Hofstadter is seated behind the table, on the right. Image of a press conference, from a three-page report in the Columbia Newsletter, which accompanied a statement on academic freedom in the university signed by 100 faculty, March 24, 1969. Potter articulated the broader political significance of this point in the context a moment in which respectful disagreement had become rare: 'How does a society handle the kind of controversy which is necessary to all reform and social change,' he wrote, 'without experiencing a measure of disruption that injures or even destroys the society itself? How can we have consensus without repression or controversy without disruption?'. Perhaps he was modeling, for a younger generation, how to criticize the ideas of writers whose heyday has long passed without treating them as entirely disposable.

Potter mentions that Hofstadter treats his forebears with a 'largeness of mind and.emotional sympathy for points of view which he reluctantly regards as rationally fallacious'. We might therefore speculate that he wrote the book, somewhat poignantly, out of concern for his legacy. In a review of The Progressive Historians, David M.

Hofstadter's reflections on the long-surpassed work of the progressive historians came just as a new wave of revisionists, many of them identified with the New Left, were challenging the interpretations of Hofstadter and his generation of scholars. So why did Hofstadter choose to write a book about them at that moment? Unlike other 'consensus historians,' such as Daniel Boorstin, Hofstadter had never celebrated consensus in American politics, and by the late 1960s he had begun to qualify his earlier interpretative bias. In the contentious air of that decade, historians were once again far more likely to emphasize conflict, but Beard, Turner, and Parrington remained hopelessly out of favor.

Above all else, he had taken issue with their tendency to view American history through the lens of economic and social conflict, and responded by emphasizing consensus to such an extent that he had once been identified as part of a 'cult of consensus'. Always lurking in the background of his writings, that argument at long last rose to the surface and became a topic in its own right in 1968, with the publication of The Progressive Historians.įor decades, Hofstadter had poked holes in these writers' simplistic explanations of historical change and their rationalistic models of political behavior. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon L. Advertisement for Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians, 1968.Īs we have seen, Richard Hofstadter had long been engaged in an ongoing argument with the generation of scholars preceding him, especially the historians Charles A.

America at 1750 by Richard Hofstadter