Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916–October 24, 1970) was an American historian of the U.S. at Columbia University. A Pulitzer Prize winning author and public intellectual, he was considered one of the leading historians of the Consensus School of American historiography.

Early Life and Education

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 6, 1916, to a Jewish immigrant father, and a German American Lutheran mother who died when he was ten years old. Hofstadter attended Fosdick-Masten Park High School and the University of Buffalo.

While at Buffalo, he studied philosophy with the phenomenologist Marvin Farber and studied history with the progressive diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. During the Great Depression, Hofstadter, like other disillusioned liberals, got involved in left-wing politics. He joined the National Student League where he met Felice Swados, who he married in 1936. The Hofstadters were active in the NSL, precipitating campus strikes and writing anti-capitalist op-ed pieces for the campus newspaper. When he was at Columbia, Hofstadter joined the Young Communist League. In spite of majoring in philosophy, Hofstadter wrote a senior thesis titled "The Tariff and Homestead Issues in the Republican Campaign of 1860." He finished courses in 1936 and the couple moved to New York City. He received his B.A. that winter after he began graduate coursework at Columbia University.

At Columbia, Harry J. Carman was his thesis adviser. He completed the M.A. in 1938 and immediately began doctoral studies. As a doctoral candidate he worked with Merle Curti who, Hofstadter remarked, influenced him and his career more than any other person. After taking a Ph.D. at Columbia he taught at the University of Maryland and at Columbia.

Leftist Phase

In New York City after 1936, Hofstadter became more involved in Marxist circles, moving from the Young Communist League to the American Communist Party in 1938, though, in his words at the time,

I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.

By 1939, however, he had become disenchanted with the party and his participation began a steady decline; by the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in September, 1939, he was thoroughly and permanently disillusioned with the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and Marxism itself. He did not, however, change his opposition to capitalism: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it."

Perhaps to a greater degree than other former American communists in that period, Hofstadter was left with a deep sense of cynicism that pervaded his academic work and thought. In 1942, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His dissertation was published in 1944 by the University of Pennsylvania Press as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 and sold 200,000 copies. It was a 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. Later critics took issue with his evidence, arguing that very few businessmen were Social Darwinists and that many took positions supportive of philanthropy.

Perhaps because of Hofstadter's disenchantment with capitalism, he was deeply influenced by historian Charles A. Beard, who was equally disenchanted with American capitalism. He noted that "Beard was really the exciting influence on me." By the end of the forties, however, Hofstadter began a major shift in American historiography away from Beard's conflict school and towards an emerging "Consensus."

The "Consensus Historians"

Having broken with the communists politically and Beard historiographically, Hofstadter moved to the right becoming associated with the "consensus historians". In 1946, he joined the Columbia faculty and was appointed DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959. His best-known and influential work through which the consensus perspective of American historiography was established was The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948). It comprised a series of 12 biographical portraits of major political leaders from the 1770s to 1930s. Like all of Hofstadter's books, it was based primarily on reading and synthesizing secondary sources and published letters and speeches. It was a major success, as Pole (2000) explains, because it was "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive." The chapters titles themselves were ironic and revisionist, pointing up the paradoxes inherent in the American political idiom—Thomas Jefferson was labeled "The Aristocrat as Democrat"; John C. Calhoun was "the Marx of the Master Class"; Franklin D. Roosevelt was "The Patrician as Opportunist."

All of Hofstadter's work after 1945 was characteristic of the "consensus school", which flourished in the 1950s in reaction to Beard. Hofstadter explained that the generation of Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Carl Becker, 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. 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.

Later Work

Following his work in consensus historiography, Hofstadter broke new historiographical ground by exploring sociological structures (perhaps influenced by his friend C. Wright Mills) and by probing unconscious psychological motives, including status anxieties and irrational hatreds in works such as The Age of Reform. In this work he posited that the major cause for the era of progressive reform was psychological anxiety among the middle class over perceived lack of power and imminent threats of class warfare. This anxiety motivated the middle class to work for and enact social reforms curbing the excesses of the rich, mollifying the trials of the poor, and correcting the abuses of machine politics.

His later work continued these investigations, finally looking at paranoia as a political motivator. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter described American society as a whole as provincial, harboring widespread fears of any ideas outside the mainstream. Hofstadter saw a direct lineage from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. The title essay of the "Paranoid Style" was first delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University in November, 1963. Both works have have had some continuing influence on cultural and political critics: observations made in both works have been used to explain the ideology and rhetoric of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Movement.

In other works, Hofstadter described American politics as irrationally motivated in fundamental ways. In The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter described the origins of the First Party System in America as driven by an irrational fear that one of the two major parties hoped to destroy the republic. From this, Hofstadter was developing a major three-volume history of American politics, but had only completed sketches of the first volume (posthumously published as America in 1750) at the time of his death in 1970.

Like other former leftists and many others, Hofstadter was not enthusiastic about radicalism on university campuses in the 1960s, notably the radical sit-in and temporary closing of Columbia university in 1968. His friend David Herbert Donald recalled, "he was appalled by the growing radical, even revolutionary sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach." But others noted that, during and after the events of 1968, 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 U.S. In the words of another of his students Eric Foner, Hofstadter and Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary History "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements." American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he died in 1970.

Although Hofstadter directed over 100 Ph.D. dissertations in American history, his influence on them was limited. He gave little advice to his graduate students, rarely entered the archives himself, and could not help his students with those sorts of methodological issues. He was also an aloof teacher who read sections of his next book to undergraduate classes and was difficult for graduate students to approach.

Richard Hofstadter died in 1970 at the relatively young age of 54 from leukemia.