Richard Hofstadter

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Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 - October 24, 1970) was a noted American historian and was the chair of Dewitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His better-known works include The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, as well as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1944), The American Political Tradition (1948), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964).

Biography

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York in 1916 to a Jewish father and a German Lutheran mother, who died when he was ten. In 1933 he entered at the University at Buffalo, majoring in philosophy and minoring in history. During this time, Buffalo was suffering under the full impact of the Great Depression, which strongly affected Hofstadter's political and intellectual thinking. At the university, Hofstadter became involved in left-wing politics, joining the Young Communist League and meeting a radical student named Felice Swados whom he would marry in 1936.

After graduation, Hofstadter enrolled in the graduate history program at Columbia University. In New York, Hofstadter became more involved in Marxist politics, joining the Communist Party in 1938 (as did many disaffected intellectuals at the time), though, in his words "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now." By 1939 however he had become disenchanted with the party and began a steady decline in his participation; by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact in September he was thoroughly and permanently disillusioned with the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and Marxism itself. He did not, however, change his views on capitalism. This would leave Hofstadter with a deep sense of cynicism that would pervade his work. In 1945 Hofstadter received his Ph.D. from Columbia University after completing his dissertation, which had already been published in 1944 as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. In 1946, he joined the faculty of Columbia, becoming DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959.

Hofstadter would become one of the leading historians of his generation, associated with consensus historians challenging the theories of their progressive colleagues, who at that time were inclined to explain American history primarily through the prism of economics. Instead, Hofstadter would emphasize unconscious motives, status anxieties, irrational hatreds, and paranoia. In several of his works, most notably The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-intellectualism in America, Hofstadter described American society as a whole as extremely provincial, harboring widespread fears of any ideas outside the mainstream. Thus, Hofstadter saw a direct lineage from the Salem witch hunts in the seventeeth century down to the McCarthy era, a theme also touched upon by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. In other works Hofstadter would describe American politics as essentially irrationally motivated. In The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter described the beginning of the first party system in America as having been driven by an irrational fear that one of the two major parties hoped to destroy the republic. Hofstadter planned to write a major three-volume history of American politics, but had only partially completed the first volume, later published as America in 1750, when he died at the early age of 54 from Leukemia.

Recent Citations

Michelle Goldberg in a 21-Nov-2005 Salon.com feature references Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" when analyzing the Right wing's conspiracy theory about a "War on Christmas".[1]

David Brooks in an 30-Oct-2005 New York Times Editorial references Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" when analyzing Democrat speculation in anticipation of indictments brought by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Published works

• Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 1944).
• The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948). online edition
• The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Knopf, 1955). online edition
• The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). (with Walter P. Metzger)
• The United States: the History of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1957).
• Anti-intellectualism in American life (New York: Knopf, 1963).
• The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics Harper's Magazine (1964)
• The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).
• The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
• America in 1750: A Social Portrait (1971)

Reference

• David S. Brown. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (2006)
• Jack Pole, "Richard Hofstadter," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. "Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000" U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 68-83pt:Richard Hofstadter