Richard Hofstadter (edit name/settings)

This excerpt originally appeared at Progressive Book Club.

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.

Conceived during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s centrist Republican presidency, “The Paranoid Style” analyzed impulses that Hofstadter believe had, at least for the time being, been contained at the political margins. President Eisenhower himself had privately called the right-wing extremists of the mid- 1950s “stupid,” and predicted that, should any political party adopt the positions, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” In an unpublished essay written in 1958, Hofstadter spoke of “the limited potential of extreme right-wing agitations,” and noted that “zealots of this persuasion are a small minority of the whole public.” Yet only six years later — the same year that “The Paranoid Style” appeared in Harper’s — right-wing zealots seized control of Eisenhower’s party and nominated Barry Goldwater for president.

Hofstadter studied the Goldwater campaign closely and wrote an essay about its worrisome paranoid emanations. He duly included “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics” in his new collection of essays, along with a revise version of “The Paranoid Style,” and some second thoughts about a brief earlier study of right-wing extremism. To read these selections today is to see a devoted liberal of moderate disposition aroused by his realization that, despite Goldwater’s crushing defeat in the general election in 1954, some of the worst distempers of American democracy had become, as he wrote, “a formidable force in our politics” – and, quite possibly, a permanent one.

In fact, those distempers would eventually sweep over American political life, although Hofstadter did not life to see it in full. Historians who claim prophetic gifts are charlatans, yet seldom has any work of history, let alone a collection of essays, done more to foretell the spirit of things to come that The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

II.

In 1965, Richard Hofstadter, the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes and holder of the DeWitt Clinton Professorship at Columbia University, was widely regarded as the most incisive and original historian of his generation – as he is still regarded today.* Hofstadter’s books and essays on American political history and on what he called political culture won him readers far beyond the academy — yet the respect of his demanding professional peers remained undiminished.

Some critics tried to pigeon-hole Hofstadter as a proponent of what was known as the “consensus” interpretation of American history, which became associated with a complacent, even conservative political outlook that denied injustice and vaunted national unity. Yet there was nothing complacent about either the man or his scholarship; and he cannot be labeled as a conservative. He had outgrown a youthful adherence to the Marxism that had led him to join, very briefly, the Communist Party, but he did not harbor the outrage and remorse that drove many disillusioned leftists far to the political right. (He would include in the 1965 version of “The Paranoid Style” a blast at those ex-leftists “who had moved from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all the while to the Manichean psychology that underlies both.”) A restless, skeptical liberal intellect, he refuses to trade one dogma for another, but rather because a mordant critic and deflator of all dogmas, in his politics as well as his historical writing. His aversion to doctrinaire thinking fed his curiosity about such thinking in American politics, and the combination propelled much of his best writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including the essays in The Paranoid Style.

Ironically, Hofstadter came closest to presenting a “consensus” interpretation in an early work written firmly from the left. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (His second book, published in 1948) offered twelve biographical sketches of political leaders from the Framers through Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and emphasized and enduring liberal consensus bases on a common commitment to private property and the virtues of entrepreneurship among liberals and conservatives alike. Unlike many other young historians of the time, though, Hofstadter viewed this consensus with dismay, as an irrational evasion of social reality. Instead of celebrating what Daniel Boorstin later called “the genius of American politics,” he skewered what he described as sentimental political myths that sustained a delusory national accord.

Hofstadter would modify his thinking on these matters, and sometimes dramatically, over the coming years. But he would always be sharply attuned to the delusions and self-delusions of American politics, in the present as well as the past.

III.

The American Political Tradition established Hofstadter’s reputation as a leader of a new generation of American historians. He had been preceded by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose Age of Jackson, published in 1945, had toppled the prevailing Progressive interpretation of Andrew Jackson’s democracy as a western movement against eastern privilege. After him, in 1951, C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, opened up an era of Southern history that most historians had thought held little interest – and offered startlingly fresh views about the history of Populism and Progressivism. Although these three scholars differed greatly in background, temperament, and style, Hofstadter, Schlesinger, and Woodward each wrote history with literary grace for a general audience, and not simple for their fellow historians. Each interpreted the past in order to shed light on important present-day issued. Each was a champion of liberal values against the extremes of the left and right.

