David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Pp. xxiii, 237 + notes, bibliography, index.
The cultural function of the modern historian is to teach us how to learn from people with whom we differ due to historical circumstances (and such circumstances include the range of ideological commitments they can profess with plausibility). We “go back” to the people of the past in the hope of changing our perspective on the present and thus multiplying our choices about the future. But these people with whom we differ, and from whom we must learn, are, to begin with, other historians; for there is no way to peek over the edges of our present as if they aren’t there, standing between us and the archive, telling us how to approach it.
No one gets to the “primary sources,” whether they are constituted as the historical record or as the literary canon, without going through the priests, scribes, librarians, professors, critics—the professionals—who created them in retrospect, in view of their own intellectual obligations and political purposes. In this sense, history is not the past as such, just as the canon is not literature as such; it is the ongoing argument between historians, among others, about what qualifies as an event, a document, an epoch. It is the endless argument about what the future holds; for the form and the content of the past matter only to those with political commitments in the present, and so to the future.
Hofstadter was born in 1916, in Buffalo, New York, then a prosperous port city and a vibrant manufacturing town. He was the son of a Jewish immigrant and a native-born Lutheran who raised him as an Episcopalian: America dreamed him. He attended the University of Buffalo in the early 1930s, where he took courses with Julius Pratt, a counter-progressive diplomatic historian avant la lettre—the American empire was a big mistake, he argued, an embarrassing by-product of sloppy thinking and high spirits at the State Department—connived with left-wing activists who promoted the Popular Front, and yet fell under the spell of Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, whose two-volume Rise of American Civilization (1927) was still a sensation both inside and outside the academy, in part because it reanimated the central principles of “Progressive” historiography. By the time he left Buffalo, however, Hofstadter had begun to complicate his identification with the Left, and had realized that the Beards’ forceful restatement of “Progressive” principles was a new instance of the Owl of Minerva, spreading its wings only at dusk, at the very moment of its eclipse. His senior thesis, soon after published in the American Historical Review, was a revisionist study of the tariff in the electoral politics of 1860.
Hofstadter moved to New York City in 1936 with his radical, charismatic young wife, Felice Swados, apparently to attend law school as per his family’s wishes. There he fell in with a new Popular Front crowd (including Alfred Kazin) which she and her brother, Harvey, cultivated. He actually joined the Communist Party in late 1938, lasting for all of four months, resigning before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Meanwhile, bored by the study of the law, Hofstadter enrolled in the graduate history program at Columbia. But, despite his extraordinary ability and accomplishments—how many undergraduates see their senior theses published in the AHR?—he struggled in the program until Merle Curti and Henry Steele Commager commandeered his career. Together they pointed him toward intellectual history and, not incidentally, deflected the old-school anti-Semitism that had stalled his applications for fellowships. He completed his PhD in 1942 by writing a dissertation on the reception of Herbert Spencer in the U.S., which became, in 1944, his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought.
Hofstadter published his way out of Maryland, as did his soon-to-be famous colleagues; by 1946, he was far into the writing of The American Political Tradition, thanks to a fellowship from Knopf, and had accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at Columbia, thanks to Commager and Harry Carman, another mentor from the early days as a graduate student. Felice had died of cancer in July, 1945; her husband kept writing, five pages a day, as a way of keeping this new reality at the distance required by the laconic, dispassionate historical analysis he was now perfecting.
The American Political Tradition (1948) is probably Hofstadter’s most accessible work because he was writing as a ventriloquist, speaking through the historians, among them Freidel and Stampp, who had spurred his rethinking of historiographical truisms, and trying to say something useful, as a public intellectual, about the political culture of the United States. It is a set of conjectures about modern politics, a collection of essays rather than a monograph; its attitude toward history borrowed heavily from the debunking imperative at work in Thurman Arnold’s caustic books on the anti-trust animus of the early New Deal. All politics was a matter of ritual, ceremony, and/or rhetoric—a studied evasion of reality which, at least in America, presupposed a “mute organic consistency” or a “common ground, a unity of cultural and political tradition,” in other words a consensus. Even Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and FDR were politicians par excellence, so there was no point in accrediting the differences they claimed to have made, or in worshipping at the shrine of the other “great men” who had made the American political tradition.
