Re: Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading.Huh?
On Oct 10, 2006, at 6:53 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
Oh, that’s cute: He’s good to his graduate students.
And they return the favor. This is from an essay by his student Eric
Foner - is he an enemy of the people too? - in the Columbia alum mag
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2005/Hofstadter.pdf:
Providing unity to the individual portraits was Hofstadter’s insight
that his subjects held essentially the same underlying beliefs.
Instead of persistent conflict between agrarians and industrialists,
capital and labor, or Democrats and Republicans, broad agreement on
fundamentals, particularly the values of individual liberty, private
property, and capitalist enterprise, marked American history.”The
fierceness of the political struggle,”he wrote,”has often been
misleading;for the range of vision embraced by the primary
contestants…has always been bounded by the horizons of property and
enterprise.”
With its emphasis on the ways an ideological consensus had shaped
American development, The American Political Tradition marked
Hofstadter’s break with the Beardian and Marxist traditions. Along
with Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics and Louis
Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (both published a few years
afterward), Hofstadter’s second book came to be seen as the
foundation of the “consensus history”of the 1950s. But Hofstadter’s
writing never devolved into the uncritical celebration of the
American experience that characterized much “consensus”writing. As
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, there was a basic difference
between The American Political Tradition and works like Boorstin’s:
“For Hofstadter perceived the consensus from a radical perspective,
from the outside, and deplored it; while Boorstin perceived it from
the inside and celebrated it.”
In Hofstadter’s account, the domination of individualism and
capitalism in American life produced not a benign freedom from
European ideological conflicts but a form of intellectual and
political bankruptcy, an inability on the part of political leaders
to think in original ways about the modern world. If the book has a
hero,it is Wendell Phillips.Alone among Hofstadter’s subjects in
never holding public office, Phillips was an engaged intellectual who
used his talents first to mobilize opposition to slavery and then to
combat the exploitation of labor in the Gilded Age.It is indeed
ironic that Hofstadter’s devastating indictment of American political
culture should have become the introduction to American history for
generations of students.