Hofstadter’s two major works from the 1950s and early 1960s, for which he received his Pulitzer Prizes, consolidated his renown as a historian and intellectual. In The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.., which appeared in 1955, Hofstadter fully embraced the New Deal as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and pragmatic effort to curb specific ills of modern American capitalism. But he also contrasted the New Dealers with the earlier Populist and Progressives. The Populists, he argued, were gripped by both sentimental Jeffersonian rural mythology and provincial conspiracy mongering, whereas the New Dealers were consummate realists and experimenters who had adapted to the urban industrial age. The Progressives’ talk of reform cloaked a desire to salvage the Yankee Protestant patrician social status, and restore high-minded integrity against crass businessmen and corrupt immigrant ward-heelers; the New Dealers, on the other hand, although similar in some ways to the Progressives, understood the limitation of the old individualism in a modern corporate society, and were more interested in curing capitalism’s ills than achieving moral and political purity. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, presented a broader narrative of the national prejudice against serious, cultivated through and thinkers, from the eighteenth century to the present. Evangelical protestant revivalism, populist politics, the modern businessman’s cult of practical knowledge, Hofstadter asserted, all had helped to render the life of the mind, and especially heterodox ideas, suspect in America.

Hofstadter’s thoughts about right-wing extremism developed while he was at work on both of these books, so it comes as no surprise to find a good deal of overlap among them. Nor is it surprising that the ex-Marxist Hofstadter, more than some other leading liberal historians, was drawn to the social sciences in search of theoretical concepts that might illuminate the history of political culture.* He found a great deal of value in re-reading the classic works of Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Mannheim. And he found intellectual camaraderie as well as stimulation by engaging with historically-minded social scientists, including friends and colleagues at Columbia. As it happened, several of them – especially Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset at Columbia and David Riesman at the University of Chicago – were also investigating the origins and effects of contemporary right-wing politics. Out of their conversations and collaborations came an anthology, The Radical Right, which appeared in 1955 and included an essay Hofstadter had published a year earlier, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” — the beginnings of what would become “The Paranoid Style.”

IV.

“The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” distinguished between McCarthyism (and similar form of right-wing recklessness) and traditional, practical American conservatism. Although the new right-wingers masqueraded as conservatives, Hofstadter asserted, they actually expressed “ a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways.” They called themselves conservatives in order to enhance their political respectability, but they wished to destroy far more than they did to conserve. Hofstadter called “pseudo-conservatives,” a term he borrowed from the Frankfurt School émigré and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, and which refereed to a strain of right-wing radicals who sought to deny their radicalism. Driven by feelings of persecution and by fears of imminent political collapse, pseudo-conservatives had become subversives in the name of crushing subversion. Rejecting reasoned compromise as perfidious, they would settle only for total victory over the foe, whose ranks ranged from the bedraggled post-war communist and socialist left to the supposedly quisling Eisenhower administration.

No class or economic interpretation could explain the new right’s frenzied attacks on the Supreme Court and the United Nations, as well as on the income tax and social-welfare legislation. Nor could economic self-interest explain why pseudo-conservative fervor had gripped so many Americans in lower-middle income households – voters whose material lives would not be improved, and in some respects would suffer, if the right-wing extremists prevailed. In the world of pseudo-conservatism, Hofstadter argued, interest politics had given way to what he called “status politics,” which he defined as a clash of “projected rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives” that arose from the peculiar social rootlessness and insecurity of American life. In that clash, pseudo-conservatives exhibited an angrily authoritarian temperament that was especially compelling in times of acute political anxiety.

“The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” focused on two groups of Americans who, Hofstadter noted, were under intense social stress: first, declining, old-family Anglo-Saxon Protestants who felt they were losing prestige and standing; and second, old-stock immigrants, especially German and Irish Catholics, wracked by the continuing demands of sustaining middle-class respectability according to American (that is, Yankee Protestant) norms. Hofstadter offered arresting explanations for how and why these groups had been mobilized against two supposedly sinister foes: the international communist conspiracy and the duly constituted authority of the post-New Deal federal government. Yet for all its ambition the essay also overlooked a great deal, including the growing importance within the new right of a Protestant fundamentalism that was alien to mainline, upper-crust Protestants or Catholic ethnics. In turning to the social sciences, and with his mind chiefly on McCarthyism, Hofstadter also slighted history. In particular, he slighted configurations of insecurity and irrationality on the right that dated back long before the 1950s — from the conspiracy-obsessed, repressive High Federalist outbursts of the 1790s that helped produce the Alien and Sedition Laws, to the choleric, anti-Semitic ranting of the “radio priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, in the 1930s. – and how they might throw light on later events.

