Doug, with all these citations, when are you going to look at Hofstadter's 1968 commencement address in Columbia Forum, which I've now cited two or three times? It's about how the student protests constituted a dangerous swinging of the pendulum away from the center. I don't recall whether this was in May or June of '68, but the blood was still fresh at Columbia from April.
By the way, an updated parallel would be to look at those faculty who disapprove of TA unions, GESO at Yale, and the union at NYU -- where some liberal faculty countered with calls for a company union. These positions in the real world, on their own turf, shed quite a lot of light on their works of scholarship. Consider Alan Brinkley at Columbia (google Lemisch + Brinkley; for NYU google Lemisch + Sexton)
Jesse Lemisch
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 7:27 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] 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.
>
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