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Article: Making history.(Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography)(Book review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- December 4, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S. Brown (Chicago, 320 pp., $27.50)
FROM the publication in 1944 of his doctoral dissertation as the classic Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, to his death from leukemia at age 54 in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Even today, his landmark work, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, sells 10,000 copies a year (though one suspects much of that number is owing to high-school and college course requirements, the way in which, almost a half century ago, I was indoctrinated in it). His extraordinary intellectual influence, both in his ...