"He Preferred the Beauty of Insight to the Brawn of Proof"

"The debate over whether Hofstadter was celebrating, lamenting, or indicting the narrow boundaries of the American political tradition underscores an important ambiguity in his work. I would argue that Hofstadter was doing all these things. Frustrated as he was with the tradition, he also esteemed it. 'Critical of many aspects of American life,' the historian C. Vann Woodward said at a memorial when Hofstadter died, 'he never joined the fashionable cult of anti-Americanism.'"

In a 1998 article, David Greenberg in The Atlantic discusses Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It.