Making history.(Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography)(Book review)

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S. Brown (Chicago, 320 pp., $27.50)

FROM the publication in 1944 of his doctoral dissertation as the classic Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, to his death from leukemia at age 54 in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Even today, his landmark work, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, sells 10,000 copies a year (though one suspects much of that number is owing to high-school and college course requirements, the way in which, almost a half century ago, I was indoctrinated in it). His extraordinary intellectual influence, both in his own time and today, calls for a biography as meticulous and analytical as this volume by David S. Brown.

Which is not to say that this is a candidate for most conservatives' libraries. Hofstadter was always a man of the Left, from his early four-month sojourn with the Communist party in the 1930s through the various permutations of his liberalism. Indeed, Goldwater's candidacy in 1964 was enough to convince him that America was "visibly sick," and he later provoked outrage by joking that conservatives should be put into mental hospitals. It may be only natural that his biographer would share the same general inclination. But what are we to make of some of Brown's phrases--"the authoritarian roots of WASP behavior," "age of American and Soviet expansion"? Observe, also, the linkage in "the Moscow trials, the Holocaust, or McCarthyism."

The shadow of Joe McCarthy hangs heavily over this volume, as it apparently did over the mind of Hofstadter himself. And why would anyone, in mentioning atheistic Communism, put the modifying adjective in quotation marks, as if to suggest there was some doubt about the matter? But let Brown speak for himself: "Perhaps there is something at the core of American conservatism that is erratic, emotional, and receptive to the moral absolutism and prosperity theology celebrated by Pentecostals and free marketers." Apart from the rest of that remarkable sentence, the misuse of the label "Pentecostal" is of a piece with Brown's misuse of "antinomian Christianity" and "evangelical" and, for that matter, Hofstadter's misuse of "fundamentalism."

As was the case with Hofstadter, Brown's range of vision is narrowed by slogans masquerading as political science: The Far Right and Radical Right seem to have encompassed anyone less liberal than Nelson Rockefeller, who, by the way, was Hofstadter's idea of a responsible Republican. Because Hofstadter, in the 1960s, penned an article on "The New American Right," Brown freely applies the term "New Right" to conservatives way back then. Was there no one in his college's poli-sci department who could tell him that, for the last three decades, that label has had a very specific contemporary meaning, and not just among conservatives: a meaning that has nothing to do with the people or the era in which Hofstadter lived?

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To Brown's credit, he is informative about his subject's quirks and shortcomings. We learn of Hofstadter's youthful wish to join Mississippi sharecroppers at their labor; Brown skewers this desire as "sharecropping as an introduction to the science of socialism." Brown recounts Hofstadter's negative view of his Italian-American students and his ...