Richard Hofstadter
An Intellectual Biography
David S. Brown
University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 282 pp. 

History is one of the few scholarly pursuits that garners popular attention. Among the ranks of its practitioners are bestselling authors with fans who avidly follow their careers—cheering the latest long ball struck by David McCullough, for instance, or the comeback of Doris Kearns Goodwin following her plagiarism mishap. Unfortunately, popular treatments of history often disappoint. In order to swim in the mainstream, mass-market narratives tend to adopt a History Channel approach that blurs the boundary with entertainment, turning history into a lurid parade of conspiracy theories and ghosts haunting old western mining towns.

Things weren’t this way just forty years ago, when Richard Hofstadter was one of America’s most popular historians. A public intellectual “committed to history as a literary art,” as David S. Brown writes in his new biography, Hofstadter penned best-selling books that closely examined America’s political culture, offering social criticism and historical exploration in equal measure while endeavoring to prompt national self-scrutiny. More than three and a half decades after his early death in 1970 (of leukemia, at age fifty-four), Hofstadter remains a player. His analytical terminology—“the paranoid tradition,” “status revolution,” and “anti-intellectualism”—continues to be relevant, and The American Political Tradition, a book that in its author’s own words eschewed “hero worship and national self-congratulation,” is still in print and selling well.

David Brown believes Hofstadter’s role as a popular historian tells us something about the wider story of postwar American liberalism. Like other postwar liberals, Hofstadter started on the far left in the 1930s, joining the Communist Party during the Great Depression, and remaining faithful until the shock of the Moscow show trials made him recoil. Rejecting rigid ideology thereafter, Hofstadter never made the subsequent leap to neoconservatism that a number of his contemporaries did, but remained in the liberal center even through the tumultuous 1960s, when, at Columbia University, he confronted student radicals who seemed to him as fanatical as the Communists he had earlier rejected.

Hofstadter was a rarity in postwar liberal circles—someone who took the Right seriously, long before it became impossible not to. Colleagues at Columbia such as Lionel Trilling could declare liberalism the “dominant” tradition in America and leave it at that. But in Senator Joe McCarthy’s hunt for Communists, and specifically in the way McCarthy whipped up disgust at the educated and pampered elite into a confectionary right-wing populism, Hofstadter saw an ominous alternative to American liberalism. He perceived the “popular roots of antiliberalism,” Brown writes, “and thus more insightfully anticipated where the heart of twentieth-century American conservatism was heading.” Later on he recognized the power of the Right once again, in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Recent work by young historians like Lisa McGirr, Jonathan Schoenwald, and Rick Perlstein detail the grassroots organizations that undergirded Goldwater’s failed run and show how prescient Hofstadter’s earlier analysis was. As early as 1964, Hofstadter noted “enthusiasts” who embraced “conspiracy theories, blamed the nation’s problems on government activism, and flirted with an authoritarian style of politics”—all in all, an outlook that would loom large in America’s political future.

Hofstadter marveled at the classic horseshoe effect in American politics; Far Left and Far Right, he noted, shared more than first appeared. He opposed them both. Forced to defend academic freedom in the late 1960s against the politicization of campus life by the student Left, Hofstadter once again lambasted fanaticism. While accepting that students at Columbia had legitimate concerns about university governance, he rejected the militancy of the 1968 takeover. He also worried that liberals were unwilling to defend their centrism against student radicals. “The Columbia crisis forced him to realize that most liberals did not understand liberalism,” Brown writes. “They believed it was self-perpetuating, even in the face of violence.” Enchanted by complexity and nuance, liberals couldn’t fight back.

This brings us to Hofstadter’s celebration of “consensus,” a term that pops up in his work and often confuses readers. It is a mistake to describe Hofstadter as a consensus historian whose view of America’s past minimized conflict. Highly attuned to conflict—both past and present—Hofstadter viewed consensus not as an empirical description of American society, but as a normative and moral ideal. It presented a conscious rejection, on his part, of radicalism of any political stripe and an embrace of the fragile principle of compromise.

Now that the tumultuous decade of the 1960s seems so distant, it behooves us to ask what remains of Hofstadter’s liberalism and his analysis of American political culture. For many at the time, his attacks on both the therapeutic, feel-good politics of the New Left and the nutty, deranged conspiracies of the Right looked elitist. Brown quotes Christopher Lasch suggesting that Hofstadter “could not conceal his disdain for the hopelessly muddled thinking of ordinary Americans.” Lasch, Brown writes, came to “see Hofstadter as a latter-day version of H. L. Mencken endlessly belaboring the ‘booboisie.’” And at times Brown himself, intent on offering a candid assessment of the flaws and limitations of Hofstadter’s liberalism, seems to concur.

But the notion of such liberalism as an elite indulgence seems less convincing today than it did during Hofstadter’s lifetime. Just consider: the recent rise to fame of conservative activists like David Horowitz, with his call for state legislatures to crack down on liberal professors; the radically relativizing push to teach “intelligent design” as just another “perspective”; the shouting lunacies of right-wing talk radio and cable television; and the “tough guy” foreign policy of the Bush administration. Students may no longer need to reread Mencken, but it sure wouldn’t hurt if they picked up a copy of Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life or The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Nor would it hurt if they spent time reflecting on the meaning of consensus.

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography deftly situates its subject squarely at the center of the story of twentieth-century American liberalism. Sometimes, when Brown draws his own observations, he seems less sure of himself. But he has provided insight not merely into one man’s life, but into his era—a time when liberalism seemed intelligent enough to recognize both its own ethical strengths and its ultimate limits. That’s a fine accomplishment for a young historian.