determinism, nevertheless made the pursuit of clearly defined economic interests appear to be the only rational and legitimate form of political activity. Whatever could not be reduced to an economic motive became "paranoid" by default. Thus American farmers began to achieve tangible gains, according to Hofstadter, only when they abandoned the sentimental agrarian myth and learned to define themselves as an interest group. He dismissed populism as a movement driven by the small property holder's typically conspiratorial view of politics, befuddled by soft‐ money ideologies and other panaceas, given to nativist and anti-Semitic outbursts, and longing for the vanished rural simplicities celebrated by the myth of the yeoman. He dismissed progressivism as another type of petty-bourgeois movement led by representatives of an older middle class experiencing an abrupt decline in status and fearful of the big organizations—trusts and unions—that were coming to dominate industrial society. Hofstadter's interpretation of American history incorporated cultural prejudices so familiar to a broad spectrum of intellectual opinion that its widespread acceptance, in retrospect, seems almost a foregone conclusion.

Probably the most important of these prejudices was an abiding contempt for the petty bourgeoisie. A curious convergence of Mencken and

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come to understand the shortcomings of this view, he might have asked himself whether the root of the trouble did not lie in a misguided effort to reduce political action to "behavior." In The Human Condition, published in the same year as The New American Right, Hannah Arendt pointed out that an overly "selective" view of politics had "excluded from articulate conceptualization a great variety of authentic political experiences," the most important of which—the deliberate rejection of revenge, for example, the rejection of the "natural, automatic reaction to transgression"—are precisely those that are least expected and therefore least reducible to anything as predictable as "behavior." The need for a broader conception of the political, however, was the last thing on the mind of American historians in the forties and fifties. They were not interested in Arendt's suggestion that political life represents the institutionalization of the capacity for action—the capacity to initiate something, to make a new beginning (by foregoing revenge). Instead of reconsidering the implications of "behavior," they simply supplemented economic reductionism with sociological and psychological reductionism, adding to an economic interpretation of political behavior a social-psychological interpretation designed to cover cases where no intelligible economic motive seemed to be at work.

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