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.