Re: Hofstadter
Seth Ackerman wrote:
As for Hofstadter, I think it’s safe to say that almost no graduate seminars assign him anymore. And I suspect if you tried out his argument (about the masses and rightwing paranoia) with a room full of assistant profs, the first thing they’d say is that you can’t talk about “the masses” because it assumes Americans were all alike. Which, again, has some truth to it, but it’s a lens that places pretty firm limits (probably intentionally) on what you can say about American politics.
It’s funny to hear this when I’m reading him for basically the first time. He clearly doesn’t think that all Americans think alike. In fact, I just read a bit about how a first- or second-generation oilman from Texas would be different from a third-generation one in New York. Is it a Cox-like shyness about generalizing about patterns of thought, because everything is so incommensurate?
Doug