Richard Hofstadter
Overview
 
Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

 of the 1950s, a historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus" whom 21st-century scholars continue to consult because his intellectually engaging books and essays remain pertinent to illuminating contemporary history.

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition
The American Political Tradition
The American Political Tradition is a 1948 book by Richard Hofstadter, an account on the ideology of previous U.S. presidents and other political figures...

(1948); The Age of Reform
The Age of Reform
The Age of Reform is a 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter. It is an American history that traces events from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era ending with the New Deal in the 1930s...

(1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Anti-intellectualism in American Life
Anti-intellectualism in American Life is a 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter.-References:*De Simone, Deborah M. "." The History Teacher. Vol. 13, No. 3.- External links :...

(1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard J. Hofstadter, is an historical essay tracing the influence of conspiracy theory and “movements of suspicious discontent” through the course of American history...

(1964).
Quotations

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.

Introduction (p. 16)

The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.

Chapter I, part II (p. 44)

The utopia of the Populism|Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.

Chapter II, part I (p. 62)

Clearly, the need for political and economic reform was now felt more widely in the country at large. Another, more obscure process, traceable to the flexibility and opportunism of the American political system, was also at work: successful resistance to reform demands required a partial incorporation of the reform program.

Chapter IV, part I (p. 132)

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

Chapter VI, part II (p. 245) First published in Harper's Magazine (November 1964)

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

 
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