „The Paranoid Style in American Politics“. Dieses Essay wird seit Trumps Wahlkampf zum Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten zitiert und verstärkt diskutiert.
Diese Bachelorarbeit beleuchtet die Begriffsdefinition des Populismus und die Kontroverse anhand der Werke und Person von Richard Hofstadter. Speziell beschäftigt sie sich mit „The Age of Reform“ und „The Paranoid Style in American Politics“, geht aber auch auf andere Arbeiten ein. Da die Person von dem Werk – zumindest auch in der Kritik – nicht zu trennen ist, geht es mir auch um die Herausarbeitung der Biografie Richard Hofstadters und der Themen, mit denen er sich akademisch beschäftigte.
Die Arbeit ist zum großen Teil zeitgeschichtlich aufgebaut und bezieht sich neben der Biografie und den Werken Hofstadters auf weitere Forschungen u.a. von Peter Novick, der sich mit der Entwicklung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Amerika befasste und die Kontroverse ausführlicher beschrieb, und Nell Irvin Painter, deren Forschungen zum Populismus in den ehemaligen Sklavengebieten der African Americans aus meiner Sicht die Darstellung bei Hofstadter ergänzt und abrundet.
Die Definition des Populismus wurde aus den Werken von Richard Hofstadter, seinen Referenzen und den Unterlagen des Kongresses zur Definition des Populismus, an dem Hofstadter teilnahm, erarbeitet. Der Fokus der Arbeit liegt hierbei auf einer erweiterten Erklärung für den deutschsprachigen Raum, da die Werke von Hofstadter nicht übersetzt sind.
Die Darstellung der Kontroverse baut auf den Texten seiner Schüler, Kritiker und der akademischen Darstellung der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskussion und einigen Veränderungen in der amerikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft seit Beginn des 20 Jahrhunderts auf. Hier war es mir wichtig, in einem erweiterten Fokus zu zitieren, da die Kontroverse eine Spannung zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft, Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft erzeugte, in deren Gräben die Diskussion stattfand und immer noch stattfindet.
Im letzten Teil der Arbeit geht es um die politikwissenschaftliche Diskussion speziell in Bezug zu direkten oder indirekten Referenzen in den Werken von Jan-Werner Müller. Im Speziellen gilt meine Forschungsfrage der Überprüfung der Zitate, Bezüge und Thesen, die Müller in seinem Buch und seinem Essay über Populismus in Zusammenhang mit Hofstadter über Amerika schlussfolgert.
Die Arbeit schließt mit einer Kurzbetrachtung der aktuellen Situation und analysiert aus Sicht von Hofstadter die bisherige Präsidentschaft Donald Trumps.

La publication en 1965 de Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays par Hofstadter est communément présentée comme le premier travail scientifique à s'intéresser à la question du conspirationnisme. Toutefois, dix ans plus tôt, dans Age of Reform, l'historien américain formulait déjà une grille de lecture systémiste du « style paranoïaque » : critique radicale des dominants et du système néo-libéral = irrationalité = populisme = conspirationnisme = antisémitisme. Dès lors, cette contribution cherchera a déconstruire au travers d'une épistémologie critique cette grille d'analyse, ses usages et les enjeux programmatiques/politiques qu'elle contient ou induit. D'abord, nous analyserons la genèse multifactorielle du « style paranoïaque » qui tient directement à la personnalité d'Hofstadter tant en raison de facteurs politiques (contexte de la « chasse aux sorcières »), académiques (fondation de « l’École du consensus » et approche psychopathologique des faits sociaux et politiques en général) que liés à sa trajectoire personnelle (ex-communiste devenu libéral puis néo-conservateur de première génération). Enfin, nous étudierons la postérité et les usages politiques du « style paranoïaque » dans des travaux qui offrent une lecture conservatrice du phénomène conspirationniste contemporain et qui tendent à le résumer au critère de l’irrationalité et/ou de l'antisémitisme. Dans tous les cas, dans cette vision systésmiste, toute forme de critique radicale du système néo-libéral ou toute croyance marginale devient l'expression plus ou moins manifeste de théories du complot.

