Popular quotes: The meaning an history behind "If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas..."
"If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no
independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some
special and constricting idea."
— Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was born in Buffalo, New York to a Jewish father
and a German Lutheran mother, who died when he was 10-years old. He
majored in philosophy and minored in history at the University of Buffalo.
The town of Buffalo was suffering from the full impact of the Great Depression
at the time which strongly colored his thinking on political and intellectual
matters - he became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Young
Communist League, which is where he met his future wife, Felice Swados.
After graduation he enrolled in the history program at Columbia University and,
along with many other disaffected intellectuals at that time) joined the
Communist Party. At the time he went on record saying, 'I join without
enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... My fundamental reason for joining
is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of
talking... The party is making a very profound contribution to the
radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.'
However, by 1939 (about a year after joining) he had become disenchanted with
the Communist Party, and after the Nazi-Soviet pact in September 1939 he became
permanently disillusioned with it, the Soviet Union and Marxism.
However, he remained deeply cynical of capitalism.
In 1942 he completed his dissertation (published in 1944 as Social Darwinism
in American Thought, 1860-1915); two years later he joined the faculty of
Columbia and in 1959 he was named DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History.
He became one of the leading historians of his generations - at the time,
progressive historians were inclined to explain American history through the
prism of economics; but Hofstadter described it as essentially irrationally
motivated - emphasizing unconscious motives such as status anxieties, irrational
hatreds, and paranoia. In some of his works, such as The Paranoid Style in
American Politics and Anti-intellectualism in America, he described American
society as a whole as extremely provincial, harboring widespread fears of any
ideas outside the mainstream, and described a direct lineage between the Salem
witch hunts (17th century) and the McCarthy era (early 1950s).
He planned to write a three-volume history of American politics but died at age
54 from leukemia having partially completed the first volume, which was
published posthumously as America in 1750.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
Full Story
Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was born in Buffalo, New York to a Jewish father
and a German Lutheran mother, who died when he was 10-years old. He
majored in philosophy and minored in history at the University of Buffalo.
The town of Buffalo was suffering from the full impact of the Great Depression
at the time which strongly colored his thinking on political and intellectual
matters - he became involved in left-wing politics and joined the Young
Communist League, which is where he met his future wife, Felice Swados.
