Richard Hofstadter

"Here for the first time in a single authoritative annotated edition are two masterworks by one of America's greatest historians, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970). In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American life (1963) and in The paranoid style in American politics (1965), Hofstadter offered groundbreaking and still urgent analyses of deep undercurrents in American life: a stubborn, irrepressible opposition to rationality, expertise, and higher learning, and the destabilizing pull exercised by conspiratorial movements on the right and left"--page [2] of jacket. "Anti-intellectualism in American life is at once a sweeping history of hostile attitudes toward ideas in the United States and, by Hofstadter's own account, a deeply personal work of analysis, prompted by the 'atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility' stirred up by McCarthyism. Dissecting the political and social uses of ignorance by demagogues, crusaders, self-help gurus, and even reformers assured of their own good intentions, Anti-intellectualism uncovers a persistent, multifaceted feature of our national culture. It remains an essential resource for our time, fulfilling, in the words of Su