Richard Hofstadter, modernization theory and the birth of a global populism debate

This chapter revisits the debate on populism set off by Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 classic of American historiography, The Age of Reform. Hofstadter’s revisionist reading of late nineteenth-century American populism fed a powerful strand of social science and commentary in the late 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by the work of pluralist thinkers such as Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Peter Viereck and Seymour Martin Lipset. Although Hofstadter’s claims were marginalized in the 1960s and 1970s - notably in works by historians such as Lawrence Goodwyn, Robert McMath, Norman Pollack and Comer Vann Woodward - his vision continued to condition the language of the global social sciences. This chapter reads the Hofstadter controversy as a crucible of the Cold War academe, both methodologically and politically. It ends with Hofstadter as key to a persistent paradox in today’s global populism debate: an inability to account for the first self-declared populist movement in history.