The American Historical Tradition and the Man Who Made It

"Hofstadter authored or coauthored nearly a dozen books in less than thirty years, before he died of leukemia at age fifty-four. Often criticized within the profession because his work didn't deal with primary documents, Hofstadter is more profitably read as a social critic who used American history and historiography as a template for his musings on contemporary culture. He is a particularly apt foil for Lott because he was so acutely aware of the dangers of the kind of crusading moralism that he experienced in the '30s (he was for six months a member of the Communist Party) and that Lott preaches today."

Robert S. Boynton in Bookforum uses the ideas of Richard Hofstadter to combat the identity politics of Eric Lott.


"Ironically, when the postwar political center finally did collapse in the late '60s, it was not the right but the radical children of the liberal class who made it happen. This new generation rejected the consensus view of its fathers, for in an age of violent civil rights confrontations, political assassinations and Vietnam, the bloody tide of social circumstances pulled historians back to the older conflict interpretation that the Progressive historians had championed.
"In 'The Progressive Historians,' written in 1968, just two years before he died, Hofstadter acknowledged the prevalence and importance of disagreement and upheaval in the American past, yet he still contended, obviously influenced by his own time, that pluralism, comity and consensus were virtues the nation could not afford to ignore."

And David S. Brown profiles Richard Hofstadter in the Los Angeles Times.


"Beyond his personal traits, though, Hofstadter enjoys affection because, for all his strong opinions and forceful arguments, he wasn't doctrinaire in the way that generates intellectual enemies. Disabused of his radical leanings as a young man—his flirtation with the Communist Party lasted all of four months—Hofstadter became a lifelong liberal. Most of his scholarly work not only defends liberal values—tolerance, civil liberties, academic freedom—against the onslaughts of the left and right but exhibits a liberal sensibility as well."

In Slate, David Greenberg adds an analysis.


"We might think of Hofstadter as the John Hope Franklin of urban intellectuals and liberals. Franklin bridles when benighted newspaper types describe him as the magisterial scholar of black American history. He counters that the category is American history, in which blacks played a rather big part. Hofstadter, more a wizardly writer than talented archival digger, did similar yeoman's work in creating new narratives with room for America's ethnic populations, workers, and thinkers. His books show that America's history not only can but must be rewritten by each generation because the nation keeps changing. Who we are today permits us to devalue some facts, elevate others, and even shift the plot line."

Carlin Romano in The Chronicle of Higher Education reviews David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.


"Of course Reagan had help from the left. Little did Hofstadter suspect that a year after the publication of 'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,' attacks on autonomous liberals far more damaging than any inflicted by the right would come, as Brown writes, 'from the children of the liberal class itself.' University-based militants of the New Left began echoing the criticisms of the liberal establishment the right had been making for years. The wave of campus protests, which started at Berkeley in 1964, reached Hofstadter’s Columbia in 1968, when student radicals occupied buildings and intimidated faculty. The administration summoned the police, and a violent battle ensued. Hofstadter, respected on all sides—not least because he was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and had joined one of Martin Luther King’s voting-rights marches—acted as a conciliator. When Grayson Kirk declined to appear before outraged students on commencement day, Hofstadter took his place, offering a ringing defense of academic freedom. He spoke with the authority of one who in 1950 had turned down a teaching offer from Berkeley because the state of California enforced a loyalty oath. But to members of Columbia’s Students for a Democratic Society, his speech reeked of mandarin 'privilege,' precisely the charge Joe McCarthy had leveled against liberals in 1950."

Sam Tanenhaus reviews Brown's Richard Hofstadter in The New York Times.


"But if Hofstadter seems newly relevant today, it's not for the reasons imagined by Tanenhaus and others. Despite his fame and success, he was always more of an outsider than his establishment admirers have understood. He disdained the 1950s celebration of consensus; he was deeply skeptical of the liberal heroes, especially FDR; he was never much of an anti-Communist; and when the student antiwar movement excoriated the hypocrisies and failures of the universities, Hofstadter, virtually alone among his entire cohort, refused to condemn the students and agreed with them on some key issues, even as he rejected their militant tactics. Thus while Hofstadter was in some ways a predictable member of his generation, in others he was politically more complicated and intellectually more surprising. It is these elements, rather than his particular arguments, that make him significant for us today."

And Jon Wiener takes a different view in The Nation.