progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
Hofstadter wrote several books, amongst them The Age of Reform and American
Political Tradition. His writings were not of the type which included any original
research but were more targeted at a broader non-academic audience. Though not a
general press type writer, he did achieve success in his wider audience of liberal
devotees.
In the article Jon Wiener, Wiener while reviewing the Brown biography of Hofstadter
states:
"The American Political Tradition, published in 1948 and widely regarded as
Hofstadter's best book, is still selling briskly almost sixty years later: Recently it had an
Amazon ranking of 4,400, which would be envied by most historians with books on the
market today. (Brown's, for example, was at 22,000 on the same day.) Knopf's 1948
publicity marketed the book as a work of consensus history: "In this age of political
extremism, this young and brilliant Columbia historian searches out the common ground
among all American parties and factions." In fact the book was more subtle, and much
more interesting, than that. Hofstadter wrote the book from a vantage point on the left.
While others, like Daniel Boorstin, celebrated consensus, Hofstadter was openly critical.
It opens with a description of an "increasingly passive and spectatorial" state of mind in
postwar America, a country dominated by "corporate monopoly," its citizens "bereft of a
coherent and plausible body of belief" and adrift in a "rudderless and demoralized state."
…"
This shows that Hofstadter is still held in high esteem by the left, since this was so well
received in The Nation.
But let us look at Hofstadter a bit more closely. Hofstadter makes the following
comments in 1963, the year Kennedy was killed in office 150 :
“In these pages I have been mainly concerned with the relationship between Protestant
evangelicism and American anti-intellectualism, simply because America has been a
Protestant country, molded by Protestant institutions. It would be a mistake, however, to
fail to note the distinctive ethos of American Catholicism, which has contributed in a
forceful and decisive way to our anti-intellectualism. Catholicism in this country over the
past two or three generations has waxed strong in numbers, in political power, and in
acceptance. At the middle the nineteenth century it was, though a minority faith, the
largest single church in the country and was steadily gaining ground despite anti-
Catholic sentiment. Today the Church claims almost a fourth of the population, and has
achieved an acceptance which would have seemed surprising even thirty years ago. One
might have expected Catholicism to add a distinctive leaven to the intellectual dialogue
in America, bringing as it did a different sense of the past and of the world, a different
awareness of the human condition and of the imperatives of institutions. ..
150 See Hofstadter, R., Anti- Intellectualism in America, Knopf (New York) 1963, pp. 136-141.
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