Hofstadter argued that the reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century-Populist agitators, Progressive social planners, temperance and suffrage advocates-were engaged in a panicked bid to reclaim their diminishing status in public life.

But it’s chiefly as a critic of the reformist impulse in American politics that Hofstadter lives on in today’s post-liberal order. Across his too-short life and career, he produced indispensable monographs on American violence and the rise of social Darwinism, together with a pioneering body of analysis on the rise of the postwar American right. Hofstadter was a deft, wide-ranging chronicler of American intellectual and political life, beginning with his landmark revisionist study, The American Political Tradition (1948). This point of style speaks volumes about discursive gatekeeping in Washington-but it also stands in no small measure as a legacy of the late historian of American politics Richard Hofstadter. RICHARD HOFSTADTER: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS 1956-1965 by Richard Hofstadter, edited by Sean Wilentz Library of America, 1,056 pp., $45.00 No, the larger point here was that reform was too wild and indecorous an idea for a respectable Hill journal to grace with serious or sustained treatment. And never mind that reforms and reformers have always claimed center stage in the drama of our national politics-one can scarcely imagine the civil rights revolution, women’s suffrage, and Social Security (or, on the other side of the ledger, Prohibition, jingoism, and rampant nativism) without them. Never mind that overhauls are far more ambitious in scale than reforms, as any long-suffering sports fan or construction professional can tell you. The notion of reform, I was soberly informed, was simply too charged and incendiary to pass as a description of any agenda item seeking approval from the people’s representatives the less loaded term “overhaul” was always and everywhere to be preferred.

One of the early directives I encountered there concerned the use of the word “reform” in connection with any pending legislation. In another journalistic life, I worked at an estimable Beltway publication covering the daily business of Congress.

Richard hofstadter the paranoid style