Richard Hofstadter: The Education of RH
At his death in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was probably this country’s most renowned historian, best known as the originator of the “consensus” school, whose measured siftings of the American past de-emphasized conflict — whether economic, regional or ideological — and highlighted instead the nation’s long tradition of shared ideas, principles and values.
This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter’s work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his talent for drawing parallels between disparate episodes in our national narrative, almost always bringing the argument around to the concerns of midcentury America. “I know it is risky,” he acknowledged in 1960, “but I still write history out of my engagement with the present.” The gamble, of course, was whether questions so pressing in his time would continue to engage later generations. To a remarkable extent they have, and so Hofstadter remains relevant — in some respects more relevant than ever.
This isn’t to say he was the most enduring historian of his time, but rather the one who came closest to being his generation’s exemplary intellectual. Others, like Bernard Bailyn and C. Vann Woodward, probably left a deeper imprint on the profession; or, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had greater influence on the important events of the day. But no other historian wrote so penetratingly about the politics of the moment, and at the same time none did more to establish pragmatic liberalism as a kind of unofficial, if constantly imperiled, public doctrine during the peak years of the cold war. Indeed so immersed was Hofstadter in the complications of postwar liberalism that he came finally to dramatize them, not only in his work but also in his life. This is the story David S. Brown tells in “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.” Brown, who teaches history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, describes his intelligent and stimulating book as “an extended conversation with the formal writings of Richard Hofstadter.” That’s too modest. Brown’s interviews with Hofstadter’s colleagues and students and his careful reading of Hofstadter’s copious writings, including unpublished manuscripts and letters, help situate the work in the context of Hofstadter’s short life (he died, at age 54, of leukemia) and also within the larger tumult of his period.
Brown admirably balances respect for his subject with critical distance and persuasively makes the case that the ambiguousness of Hofstadter’s legacy is inseparable from his continuing interest. There is, first, the ambiguity of his professional identity. Though he held a distinguished Ivy League professorship and wrote important books on higher education and on historiography, Hofstadter characterized himself as being “as much, maybe more, of an essayist than a historian.” Some of his most famous formulations, for example on “status politics” and “the paranoid style in American politics,” came in think pieces first published in general interest magazines, and were written in elegant, ironic prose modeled on that of social observers like H. L. Mencken, Thorstein Veblen and Edmund Wilson....
Read entire article at Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT Book Review
This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter’s work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his talent for drawing parallels between disparate episodes in our national narrative, almost always bringing the argument around to the concerns of midcentury America. “I know it is risky,” he acknowledged in 1960, “but I still write history out of my engagement with the present.” The gamble, of course, was whether questions so pressing in his time would continue to engage later generations. To a remarkable extent they have, and so Hofstadter remains relevant — in some respects more relevant than ever.
This isn’t to say he was the most enduring historian of his time, but rather the one who came closest to being his generation’s exemplary intellectual. Others, like Bernard Bailyn and C. Vann Woodward, probably left a deeper imprint on the profession; or, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had greater influence on the important events of the day. But no other historian wrote so penetratingly about the politics of the moment, and at the same time none did more to establish pragmatic liberalism as a kind of unofficial, if constantly imperiled, public doctrine during the peak years of the cold war. Indeed so immersed was Hofstadter in the complications of postwar liberalism that he came finally to dramatize them, not only in his work but also in his life. This is the story David S. Brown tells in “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.” Brown, who teaches history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, describes his intelligent and stimulating book as “an extended conversation with the formal writings of Richard Hofstadter.” That’s too modest. Brown’s interviews with Hofstadter’s colleagues and students and his careful reading of Hofstadter’s copious writings, including unpublished manuscripts and letters, help situate the work in the context of Hofstadter’s short life (he died, at age 54, of leukemia) and also within the larger tumult of his period.
Brown admirably balances respect for his subject with critical distance and persuasively makes the case that the ambiguousness of Hofstadter’s legacy is inseparable from his continuing interest. There is, first, the ambiguity of his professional identity. Though he held a distinguished Ivy League professorship and wrote important books on higher education and on historiography, Hofstadter characterized himself as being “as much, maybe more, of an essayist than a historian.” Some of his most famous formulations, for example on “status politics” and “the paranoid style in American politics,” came in think pieces first published in general interest magazines, and were written in elegant, ironic prose modeled on that of social observers like H. L. Mencken, Thorstein Veblen and Edmund Wilson....