These are the questions that animate The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Hofstadter’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, and that inform the extraordinary intellectual ferment of the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, leading toward the New Left, the New Right, and the radical redefinition of liberalism in our own time. You would never know it by reading David S. Brown’s new “intellectual biography,” as he calls it. Here you will find instead a search for the “ethnocultural roots of Hofstadter’s work” which can be read either as an earnest parody of Progressive historiography—by this account, the historians who defended Populism and who remained suspicious of Eastern, “ethnic” interpretations were Protestants from the Midwest and the South, precisely those provincial character types who led the Populist revolt in the first place—or as the attempted capture of intellectual history by the essentialism of identity politics.
Like Williams, Hofstadter veered toward belabored, idiosyncratic statements of a post-Progressive political creed in the early 1960s, as the New Left took shape, mainly in the Midwest, and as the New Right took shape, mainly in the Southwest. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is, by all accounts, including Hofstadter’s own, his least satisfying book, even though it won a Pulitzer. Every paragraph except those derived from his reading of a specific text—he is especially good at deciphering the sermons of the Great Awakening—groans under the verbal weight of the need to explain what he is not doing; the book is 300 pages too long.
For my money, however, 1968 was Hofstadter’s finest hour, the moment he became the most important historian of his generation. That was the year he sat through Mark Naison’s PhD qualifying exam even as student radicals occupied Fayerweather Hall, and, then, having observed all the relevant academic rituals, was escorted out of the building by the candidate by way of a window. That was the year he gave the commencement address at the request of the faculty of Columbia, who feared more disruption if the president of the university appeared before the graduating class. That was the year of The Progressive Historians, when he reopened the archive by interfering yet again with our attitudes toward history, by persuading us that, even in the final analysis, the people out of the past from whom we first learn are other historians.
There are plenty of historians, political scientists, and journalists who can tell us why we will lose the current war, but very few who can tell us how—that is, how the humility induced by military defeat or stalemate might be consistent with the promise of American life. Hofstadter could have. Were he still among us, telling us where fundamental changes in our international posture might lead, we would know better than to equate the rise and fall of world power with military victories and losses. At any rate we would know that the cultural function of the modern historian was in question, but still intact.
*Author’s Note: In addition to the biographical information in David Brown’s book, I have drawn on (and sometimes disagreed with) acute essays by Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, Paula Fass, Eric Foner, Daniel J. Singal, and Sam Tanenhaus, all of whom except Tanenhaus were Hofstadter students at Columbia, ca. 1959-1976 (Fass and Singal completed their degrees in 1974 and 1976, respectively, after Hofstadter’s death in 1970). I am grateful to Professor Singal for correcting my mistakes and to Jonathan Arac, Bruce Robbins, Louis Ferleger, James Oakes, Nick Bromell, Patricia Rossi, and especially Eugene D. Genovese for attempting to change my mind and mend my prose.
(1) On Williams, see James Livingston, “Farewell to Intellectual Godfather of the New Left,” In These Times March 28-April 3, 1990, and “Social Theory and Historical Method in the Work of William Appleman Williams,” Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 275-82; the latter was part of a roundtable that began as a panel at the 2000 Meeting of the Organization of American Historians which included Justus Doenecke, Patricia Limerick, Leo Ribuffo, and Paul Buhle. See also Paul Buhle & Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York: Routledge, 1995). On Genovese, see James Livingston, “’Marxism’ and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 30-48, with comment following by James Oakes, Peter Kolchin, and Diane Sommerville. On Woodward, see the special issue of The Journal of Southern History 67 (2001), devoted to discussion of his Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951) on its 50th anniversary. Hofstadter quoted from his “History and the Social Sciences,” in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 359-70, here 368.
