About Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual. 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, since he 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 first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), and The American Political Tradition (1948) had a radical point of view." In the 1940s, Hofstadter cited Beard as "the exciting influence on me". From 1942 to 1946, Hofstadter taught history at the University of Maryland, where he became a close friend of the popular sociologist C. Although Hofstadter quickly became disillusioned with the Communist Party, he retained an independent left-wing standpoint well into the 1940s.
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