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 marked him as one of the nation's most
important and prolific public intellectuals.
In this masterly 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 his fans, the importance of
this seminal thinker cannot be denied. "In this illuminating
biography . . . [Brown] freshens the worn-out chronicle of postwar
Upper West Side intelligentsia by re-telling it fromHofstadter's
playful, eternally skeptical, oddly uninflammatory point of view. .
. . Above all, Brown helps readers assess Hofstadter as a member of
a generation of American historians every bit as important as (and
in some respects more so than) the well-known Progressive
generation of Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon
Parrington."--Sean Wilentz, "New Republic"
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