In 1958, The Fund for the Republic, a group established by the Ford Foundation to combat threats to freedom of thought and expression, asked Hofstadter to revisit the subject, by commissioning him to write a confidential memorandum on the contemporary American right wing. Hofstadter now described extremist through as “paranoid,” so as to underscore the psychological dimensions of certain styles of political argument – to the consternation of some scholars at the fund who took his use of the term too literally, as if he was claiming some sort of clinical expertise. The report included a lengthy historical section that established a sketchy genealogy of right-wing extremism, beginning with the Anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and concluding a century later with the revived Ku Klux Klan. Hofstadter also discussed the extremists’ tendency to envisage history in conspiratorial terms, “ as kind of a moral drama in which a few even and immensely powerful character mislead, exploit, and betray the gullible public, while only a modest handful of right-wing thinkers interpose warning sand remonstrances against what is happening.”

Over the next several years, historians uncovered more evidence about the counter-subversive strain in American politics – and all the while, the radical Right quietly enjoyed resurgence inside the Republican Party. In particular, Richard M. Nixon’s narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960 cleared the way for the right wing to seize the party’s machinery and rally around it new hero, Senator Goldwater. Hofstadter, having seen his book on anti-intellectualism through publication, returned to the subject of right-wing extremism. The Fund for the Republic memo, with its historical approach to “paranoid” politics, had represented a conceptual breakthrough, and Hofstadter’s thinking continued to evolve. He also kept a file of current newspaper clippings on some of the more bizarre right-wing pronouncements of the day. That file thickened during Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964.

V.

The first half of The Paranoid Style contains Hofstadter’s most overtly political writing as a historian. An intensely private man and dedicated writer, averse to the limelight, Hofstadter usually shied away from public controversy, even though his historical writing often touched on current political issues. (In this circumspection, he was very much unlike his fellow liberal historian, Arthur Schlesinger.) But the sudden revival of the right, and especially the Goldwater phenomenon, presented exceptional circumstances. Hofstadter would now explicitly bring his historical insight to bear on the present, and write one version of what the historian and critic Theodore Draper later called “present history.”

Even as he took a overt political stance, Hofstadter hardly abandoned the historian’s craft. The three previously published essays that he included in the second half of The Paranoid Style – read chiefly by professional specialists – show how much his writing about the modern right wing had in common with his more conventional historical scholarship. Reassessing the origins of the Spanish-American War, he posited a broad crisis in the national consciousness that brought to the fore a mixture of humanitarian and aggressive instincts. “What Happened to the Anti-Trust Movement?” explored the ironies of how traditional liberal attacks on concentrations of economic power gave way to liberal defenses of bigness. The essay on the Populist propagandist William “Coin” Harvey exposed the conspiracy theories and pie-eyed panaceas that contributed to William Jennings Bryan’s doomed campaign for the presidency in 1896. Skeptical of dogma, alert to paradox, and sensitive to cultural and emotional as well as economic conflicts, these conventional historical essays were in intellectual harmony with those featured in the first half of the book.

Hofstadter’s opening chapter, the final version of “The Paranoid Style American Politics,” enlarged his historical scope, moving backward to the close of the eighteenth-century as well as forward to the John Birch Society of the late 1950s. Hofstadter identified a few elements common to all of his historical examples: the central image of a gigantic conspiracy that had seized control of all history; a Manichean view of the opposition as the super-human incarnation of perfect evil, endowed with super-human powers of deception; and a beleaguered view of themselves as a redeeming remnant, bloodied but unbowed. Hofstadter still utilized the concept of status politics, but the paranoid style emerged from this essay as something more akin to what others called “cultural politics” or “symbolic politics,” in which appeals to moral rectitude and fears of ethical chaos and decline supersede appeals to economic interest and social justice.∗

“The Paranoid Style,” like the rest of Hofstadter’s best work, dissected and described American politics as a cultural fact, paying special attention whenever political ideas and programs shaded into moods, tones, style — and vice versa. His absorption in psychology, political science, and sociology had been intellectually profitable, but finally Hofstadter resisted the temptation (to which many others succumbed in the 1960s) to turn history into a kind of retrospective branch of the social sciences. By abjuring clinical intentions and likening his effort to that of an cultural critic – in speaking of the paranoid style, he wrote, “I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or mannerist style” – Hofstadter demonstrated that he had passed through an illuminating, even indispensable encounter with social theory and its hypothesized structures of class, status, and power — and had emerged intact. He would always encourage dialogue and even collaboration between historians and social scientists, and would go on to co-edit two columns of scholarly essays that combined sociology and history – but in “The Paranoid Style,” as in virtually all of his work, he returned to writing open-ended, humanistic history.∗ Armed with that history, readers might be better prepared to see through the cranks and zealots of the pas and the present – and, perhaps, of the future.

VI.

