Talcott Parsons
American sociologist
Richard Hofstadter
American historian and public intellectual (1916-1970)
Richard Hofstadterwas an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.
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About the Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadterwas an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of “consensus history”, and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus.” Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the “consensus” within the society as “bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship”, criticizing the “hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history”.
His most widely read works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963); and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
3 Quotes by Richard Hofstadter
- 1.
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
Richard HofstadterAmerican historian and public intellectual (1916-1970)
- 2.
A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
Richard HofstadterAmerican historian and public intellectual (1916-1970)
- 3.
The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.
Richard HofstadterAmerican historian and public intellectual (1916-1970)