(4) Ibid., pp. 10-11. Daniel Bell’s worries on this score eventually culminated in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976). But as early as 1956, he reiterated Hofstadter’s concenrns about the moral problem of a world in which “not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine”: see Bell, Work and its Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1956), pp. 45-56. Long before this moment, and long before George Gilder and Michael Novak prescribed more family and fatherhood as the cure for what ails us, Joseph Schumpeter argued that “capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests. . . but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself. . . [e.g.] the loosening of the family tie—a typical feature of the culture of capitalism—removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessman of old.” Business Cycles, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 2: 699. The broader intellectual and political concerns about mass culture, “consumer culture,” etc., are analyzed in Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); on the current academic Left’s reading of consumer culture, see also James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001), chap. 1.
(5) On what Clark Kerr called the “Great Transformation of Higher Education,” see my treatment in The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, chap. 2.
(6) On Turner’s inflections of Achille Loria, the Italian Marxist, see Lee Benson, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 1-91.
(7) On Hofstadter’s continuous and explicit engagement with Adorno, Riesman, Mills, et al., see “History and the Social Sciences,” pp. 362-66, and his “History and Sociology in the United States,” in Seymour Martin Lipset & Richard Hofstadter, eds., Sociology and History: Methods (New York: Basic, 1968), pp. 3-19. With respect to the new genre of social psychology as “analytical history” written in the Frankfurt style of The Authoritarian Personality, see also Hans Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
(8) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 141. The language of “inner direction,” etc., is of course drawn from David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University press, 1950), who readily acknowledged the Frankfurt School’s influence in the development of his own character typology: see p. 176. C. Wright Mills pondered the possibilities of a post-modern subject(ivity) in “On Reason and Freedom,” The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 165-76.
(9) These and other pressing questions about the viability of popular politics and the utility of the concept of ideology are posed most pointedly in Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206-61; Clifford Geertz’s seminal essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” appears in the same anxious volume at pp. 47-76. In a similar vein—that is, in a similar spirit of strategic retreat from Marxian metanarratives—see also Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), and George Lichtheim, “The Concept of Ideology,” in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 3-46.
(10) See Brown, Hofstadter, pp. 4-7, 16-17, 31-34, 39, 53, 73-76, 100-03, 111-13, 133, 195-98.
(12) See Williams, The Great Evasion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), and The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), Part I; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 312.
(13) I treat the “pathos of authenticity” as the key constraint on fresh thinking about the future of subjectivity and politics as such in “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?,” an essay forthcoming in a centenary volume on William James’s Pragmatism edited by John Stuhr for Indiana University Press.; I borrow the phrase from Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See also my Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chaps. 1-2, 4, where I deploy Kenneth Burke’s distinction between tragic and comic “frames of acceptance” in the hope of detaching mainstream historians from their uniform fondness for narratives that combine energetically ironic form and inevitably pathetic content.
(14) Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), pp. 55-74, 24-28, 406-12. It is no accident that Hofstadter’s early admiration for the original pragmatists evaporates in this book; for it is the work most deeply informed by the tragic sensibilities of the Frankfurt School.
(15) The Progressive Historians (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 92.
(16) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. x; Progressive Historians, pp. 446-59.
(17) See America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage, 1973), chaps. 1-4.
the form and the content of the past matter only to those with political commitments in the present, and so to the future.
Almost right. I would take out the word "political": not all of our committments to the present and future can be constrained in that narrow realm. My committment to pragmatic intellectual honesty is not a political one, as I see it, though it has profound political implications.
I'm not sure I've ever seen, in an academic publication, such a long review which spent so little time engaging with the book under consideration.
There are plenty of historians, political scientists, and journalists who can tell us why we will lose the current war, but very few who can tell us how—that is, how the humility induced by military defeat or stalemate might be consistent with the promise of American life.
This is a fascinating and disturbing challenge in its own right. It would require articulating a vision in which irreducible complexity and unrepentent pragmatism were consistent with American optimism, ideologism and preference for simplicity.
