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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (188741)	12/6/2006 12:33:30 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793999

The guy we were talking about had this man for "guidance" -NO WONDER so many of the New Yorkies are Communists or Socialists.... Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 - October 24, 1970) was an American historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. One of the leading public intellectuals of the 1950s, his works include The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)`, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, as well as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1944), The American Political Tradition (1948), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). [edit] Biography Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York in 1916 to a Jewish father and a German American Lutheran mother, who died when he was ten. He attended high school in Buffalo's City Honors School and enrolled at the University at Buffalo in 1933, majoring in philosophy and minoring in history. He worked with the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. At the university, Hofstadter became involved in left-wing politics, joining the Young Communist League and meeting a radical student named Felice Swados, whom he would marry in 1936. [edit] Marxist Stage After graduation, Hofstadter entered the graduate program in History at Columbia University. In New York, Hofstadter became more involved in Marxist circles, joining the Communist Party in 1938, though, in his words at the time, "I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now." By 1939, however, he had become disenchanted with the party and his participation began a steady decline; by the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact in September, he was thoroughly and permanently disillusioned with the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and Marxism itself. He did not, however, change his views on capitalism: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it."[1] Hofstadter was left with a deep sense of cynicism that pervaded his academic work and thought. In 1945, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University after completing his dissertation, which had already been published in 1944 as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 and sold 200,000 copies. It was a Marxist critique of American capitalists of the late 19th century who, he argued, believed in a dog-eat-dog sort of ferocious competition endorsed by Social Darwinism as preached by William Graham Sumner. Later critics took issue with his evidence, arguing that very few businessmen were Social Darwinists and that many took positions in favor of philanthropy.[2]