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Richard Hofstadter
| born |
August 06, 1916
|
| died |
October 24, 1970 |
| gender |
male |
| place of birth |
Buffalo, New York, The United States |
| website |
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98nov/hofstadt.h... |
| genre |
History, Social Sciences, Nonfiction
|
| influences |
Charles Beard, Merle Curti, Karl Marx, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, Karl Mannheim, Edmund Wilson, Vernon L. Parrington, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, C. Wright Mills, Theodor Adorno, Seymour Martin Lipset |
about this author
Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, an historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays remain pertinent to illuminating contemporary history.
His most important works are 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 unsentimental 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.
Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually might have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.
As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research.[4] In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “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.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it”.
In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late nineteenth-century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified by William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagree with his interpretation.
In the 1940s, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that: “Beard was really the exciting influence on me”, specifically the social-conflict model of U.S. history that emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups (primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and the workers) and discounted abstract political rhetoric that was rarely translated into action. Historians following that model must search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents. As such, Charles Beard perceived the American Civil War (1861–65) as a South-to-North transference of political power, progressing from slavery to industrial capitalism, because neither the Union nor the Confederacy was truly intere
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