Hofstadter applied his concept of the paranoid style vigorously to the Goldwater campaign and the right-wing extremism that surrounded it. When reading the surviving research files on right-wing politics now preserved in Hofstadter’s collected papers at Columbia, I have found it easy to imagine the mixture of dismay and satisfaction with which he collected his materials. Hofstadter spread his net widely, gathering in everything from newspaper articles to official campaign bulletins from the Goldwater-dominated Republican National Committee. There is a press report about a professor’s claim that Soviet taskmasters had assassinated President Kennedy because was too slow in effecting a Communist takeover of the United States. Another report includes a description of federal gun control laws as “a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government.” There are ultra-conservative book club lists warning of the republic’s imminent collapse – including several lusts that bear the name of a former isolationist follower of Senator Robert Taft who had become a Goldwater activist and pamphleteer, and who would win much greater notice in year to come, Phyllis Schlafly.

Above all, Hofstadter drew on Goldwater’s own public statements. In the years since Goldwater’s death in 1998, there has been a tendency to soften his political image, in part because, late in life, his blunt libertarian objections to the fire-and-brimstone evangelical wing of the Republican Party made him look like a liberal. (In the 1990s Goldwater actually referred to himself as a “liberal,” and he was only half joking.) even at the height of his pseudo-conservative crusade in 1964, moreover, Goldwater was a working politician who lived a divided existence, “half in the world of our routine politics,” Hofstadter wrote, “and half in the curious intellectual underworld of the pseudo-conservatives.”

The responsible Goldwater was always quick to repudiate the more flamboyant excesses of the extreme right, such as the claim by Robert Welch, the candy manufacturing magnate and founder of the John Birch Society, that President Eisenhower was a conscious and insidious agent of the Communist conspiracy. The reckless Goldwater, however, lived off what Hofstadter called “the emotional animus” of the extreme right. This was the Goldwater who denounced the bipartisan, anti-communist Cold War policies of deterrence and containment as pusillanimous appeasement, and he demanded nothing less than total victory over the Soviets, by any means necessary. This was the Goldwater who declared that “the philosophy of modern ‘liberalism,’ the dominant philosophy of the opposition party,” endangered American freedom, and caused the nation’s moral fiber to “rot and decay.” This was the Goldwater who, in the wake of Supreme Court decisions promoting racial equality, opined that the court’s rulings were “not necessarily” the law of the land, and hinted that disobedience of those rulings was permissible and perhaps imperative. And this was the Goldwater who would broach no compromise with the enemy – famously declaring that just as “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” so “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

In the end, Goldwater won less than 30 percent of the popular vote and less than 10 percent of the electoral vote – at that time, the second worst drubbing suffered by any presidential candidate in American history. Some Goldwater Republicans said that defeat proved that the nation was just as rotten as their leader had claimed it was. Others spoke darkly of how moderate Republicans, in league with a liberal new media, had stabbed the Goldwater campaign in the back. To Hofstadter, such rationalization affirmed the other-worldliness of Goldwater’s cause. But, true to form, Hofstadter did not let his great relief and satisfaction at the outcome get the better of him; instead he drew carefully measured conclusions about the election’s larger political significance. Goldwater, he observed, had broken the back of “practical conservatism,” and helped to elect a large liberal majority in Congress as well as a liberal president. And yet, he added, the right wingers’ zeal and gift for organization, had left them in a position “to make themselves effective far out of proportion to their numbers.”

VII.

“This is beautifully done,” Daniel Bell wrote to Hofstadter, in praise one of the revised drafts of “The Paranoid Style.” Historians agreed. Hofstadter’s friend, C. Vann Woodward had taken cordial but firm exception to what he considered The Age of Reform’s exaggerated emphasis on the conspiratorial themes in the Populist movement. But now Woodward expressed admiration for how, in The Paranoid Style, Hofstadter responded to criticisms and broadened his scope. Woodward lauded the boos as “the most balanced and authoritative analysis we have of a formidable and apparently permanent force in American politics.”

As it happened, the “apparently permanent force” was actually gathering steam. In 1965, President Johnson launched his Great Society programs, but also escalated American involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. Three years later, dissention over the war and civil rights within the Democratic Party broke the New Deal coalition; and over the next forty years, the party more often than not was in the political wilderness, a congeries of contending interest groups lacking a common purpose. Some on the party’s left wing came to accept the view that America was in the clutches of a remorseless, all-powerful, white male corporate elite – a globalist conspiracy that included center-left Democrats such as President Bill Clinton. Here was a style of left-wing paranoia that closely resembled the right-wing paranoia Hofstadter described earlier. In the presidential election of 2000, the gadfly candidate Ralph Nader, declaring that there was no difference between the major party candidates, impressed embittered leftist Democrats – and won just enough of their votes in Florida to allow an activist Supreme Court to declare George W. Bush the winner. Thus began what would become the most radical right-wing presidency in modern times, under the guise of conservatism.

