Richard hofstadter biography

&#;Eventually, most wised-up readers of history come to agree with the advice of E. H. Carr, cited and honored by David S. Brown, that &#;Before you study the history, study the historian.&#; The payoff of Brown&#;s effort comes in Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, an incisive interpretive profile.&#;

Carlin Romano | Chronicle of Higher Education

&#;[In] his intelligent and stimulating book. . . . 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. . . . At his best, Hofstadter remains vitally alive and endlessly instructive.&#;

Sam Tanenhaus | New York Times Book Review

"The most important political book of that is not a book about politics at all."

E.J. Dionne | Washington Post

"Hofstadters’s achievement, as the great historian of postwar liberalism, could hardly be a mo

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“A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our gemenskap insofar as that kultur aims to cherish the human mind." Richard Hofstadter (&#;) Historian PhD Faculty &#; The historian Richard Hofstadter was a core member of the group of postwar Columbia intellectuals that included Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Robert Merton, and Daniel Bell. At a time when politics were assumed essentially to reflect economic interests, Hofstadter began studying alternative explanations for political conduct: unconscious motives, ställning eller tillstånd anxieties, irrational hatreds, paranoia. Hofstadter wrote some of the most influential books to appear in American political and cultural history, among them The Age of Reform () and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (), both recognized with Pulitze • Richard Hofstadter: Columbia’s Evolutionary Historian Introduction by Wm. Theodore de Bary Richard Hofstadter’s stature, not only as a leading American historian but as a public intellectual who represented Columbia at its best in his time, is shown by the extraordinary honor done him when he was asked to give the commencement address in the spring of It is a long tradition at Columbia that the president, not an invited speaker, always gives this address himself. The sole exception was made in favor of Hofstadter, who in that year of radical challenge to the values of the University, stood firmly and spoke eloquently in their defense. The story of the dominant figure in American historical writing in the post–World War II years is told by his successor to the distinguished DeWitt Clinton Professorship of American History, Eric Foner, who received his doctorate at Columbia under Hofstadter. Foner’s publications have focused on the intersections of intellectual, social, and pol