Sure you have. NYRB or LRB always features reviews in which the reviewer is the featured player, in accordance with the idea that reception (consumption) is at least as important as conception (production).
I'd love to hear more about the pragmatist realism you're citing here.
And besides, Hofstadter is really important in the very long run, and Brown's book is not.
We need to get over the intellectual petrification that enfranchises a biography as narrowly conceived as this one. That reanimation will let us see that he speaks across almost every line of discipline and field, so that just Americanists--just us--aren't his only audience.
And may I say, in almost apology, that it took me many years to understand what the man was up to.
Jim, I have NO idea why it's showing your e-mail address up there. I've never seen that happen before. Do you want me to delete the comments and repost without the personal info?
Also, I have to say, in Ahistoricality's defense -- if you'd mentioned your opinion on Brown in the text, you wouldn't be open to the charge. I've only skimmed the piece so far, but it does seem to have almost nothing to do with Brown's book. Not that there's anything wrong with that, or that it makes your arguments any less valid, but if I were Brown I'd be a mite peeved.
"On the one hand, the mainstream of American thought, then as now, was nowhere near conservative; if anything, it was alarmingly radical, even after the anarchist debacle of 1886, because, then as now, it subsisted on brute inversions of every received tradition"
Hmmm. I spent a fair amount of time, back in the day, on studying the Populist movement, both primary sources and historiography. Certainly, they were a vigorous and at times, quite radical, movement that drew on deep agrarian roots and presented an alternative political economy to laissez-faire.
But radicalism per se was a cultural or political majority in this era ? I'm skeptical. If so, why were Left-wing intellectuals so alienated in America if radicalism represented a consensus view ?
I've seen NYRB and LRB reviews, sure; I don't consider them academic venues. boundary2 is published by Duke and gives the impression of being an academic publication. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it -- it was perfectly interesting -- but it doesn't really fill the same needs as an academic review. contra Jeremy, though, I spotted your takedown of Brown's thesis, tucked in the middle of your piece, and figured that you just decided against saying more. You left the impression that the book was pretty much worthless and your time was better spent elsewhere.
If, on the other hand, you're asking about "a vision in which irreducible complexity and unrepentent pragmatism were consistent with American optimism, ideologism and preference for simplicity," then I'm going to have to put you off. I honestly don't know how to reconcile these things, but it seems to me that the acceptance of complexity which resists simple change and the acceptance of pragmatism (instead of practicality; not the same thing) are the necessary attitudes for accepting this defeat (for I do believe the Bush mission in Iraq has been defeated) and I honestly have no way to reconcile those attitudes with those of the American public which twice voted for Bush in sufficient numbers to have him assume the presidency.
Well, pbbbbbt! That's because you actually READ the essay, while I criticized it WITHOUT reading it.
My apologies to Jim for the mis-skimming.
I actually think that the buried review is quite devastating. If I were Brown, I'd have rather it were left out entirely.
For Mark: yeah, radicalism is the sign of American intellectual life. We--that is, us lefties--now control the commanding heights of the higher education, where the repudiation of the past is business as usual, but back in the day, when nobody knew what the received tradition was (they were just making it up), everybody was, er, making it up, getting all radical, trying to escape the past.
Americans, esp. the intellectuals, have always been good at showing us how we can evade the past. Nothing new there. It all depends on how you define radicalism. For me, the Populists don't matter except as the trace of bourgeois individualism.
For ahistoricality: we have to talk about pragmatism. Soon. Shoot, I've written two books that go from there, the "there" in view, in question, being pragmatism.
You gotta get less cryptic in your references, and then I'll get all happy in my responses. And how come you're claiming exemption from American history and then cloaking yourself in this very serious version of pragmatism?
For Jeremy: Just thanks, man, if you're the cheese you don't have to be the line editor. Just thanks.
how come you're claiming exemption from American history and then cloaking yourself in this very serious version of pragmatism?