Sublime

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the 1960s, Hofstadter saw paranoia as a pernicious and growing influence in American life, citing the rise of groups like the anticommunist John Birch Society. He laid out a blueprint for the paranoid style that, even after all these years, sounds familiar to anyone who ever watched Glenn Beck sweat onto his chalkboard.

Therefore, as in all social fears, there will be an increasing belief in the coming decade that the federal government is in the hands of conspirators.

Dans la glaciation politique des sciences sociales américaines des années 1950, Wright Mills apparaît en effet comme un franc-tireur, attaquant aussi bien les constructions théoriques pompeuses d’un Talcott Parsons que la division extrême des objets de recherche pratiquée par l’empirisme caractéristique du tournant béhavioriste. Il proclame son att

C’est précisément cette dimension temporelle de la démocratie que Hofstadter, et avec lui la plupart des antipopulistes passés et présents, rejettent. Pour l’historien américain, l’histoire est pour l’essentiel faite par des forces – économiques, culturelles, sociales – qui dépassent de très loin la capacité des collectivités à influer sur son cour

In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government per se—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest groups—the Texas oilmen, na