Hoftsteder
WORKS of philosophy can last for millennia, novels for centuries. Works of history, if they're really good, survive maybe a generation. But Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It is now celebrating its fiftieth year in print and remains a solid backlist seller. High school students, undergraduates, and graduate students read it, as do lay readers. Journalists grab it off the shelf when they need to pepper a column with a dash of historical authority. Academic historians revere it too: whenever they set out to write about it, they end up producing panegyrics. Like a robust octogenarian, the vigorous old book invites us to inquire of it the secrets of its longevity. Discuss this article in Post & Riposte. Begun in 1943, when Hofstadter was just twenty-seven years old, and completed four years later, The American Political Tradition launched the young scholar on his career as the pre-eminent historian of his time. He had already written one book, Social Darwinism in American Thought; it had been his graduate thesis, under Merle Curti, at Columbia University, and it remains one of the most important books on the subject. After graduating, Hofstadter taught briefly at the University of Mary
land but soon returned to Columbia, where he taught for the balance of his career. Hofstadter, though, was never comfortable with Higham's label. He claimed he didn't even have a central theme or argument in mind when he wrote the book. Even the six-page introduction, he later said, was coughed up only at the insistence of his editor. In a stroke he downgraded the much-scrutinized "thesis" of his book to the status of an afterthought.
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Approximate Word count = 2836
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)
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