BOOKS
FEAR AND TREMBLING IN AMERICA
THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS AND OTHER ESSAYS.
By
Richard Hofstadter. Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$5.95.
Whenever a writer suggests an arresting and new idea to help
unravel some of the mysteries of historical causation, he
is
promptly
taken to mean, no matter how much he may protest, that this new
idea alone is sufficient to account for the phenomenon under discussion.
When Max Weber presented his thesis on
The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism
in oroer to lay bare the psychological conditions
which made possible the development of capitalist civilization in the
West, he was taken to have slighted economic factors. His explicit
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was said to have stressed
an idealistic or spiritualistic interpretation in lieu of an economic and
materialistic one. Though he was only concerned with tracing one
particular causal link in the chain, he was understood to have offered
a total explanation.
Something of this sort now seems to be happening to the work of
Richard Hofstadter. In several of his recent books, he chose to con–
centrate attention on the uses of political rhetoric. More particularly,
he analyzes political rhetoric to get at political pathology. "A distorted
style," he reasons, "is, then, a possible signal that may alert us to a
distorted judgment, just as in
art
an ugly style is a cue to fundamental
defects of taste." I am not alone in considering that this new approach
to American political history (which is paralleled, by the way, in
European history by Norman Cohen in his brilliant
The Pursuit of the
Millenium)
has opened up some new and exciting vistas. But just as in
the case of Weber, many critics seem
to
have been disposed to see in it
an attempt to offer a psychological alternative to an economic inter–
pretation, where all that was intended was to offer a supplement rather
than a rival claim.
Hofstadter is by no mean oblivious to the fairly obvious fact that
robust considerations of class interest played a considerable role in the
appeal of Goldwater to small-town businessmen or middle-layer corporate
