Review of Richard Hofstadter by David Brown (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)
Middle Man (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)
As a historian, Hofstadter broke with the prevailing Progressive tradition, represented most notably by Charles Beard, that saw the story of America as an ongoing conflict between ideological heroes and villains: the people versus the interests, democrats versus aristocrats, the underprivileged versus the wealthy. In Hofstadter’s view, this account was vastly oversimplified, ignoring, among other things, the socio-cultural divisions—ethnicity and religion in particular—that modified and complicated class relations.
[snip]When Hofstadter widened his lens to encompass American political pathologies on the Right—as in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), which won him a second Pulitzer, and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965)—he came in for not dissimilar criticism from conservatives. In Hofstadter’s universe, wrote William F. Buckley, Jr., Left-liberals were analyzed, but radical conservatives were diagnosed. Whether the rebukes came from the Left or from the Right, there was something to them: the bounds of Hofstadter’s own pluralism were located within the New Deal consensus, excluding those outside it from serious consideration.
What really united Hofstadter’s critiques of the Left and the Right was a suspicion of the popular mind. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was something of an intellectual snob. The masses—and mass movements—were not to be trusted. For such older dichotomies as the people versus the interests, the historian David Potter would later observe, Hofstadter tended to substitute the equally misleading dichotomy of the rational versus the irrational. It is not surprising that his greatest political hero was Adlai Stevenson, who to intellectuals of the 1950’s seemed the very model of political rationality.
Some contemporary progressive intellectuals have managed to retain Hofstadter's snobbery, if not the power of his analysis.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/24/06 09:48 | Books/Culture | Technorati
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