History with a Smirk

If you enjoy history, then you might be interested in this article in Books & Culture, January/February 2007, pages 25-27, entitled “History with a Smirk,” by Allen C. Guelzo, a review of David S. Brown’s biography Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Hofstadter was a prominent leftist historian who bucked the current trend towards intensively researched histories. He tended to write more in an essay style, commenting on ideas and ideologies, shunning the minute details of the daily lives of the historical period in question.

Hofstadter was sympathetic towards Communism and leftist ideology throughout his life, and ridiculed and sought to undercut democratic and conservative values and ideals. He was so arrogant he refused to believe that anyone on the Right could be an intellectual. He despised the middle class American values and thought the majority of Americans were mindless boobs, clueless and deceived.

Here are a few paragraphs from the article that I found most interesting:

Brown tends to see the resurgence of the Right as an intellectual movement largely through Hofstadter's eyes, as alarming in volume but philosophically insignificant by unit. This underestimation of the hitting power of Right intellectuals has been one of the chronic failures of the American Left; and as Hofstadter's own attitude demonstrates, there is no real cure for this failure, since the logic of Left politics actually requires that intellectuals on the Right be defined, ipso facto, as an impossibility. Brown remarks pretty sharply that whether it was "out of fear, anger or fantasy, the Far Right inspired Hofstadter to write some of the most original studies of American political culture ever produced." But "the Left never provoked such a productive reaction." Hofstadter preferred "to instruct radicals, not—as he had conservatives—to diagnose their mental tics."

So, despite the fact that Hofstadter lived his entire life "in an era dominated by liberal politics," he insisted on describing himself as "politically alienated." And from what, exactly? Born to the modest privileges of the urban upper-middle-class, he treated peace, plenty, and truth as the normal setting of human life, and intolerance, hypocrisy, and inequality as intolerable aberrations, when the norm of human history has been exactly the other way around. While making a university subsidized apartment on the upper East Side his home and a place on Cape Cod his summer retreat, and bathing in book contracts worth $1.3 million dollars at the time of death, Hofstadter nonetheless had never a good word to say about the nation, the politics, or the economic system which guaranteed his entitlements to these things. And despite the Andes of corpses which "a more severe brand of Marxism" piled up around the world in the 20th century, it was not the abominations of Stalin but the infelicities of Abraham Lincoln's prose which summoned forth his most vivid malediction. The vital power of Richard Hofstadter's oeuvre lay in the grace and color of his writing. But it was an almost entirely negative power, in the service of a freedom he wanted for himself, but not necessarily for anyone else.

You can read this article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/001/14.25.html