Richard Hofstadter

His most widely read 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).

Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.

Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a Jewish father, Emil A. Hofstadter, and a German-American Lutheran mother, Katherine (née Hill), who died when Richard was ten.

He attended Fosdick-Masten Park High School in Buffalo.

Hofstadter then studied philosophy and history at the University at Buffalo, from 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius W. Pratt.

Despite opposition from both families, he married Felice Swados (whose brother was Harvey Swados) in 1936 after he and Felice spent several summers at Hunter Colony, New York, run by Margaret Lefranc, their close friend for years; they had one child, Dan.

Hofstadter was raised as an Episcopalian but later identified more with his Jewish roots.

Antisemitism may have cost him fellowships at Columbia and attractive professorships.

The Buffalo Jewish Hall of Fame lists him as one of the "Jewish Buffalonians who have made a lasting contribution to the world."

In 1936, Hofstadter entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University where his advisor Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research.

In 1938, he became a member of the Communist Party USA, but soon became disillusioned by the Stalinist party discipline and show trials.

After withdrawing from the party in August 1939 following the Hitler–Stalin Pact, he retained a critical left-wing perspective that was still obvious in American Political Tradition in 1948.

Hofstadter earned his PhD in 1942.

From 1942 to 1946, Hofstadter taught history at the University of Maryland, where he became a close friend of the popular sociologist C. Wright Mills and read extensively in the fields of sociology and psychology, absorbing ideas of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Sigmund Freud, and the Frankfurt School.

His later books frequently refer to behavioral concepts such as "status anxiety".

In 1944, he published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915.

It was a commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late-19th-century American capitalism and its ruthless "dog-eat-dog" economic competition and Social Darwinian self-justification.

Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagreed with his interpretation.

The sharpest criticism of the book focused on Hofstadter's weakness as a researcher: "he did little or no research into manuscripts, newspapers, archival, or unpublished sources, relying instead primarily on secondary sources augmented by his lively style and wide-ranging interdisciplinary readings, thereby producing well-written arguments based on scattered evidence he found by reading other historians."

According to his biographer David Brown, after 1945 Hofstadter philosophically "broke" with Charles A. Beard and moved to the right, becoming leader of the "consensus historians," a term Hofstadter disapproved of, but that was widely applied to his apparent rejection of the Beardian idea that the sole basis for understanding American history is the fundamental conflict between economic classes.

In 1946, Hofstadter joined Columbia University's faculty, and in 1959 he succeeded Allan Nevins as the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, where he played a major role in directing Ph.D. dissertations.

As early as his American Political Tradition (1948), while still viewing politics from a critical left-wing perspective, Hofstadter rejected black-and-white polarization between pro-business and anti-business politicians.

Making explicit reference to Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover, Hofstadter made a statement on the consensus in the American political tradition that has been seen as "ironic".

He said:

"The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading: for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man."

Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" like Boorstin, who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Hofstadter deplored it.

Hofstadter expressed his dislike of the term consensus historian several times, and criticized Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history.

In an earlier draft of the preface, he wrote: "American politics has always been an arena in which conflicts of interests have been fought out, compromised, adjusted. Once these interests were sectional; now they tend more clearly to follow class lines; but from the beginning American political parties, instead of representing single sections or classes clearly and forcefully, have been intersectional and interclass parties, embracing a jumble of interests which often have reasons for contesting among themselves."

Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of exclusively economically motivated group conflicts and financial interests of politicians.

He thought that most of the periods of US history, except the Civil War, could be fully understood only by taking into account an implicit consensus, shared by all groups across the conflict lines.

He criticized the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington because they had

"put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed.... It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it, and yet that no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history. Of course, obviously, we have had one total failure of consensus, which led to the Civil War. One could use that as the extreme case in which consensus breaks down."

In 1948 he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, interpretive studies of 12 major American political leaders from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

The book was a critical success and sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive."

Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus."

Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history".

In a widely held revision of this view, Christopher Lasch wrote that, unlike the "consensus historians" of the 1950s, Hofstadter saw the consensus of classes on behalf of business interests not as a strength but "as a form of intellectual bankruptcy and as a reflection, moreover, not of a healthy sense of the practical but of the domination of American political thought by popular mythologies."

He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an 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.

He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.