As in the 1950s, though, the paranoid style was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon. In The Paranoid Style, Hofstadter did not take not of Ronald Reagan, who had emerged as a national political figure with his celebrated speech supporting Goldwater during the closing days of the campaign in 1964. “They say we offer simple answers to complex problems,” Reagan proclaimed:

Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer – but simple:
if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our
national policy based on what we know in our hearts in morally right.

As spokesman, candidate, governor of California, and president – but perhaps most important, as a former Democrat and imitator of Franklin D. Roosevelt — Reagan would bring to pseudo-conservativism the warmth and optimism it had lacked. Like Goldwater, he was a practical politician who, to the occasional dismay of his acolytes, understood the importance of compromise in bending reality to his will. Yet Reagan was also a denizen of the pseudo-conservative intellectual underground, and advanced its hatred of the federal government as a collectivist monster. And in his rise to the White House, Reagan built a new coalition of right-wing Protestant fundamentalists, suburban Catholics, former southern segregationists, and Sunbelt Republican entrepreneurs who appeared to specialize in the politics of paranoia.

Through the 1980s and 1990s and into the new century, the headlines were filled with reports on organizations and spokesmen who strikingly resembled those described in “The Paranoid Style.” There was the zealous Goldwater supporter of 1964, Phyllis Schlafly, how a nationally-known figure, whose Eagle Forum because an important clearing house for the Republican right wing, expounding positions that ranged from opposing legal abortion to demanding that the United States withdraw from the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.∗ There was the large and influential Christian Coalition, closely allied with the Republican Party and led by the sometime presidential candidate Reverend Pat Robertson, who tract of 1991, The New World Order, projected immense conspiracies of Freemasons and Illuminati.∗∗ Through the work of communists and liberals, Robertson exclaimed, these conspiracies were trying to create a single world government that would destroy Christian America. There were also the militia movements of the 1990s, which claimed that strange black helicopters were circling the skies, supposedly the advance guard of an invasion by the United Nations. (One Republican representative from Idaho, Helen Chenoweth, held hearings on the subject, and invited the leader of a local militia to testify.)

When right-wing extremists blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, President Clinton berated the paranoid politics of hate and declared, “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country.” But three years later, right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives, furious at Clinton’s ability to outfox them politically as well as at his centrist liberalism, used his misleading statements about illicit, consensual sex as a pretext to mount an unconstitutional but successful impeachment drive against him – fueled, according to its mastermind, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, by Clinton’s lack of what Delay later called, with the old conspiratorial overtones, a proper “biblical worldview.”

Thanks to the abolition, under Reagan, of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, the radio airwaves became conduits for every variety of right-wing conspiracy theory, along with character assassination of all liberals and of Democrats in particular.∗ It was bad enough that once-respected outlets became flagship “talk radio” stations; even worse, the New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading newspapers, under the label of investigative reporting, allowed their news columns to become soapboxes for right-wing cranks and political operators, thereby giving the cranks credibility.

Having declared that the nation was embroiled in a “culture war,” right-wing publicists – including prominent writers such as Norman Podhoretz and Robert Bork – described an America so degraded by liberalism that it was now, in Bork’s words, “slouching towards Gomorrah.” (The fact that conservatives had mainly dominated politics since 1980 did nothing to temper the right wing’s apocalyptic tone.) The Manichean political psychology of the pseudo-conservative radicals fully converged with anti-intellectualism and cultural politics in the administration of George W. Bush, along with what Hofstadter had detected as an inverted bolshevism based on stealth, supreme self-confidence, and the will to power.

VIII.

Richard Hofstadter’s untimely death in 1970, at age 54, not only meant the loss of a major historian; it also deprived the nation of an eloquent critic who would have understood all too well the lures, snares, and pathologies of the past forty y ears of American political life. It is unlikely that, had he lived, his voice alone could have done much to change the tone or direction of the nation’s politics – but it is dismaying that his warnings remained unheeded even as the paranoid style that was his subject permeated and poisoned the political atmosphere. All the better that a new edition of the book appear now. The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains a singular an powerful part of Hofstadter’s formidable intellectual politics, it is an excellent place to start for lessons about a democratic world gone wrong.

–Sean Wilentz
Princeton, NJ
December 18, 2007

Sean Wilentz, is the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy and The Age of Reagan, among other books.