The Greatest Radical of a Radical Age

Paine turned Americans into radicals, and we’ve remained radicals at heart ever since.

By Harvey J. Kaye

You want to understand American experience? You want to make sense of why you despise injustice, inequality, and oppression? You want to know why you yearn to turn the world upside down? Read Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense.

In fewer than fifty pages, Paine not only inspired Americans to declare their independence and create a republic, he also emboldened them to turn their colonial rebellion into a world-historic revolutionary war, defined the new nation-to-be in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Moreover, he afforded a vision of the United States that—despite the best efforts of conservatives to have it otherwise—has inspired and encouraged liberals, progressives, and radicals in every generation to mobilize their fellow citizens in favor of extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy in the United States. Indeed, Paine’s radical-democratic arguments continue to resonate in American life. Read More

The following is excerpted from The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter

Preface to the 2008 Edition

By Sean Wilentz

I.

The first essay in this collection, a study of political cranks and zealots, is probably the best-known work by one of the finest American historians of the twentieth century. It certainly remains the timeliest.

Richard Hofstadter delivered the first version of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” as a Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University in November 1963, the same month that President John F. Kennedy was murdered; an abridged version appeared in Harper’s magazine the following year. The lecture had gown out of Hofstadter’s longstanding apprehensions about the rise of American right-wing extremism after World War ii – most conspicuously the McCarthyite hysteria of the early 1950s but also the profusion of new right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society. Hofstadter disagreed with those critics who suggested that these disturbances were extensions of European fascism: They could only have originate in American history, he argued. In tracking those origins, Hofstadter discovered a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life that he called, loosely, “paranoid.” The paranoid style, he contended, had long afflicted radical movements on the left as well as the right, and had even touched some good causes, including the anti-slavery movement. Usually, however, it appeared in bad ones.

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