Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was an influential American historian and Columbia University professor who became the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." His intellectually engaging scholarship continues illuminating contemporary history.
He won two Pulitzer Prizes: for The Age of Reform (1956) and Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1964).
Born in Buffalo to a German Lutheran mother and Polish Jewish father, Hofstadter briefly joined the Communist Party in 1938 but left after the Soviet-Nazi alliance, though remained anti-capitalist.
His 1944 dissertation, Social Darwinism in American Thought, sold 200,000 copies and critiqued late 19th-century capitalism's "dog-eat-dog" competition.
