Scholarly in Technique: Richard Hofstadter and the Style of Paranoia

• In Event: The Politics of Ugly Feelings

Abstract

This paper reads Richard Hofstadter’s influential essays on the Paranoid Style in American Politics. The essays look at the rise of a new radical right in mid-century America. Hofstadter has been criticized for “conducting political criticism in psychiatric terms.” However, my focus in reading him is different: paranoia is not only a pathology for Hofstadter. It is also a “style.”
When Hofstadter attends to the question of style, he looks in particular at technique and method of reasoning. When he counts, in nervous appreciation, the 313 footnotes in McCarthy’s paranoid pamphlet, or when he admits that the paranoid style is “nothing if not scholarly in technique,” we are left to wonder if scholarly political critique isn’t ‘nothing if not paranoid in style.’ In other words, Hofstadter’s focus on the "how" of this style, its technique, invites a comparison between the paranoid and the academic/scholarly technique, between the subject he investigates and himself.
Such proximity between author and subject would surely be unnerving for this son of Jewish immigrants, one of the first generation of Jews to be accepted on American university faculties. As Michael Rogin says, Hofstadter’s critique of paranoia actually participates in the paranoid status politics he analyzes. But is there something more here than the performative contradiction that Rogin rightly identifies? I will focus on the complexities of Hofstadter’s own position, comparing Hofstadter’s most famous essay to his other work. In his earlier essays on Pseudo-Conservatism, Hofstadter treats paranoia— in keeping with Adorno et al.— as a diagnostic personality type that has to do with authoritarian fathers, and status anxiety. In these earlier essays, Hofstadter is writing against paranoia as the son of Jewish immigrants who were the targets of it, as Rogin says. But in the later essay by contrast, the question is no longer who can count as an American, but rather what counts as legitimate scholarly work. It is knowing itself that has become the political question, with Hofstadter’s turn to style.
I argue that from the uncanny closeness to paranoia that the question of style presses on Hofstadter emerges an invitation to take seriously the dangers and the promises of paranoia, in ways that may be important for us today, when we are facing the reemergence of the paranoid style.

Author

• Noga Rotem, University of Washington