Hofstadter

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of Maryland but soon returned to Columbia, where he taught for the balance of his career.
There he wrote not only The American Political Tradition but several other provocative and enduring works. Of these perhaps the most notable was his 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Reform, which introduced his idea of "status politics" -- the notion that people act less from pure economic self-interest than from a desire to preserve their social standing -- and controversially portrayed the late-nineteenth-century Populists as moved by fears of modernity, nostalgia for an agrarian past, and no small amount of bigotry. Revisionists have since poked fatal holes in this portrait (for example, overstated the Populists' nativism and gave short shrift to their legitimate and well-developed critique of Gilded Age capitalism), yet the book still serves for historians of populism (and progressivism) as the point of departure for their work. Among his other influential books were ...

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famous in American annals chiefly for their obscurity."

Hofstadter's lapidary style is important for more than just the pleasure it affords. It also reflects his conviction that, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, "history is a part of literature and therefore should be as much a conscious art as fiction or poetry." Though Hofstadter made use of psychological and sociological research and concepts, he never kidded himself that history was a science, or that one could "prove" a historical point. He preferred the beauty of insight to the brawn of proof. Long after proofs have been disproved, he knew, insights remain fresh.

Though The American Political Tradition abstains from the ...

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