Must we define “populism”? Writing almost 130 years after the word was first introduced into our global political vocabulary, the question is now in danger of seeming near to mind-numbingly platitudinous. Of all the concepts debated in contemporary political theory, it appears easily as the most contestable. In attempting to cope with this essential contestability, scholars in the Cambridge School tradition have turned to contextualist methods to uncover their genealogical histories. Strangely enough, these tectonic movements in politico-historical scholarship have left the field of contemporary “populism”-studies conspicuously intact: a majority of academic scholars seem to have no problem with pinning a transhistorical label to it, endowing it with an immutability rarely found in other areas of political science. As an exercise in both historical clarification and contemporary political theory, this article seeks to provide an update to a more complete history of the use of the word “populism” in post-war political science. The objective of such a “contextualist” reading will be to provide a schema which can account for the “semantic drift” in the use of the concept in post-war European political science from a mildly meliorative and neutral meaning during the 1960s, to a pejorative understanding of the term in the early 1980s This pejorative understanding, I claim, is still with us today, in the work of authors such as Nadia Urbinati, Jan-Werner Müller, and Cas Mudde, who tend to cast populism and pluralism as ideological opposites.

What interests me in this essay is the question why conspiracy theories are so rarely understood as such when they issue from the centers of power. My brief, necessarily incomplete, answer to this in part one forms part of a wider critique of what I call, absent a more satisfying name, ‘conspiracy studies’, the interdisciplinary field of research that takes the culture of conspiracy as its subject.

What is commonly referred to as conspiracy theories will be understood in this essay as paranoid narratives, a form of story telling partly determined by what I regard with Jacques Lacan as the epistemological mechanism of paranoia. Such a conception allows us to go beyond the static antitheses of conspiracy theorizing seen as either flawed and meaningless or illuminating and subversive and move towards an understanding of its structure and logic, its strengths and failures. Ultimately, I claim, rethinking conspiracy studies necessitates re-writing paranoia not as a madness outside reason but the madness of reason: to conceive it not solely as a paranoia about the state, but also as a structural element of state politics.

African American poet Langston Hughes wrote “Let America Be America Again” amid the severe economic anxiety, racial tensions, and nationalist fervor of 1930s, and his refrain continues to resonate in today’s calls to “Make America Great Again.” But Hughes’s claim that “(America never was America to me)” invites us to reflect more closely on what exactly “America” is and what it means to be an “American” in the early twenty-first century. Is “America” a land that belongs to certain religious, racial, or ethnic groups? Does being an “American” imply a particular set of ideological commitments or life aspirations? To what extent does being “American” mean performing a certain set of gender roles and identities? What, in short, makes America “America” and a person in America an “American”?

This speaking-intensive course explores how rather than serving as a common starting point for American political life, the concepts of “America” and “American” have themselves always been sites of intense political debate and contestation. American Political Thought reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of and relationship between liberalism, democracy, race, gender, class, pluralism, violence, and law in what is now the United States. Participants in this struggle have included politicians, scholars, activists, enslaved persons, warriors, spouses, poets, and businesspeople, and their perspectives have shaped a diverse array of concepts of “America” and “American” that we continue to draw on and contribute to today.

The course proceeds in three units. The first unit, “America at the Founding,” examines the principles, concepts, and debates that shaped the American system of federal government in the 17th and 18th centuries. The second unit, “Democratizing America?” investigates various 19th century conflicts over democratic citizenship in light of the country’s history of slavery, Native American genocide, and the exclusion of women from public life. The third unit, “20th (and some 21st) Century Questions, Debates, Traditions,” considers some of the most dynamic and influential American political movements of the last century: pragmatism, feminism, black political thought, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and democratic socialism.

The publication in 1965 of Paranoid Style and Other Essays by Richard Hofstadter is commonly American historian formulated a systematic perspective of the paranoid style: radical critics toward the neoliberal system and its dominants = irrationality = populism = conspiracism = antisemitism. Through a critical epistemology sprinkled with several examples, this communication aims then to deconstruct in three points this approach and highlight its uses and the programmatic/political effects it implies. First, I will argue that the " paranoid style " plurifactorial genesis is directly entwined with Hofstadter's personality for political (" Witches hunting " context), academic (Hoftstadter was a " consensus historian " with a psycho-pathological approach of social facts) and personal (former communist turned into a liberal and then a first generation neo-conservative) considerations and issues. Secondly, an interesting comparison could be raised with pioneers researches led on rumors after the WWII (Knapp 1944 ; Allport Postman 1947) and the uses of the " paranoid style " in their inclination to consider those social phenomenon as pathologies of the social body. Finally, I will examine the " paranoid style " posterity and its political uses nowadays which convey a conservative approach of conspiracism. Academic works tend to reduce this phenomenon to. In any case, in this systemic vision, every radical critics formulated toward the neo-liberal system tend to be consider as conspiracy theory.