"He Was by Temperament More of a Private Intellectual"

"Coming as it did, after the University had let the campus revolt that spring get violently out of hand, that speech got quickly pigeonholed as some sort of 'conservative' defense of the status quo. Read it again; I expect to include it in a subsequent volume. It is, in many ways, a fitting coda to Anti-Intellectualism and The Paranoid Style: 'The possibility of modern democracy rests upon the willingness of governments to accept the existence of a loyal opposition, organized to reverse some of their policies and to replace them in office. Similarly, the possibility of the modern free university rests upon the willingness of society to support and sustain institutions part of whose business it is to examine, critically and without stint, the assumptions that prevail in that society.'"

At the Journal of the History of Idea's blog, Daniel Wortel-London talks to Sean Wilentz about Richard Hofstadter.

And Jeet Heer at The Nation reviews Wilentz's collection of Hofstadter's writings for the Library of America.