An historian's tale: Richard Hofstadter and the rise and fall of American liberalism.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography - Brief article - Book review

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography By David S. Brown University of Chicago, $27.50

A biography of a historian seems fated, more often than not, to be a rather boring affair. Unless the historian has played a leading role in great events, it's hard to imagine what even the most diligent biographer can uncover. That his subject read a lot of books, took copious notes, visited libraries and archives, and sat behind a desk, or, these days, computer screen, for a good part of the day?

Somehow David S. Brown has surmounted these obstacles to produce a biography of Richard Hofstadter, the historian and author (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life), that is not only a revelation, but also a fascinating read. Brown, an associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College, has written an account worthy of Hofstadter himself: wry, humane, and illuminating. In Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Brown perceptively uses Hofstadter's life as a lens through which to view the rise and fall of liberalism. It becomes clear from this book that Hofstadter, was the first great historian of American conservatism, understanding like few on the left, the grievances that have always animated America's right wing. Indeed, his writings eerily presaged the ascendance of the far right in America well before George W. Bush came to power.

One of the most renowned historians of the past century, Hofstadter taught for much of his life at Columbia University where he twice won the Pulitzer Prize for his writings on American history and politics. Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1916, to a Polish-Jewish father and his German-Lutheran wife. His mother died when he was a little boy, a trauma that left a permanent mark on him; Hofstadter's son, Dan, later described him as a "cheerful melancholic." Hofstadter, as he would do later on when his first wife died, plunged into his work, becoming class president and valedictorian in high school. During his years at the University of Buffalo, Hofstadter dabbled in radical politics. His energetic and charismatic girlfriend and future wife, Felice Swados, was a staunch leftist. As a graduate student at Columbia during the Great Depression, he attended meetings of the Young Communist League with her: "While Felice's commitment to party discipline led her to the edge of intellectual surrender," writes Brown, "Hofstadter's radicalism was of a more cerebral, critical, and pessimistic kind." Still, Hofstadter joined the Columbia graduate unit of the CP for a few months, abandoning it in February 1939 out of repugnance for the Moscow show trials. Hofstadter's first tussles against anti-intellectualism, Brown observes, were against the left. Indeed...