Champion of Liberalism

RICHARD HOFSTADTER: An Intellectual Biography.

By David S. Brown. Univ. of Chicago Press. 291 pp. $27.50

The passing of Richard Hofstadter, felled by leu­kemia at 54, was a sad loss for American scholarship. His masterly studies of American political thinking—including The Amer­ican Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), The Age of Reform (1955), and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—constitute an enduring legacy, as does the work of the talented and prolific successors he trained at Columbia University, such as Robert Dallek, Lawrence W. Levine, and the late Christopher Lasch. All the more tragic, then, that when he died, Hofstadter had barely begun what was to be his masterwork, a three-volume history of America’s political culture from 1750 onward.

Hofstadter (1916–70) made his reputation in the 1950s by attacking the Progressive historians, notably Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, and Vernon Parrington, for imagining an America riven by class conflict. Shocked by the emergence of the “radical right,” he exposed its hyperpatriotism as a populist expression of “status anxiety.” Ironically, though, he found his work under attack from the New Left in the late 1960s. Younger historians, drawn to the neglected under­side of the American experience, repudiated his “consensus history” and disdained as grandiose apologetics the sort of gracefully written synoptic narratives he composed. Buffeted from both extremes of the political spectrum, and appalled by radical assaults on universities, Hofstadter clung to his faith in America’s liberal values but anguished over the rising generation’s apparent disdain for them.

In this splendid account, David S. Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, shows that Hofstadter’s own past shaped his understanding of the American past. An eastern urbanite, he was leery of agrarian parochialism. The son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, he felt himself both outsider and insider. As a student during the Great Depression, he was drawn to Marxism and even joined the Columbia unit of the Communist Party in 1939, leaving it after only four months, disillusioned by Stalin’s purge trials. He came to believe that the best features of the American experience were its liberalism, pluralism, and inclusiveness; the worst, its anti-intellectualism, penchant for vigilante violence, and confusion of patriotism with conformism—in the phrase he coined, its “paranoid style.”

Though Brown shows admirable insight and sure-footedness in linking Hofstadter’s personality and values to his work, he does less than full justice to his subject’s central ideas. He would have done well to take more seriously the contention of Hofstadter and the influential political scientist Louis Hartz (who is neglected here) that, from the outset, American political discourse has been framed by a mythic and sometimes stultifying belief in what Hofstadter called laissez-faire individualism and Hartz termed “irrational Lockianism.” That thesis goes a long way toward explaining why socialism made scarcely a dent on the national consensus and why today the United States has the highest degree of income inequality among the world’s richest nations.

Clearly, there is much in Hofstadter’s understanding of this country still worth pondering. Consider this observation in his half-century-old The Age of Reform: “War has always been the Nemesis of the liberal tradition in America. From our earliest history as a nation there has been a curiously persistent association between democratic politics and nationalism, jingoism, or war.”

—Sanford Lakoff