Richard Hofstadter - Biography, Published works

Historian, born in Buffalo, New York, USA. An interdisciplinary pioneer and major seminal influence in American intellectual and political history, he received his doctorate from Columbia University (1942) and taught there (1946–70), training a generation of graduate students. His doctoral thesis, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944), won the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Society. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) sold over one million paperback copies, and The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) both won Pulitzer Prizes. The last of his 13 books, The Idea of a Party System (1969), explored the slow acceptance of party politics in America.

Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 - October 24, 1970) was an American historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. One of the leading public intellectuals of the 1950s, his 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 American Lutheran mother, who died when he was ten. 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.

Marxist Stage

After graduation, Hofstadter entered the graduate program in History at Columbia University. In New York, Hofstadter became more involved in Marxist circles, joining the Communist Party in 1938, though, in his words at the time, "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people....

Hofstadter was left with a deep sense of cynicism that pervaded his academic work and thought. from Columbia University after completing his dissertation, which had already been published in 1944 as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 and sold 200,000 copies. It was a Marxist critique of American capitalists of the late 19th century who, he argued, believed in a dog-eat-dog sort of ferocious competition endorsed by Social Darwinism as preached by William Graham Sumner.

Influence of Charles Beard

In the early and mid-1940s, Hofstadter was a disciple from afar of Charles Beard, stating "...Beard was really the exciting influence on me." Beard's conflict model taught that American history was the the struggle of competing economic groups, primarily farmers, plantation slaveowners, industrialists, and workers.

The Consensus Historians

After 1945, Hofstadter broke with Beard and moved to the right, becoming associated with the "consensus historians". In 1946, he joined the Columbia faculty and became DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959. His most well-known and influential work, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, was published in 1948. The chapters titles themselves were ironic and revisionist, pointing up the paradoxes inherent in the American political idiom — Jefferson was labeled "The Aristocrat as Democrat";

Hofstadter's work after 1945 represented the "consensus school" that flourished in the 1950s in reaction to Beard. Hofstadter explained that the generation of Beard and Vernon Parrington 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.

Later work

Hofstadter broke new historiographical ground by exploring sociological structures (perhaps influenced by his friend C. dissertations in American history, he did not found a school, and gave little advice to his graduate students.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter described American society as a whole as extremely provincial, harboring widespread fears of any ideas outside the mainstream.

In other works, Hofstadter described American politics as essentially irrationally motivated. In The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter described the origins of the first party system in America as being 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. But others noted that, during and after the events of '68, he invited his students in to talk with him about their political goals and strategies, and invited one of the radical students, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on a history of violence in the US. In the words of his student Eric Foner, Hofstadter and Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary History "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements."

Published works

"The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 50-55 full text in JSTOR "William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinist," The New England Quarterly> 109-124 JSTOR Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); 1992 edition with preface by Eric Foner The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. 195-213 JSTOR 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). Metzger) The United States: the History of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1957), college textbook; coauthored with Daniel Aaron and William Miller Anti-intellectualism in American life (New York: Knopf, 1963). edited excerpts The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). includes "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).