Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus."Geary (2007), p. 429 Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, since he was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history".
Hofstadter's books include Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963); and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Early life and education Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 6, 1916, to a Jewish father, Emil A. Hofstadter, and a German-American Lutheran mother, Katherine (née Hill), who died when Richard was ten. He attended Fosdick-Masten Park High School in Buffalo. Hofstadter then studied philosophy and history at the University at Buffalo, from 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius W. Pratt.
Hofstadter was raised as an Episcopalian, but later identified more with his Jewish roots. Antisemitism cost him fellowships at Columbia University and attractive professorships. The Buffalo Jewish Hall of Fame lists him as one of the "Jewish Buffalonians who have made a lasting contribution to the world."See Buffalo Jewish Hall of Fame
In 1936, Hofstadter entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where his advisor Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he became a member of the Communist Party USA, but soon became disillusioned by the Stalinist party discipline and show trials. After withdrawing from the party in August 1939 following the Hitler–Stalin Pact, he retained a critical left-wing perspective that was still obvious in American Political Tradition in 1948.Reviewed Work: Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography by David S. Brown.Review by: Daniel Geary, Vol. 35, No. 3 (September 2007), pp. 425–431 (7 pages) Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Hofstadter earned his PhD in 1942. In 1944, he published his dissertation, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a critique of late-19th-century American capitalism and its ruthless "dog-eat-dog" economic competition and Social Darwinian self-justification. Conservative critics, including Robert C. Bannister, disagreed with his critique... The sharpest criticism of the book focused on Hofstadter's weakness as a researcher: "he did little or no research into manuscripts, newspapers, archival, or unpublished sources, relying instead primarily on secondary sources augmented by his lively style and wide-ranging interdisciplinary readings, thereby producing well-written arguments based on scattered evidence he found by reading other historians." The book was commercially successful, selling 200,000 copies.
From 1942 to 1946, Hofstadter taught history at the University of Maryland, where he became a close friend of the popular sociologist C. Wright Mills and read extensively in the fields of sociology and psychology, absorbing ideas of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Sigmund Freud, and the Frankfurt School. His later books frequently refer to behavioral concepts such as "status anxiety".
Career
In 1946, Hofstadter joined Columbia University's faculty, and in 1959 he succeeded Allan Nevins as the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, where he played a major role in directing Ph.D. dissertations. According to his biographer David Brown, after 1945 Hofstadter philosophically "broke" with Charles A. Beard and moved to the right, becoming leader of the "consensus historians", a term Hofstadter disapproved of, but that was widely applied to his apparent rejection of the Beardian idea that the sole basis for understanding American history is the fundamental conflict between economic classes.Brown (2006), p. 75
In a widely held revision of this view, Christopher Lasch wrote that, unlike the "consensus historians" of the 1950s, Hofstadter saw the consensus of classes on behalf of business interests not as a strength but "as a form of intellectual bankruptcy and as a reflection, moreover, not of a healthy sense of the practical but of the domination of American political thought by popular mythologies."
In 1948, Hofstadter published American Political Tradition. At a time when he was still viewing politics from a critical left-wing perspective, he rejected black-and-white polarization between pro-business and anti-business politicians.Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (1999) pp. 232–39 Making explicit reference to Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover, Hofstadter made a statement on the consensus in the American political tradition that has been seen as "ironic". He said:
Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" like Boorstin, who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Hofstadter deplored it. Hofstadter expressed his dislike of the term consensus historian several times, and criticized Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history. In an earlier draft of the preface, he wrote:American politics has always been an arena in which conflicts of interests have been fought out, compromised, adjusted. Once these interests were sectional; now they tend more clearly to follow class lines; but from the beginning American political parties, instead of representing single sections or classes clearly and forcefully, have been intersectional and interclass parties, embracing a jumble of interests which often have reasons for contesting among themselves.
Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of exclusively economically motivated group conflicts and financial interests of politicians. He thought that most of the periods of US history, except the Civil War, could be fully understood only by taking into account an implicit consensus, shared by all groups across the conflict lines. He criticized the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington because they had
In 1948, he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, interpretive studies of 12 major American political leaders from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The book was a critical success and sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive."Pole (2000), p. 71 Certain titles of the biographical sections illustrate paradoxes: Thomas Jefferson is "The Aristocrat as Democrat"; John C. Calhoun is the "Marx of the Master Class"; and Franklin Roosevelt is "The Patrician as Opportunist".. In writing the book, Hofstadter was influenced by literary figures as well as historians: two key influences on him were the critic Edmund Wilson and the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hofstadter's style was so powerful and engrossing that professors kept assigning the book long after scholars had revised or rejected its main points.Pole (2000), pp. 71–72.
On April 13, 1970, less than a year before his death, Hofstadter wrote historian Bernard Bailyn, expressing concerns about scholarly depictions of recent studies by both of them as "consensus". Bailyn's response has not yet been examined by third-party sources.
As a historian, Hofstadter's groundbreaking work came in using social psychology concepts to explain political history. He explored subconscious motives such as social status anxiety, anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia as they propel political discourse and action in politics. Historian Lloyd Gardner wrote that "in later essays Hofstadter specifically ruled out the possibility of a Leninist interpretation of American imperialism."Lloyd C. Gardner, "Consensus history and foreign policy." in Alexander DeConde, ed. Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (1978) 1:159.
Rural ethos The Age of Reform From Bryan to FDR: Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal (1955) casts the Populist movement as a manifestation of the yeoman ideal in America's sentimental attachment to agrarianism and the farm's moral superiority to the city. Hofstadter—himself very much a big-city person—noted the agrarian ethos was "a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins; however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct values, hence their political behavior." In this matter, the stress is on the importance of Jefferson's writings, and of his followers, in the development of agrarianism in the US, as establishing the agrarian myth, and its importance, in American life and politics—despite the rural and urban industrialization that rendered the myth moot.
Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe American provincialism, warning against anti-intellectual fear of the cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his time. Hofstadter's dissertation director Merle Curti wrote that Hofstadter's "position is as biased, by his urban background ... as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies."In Brown (2006), p. 112
Irrational fear The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (1969) describes the origins of the First Party System as reflecting fears that the (other) political party threatened to destroy the republic. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Beard's historiography and revealed Hofstadter's increasing inclination toward neoconservatism. Privately, Hofstadter said that Frederick Jackson Turner was no longer a useful guide to history, because he was too obsessed with the frontier and his ideas too often had "a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth."