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    Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
    Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
    Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
    Ebook293 pages7 hours

    Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography

    By David S. Brown

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    About this ebook

    Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America’s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism’s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation’s most important and prolific public intellectuals. 

    In this masterful biography, David Brown explores Hofstadter’s life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. According to Brown, Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America’s hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. 

    By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years, as Brown shows, culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter’s critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied. As this fascinating biography ultimately shows, Hofstadter’s observations on the struggle between conservative and liberal America are relevant to our own times, and his legacy challenges us to this day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226076379
    Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
    Author

    David S. Brown

    David S. Brown teaches history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven books, among them four biographies: The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.

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    • 4/5
      What particularly informs this work is a certain sense of sly irony, in as much as while the author has no lack of respect for the life and work of Richard Hofstadter, he doesn't gloss over Hofstadter's failure to grasp how he had become quite the organization man by the time his style of politics and history came under fire in the Sixties; a period that Hofstadter was prepared to write off as the "Age of Rubbish." The question has to be whether the man could have reinvented himself for the era of the rise of the talking-head expert, or whether he would have dwindled away to being a mere curiosity had he lived longer than fifty-four years; one has to suspect the latter, as Hofstadter tended to recoil from conflict for its own sake.

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