Richard Hofstadter - Political Views

Political Views

Hofstadter, influenced by his wife, was a member of the Young Communist League at university, and in April 1938 he joined the Communist Party of the USA; he quit in 1939. Hofstadter had been reluctant to join, knowing the orthodoxy it imposed on intellectuals, and disillusioned by the spectacle of the Moscow Show Trials, but wrote: "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." He remained anti-capitalist, writing: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it", but was similarly disillusioned with socialism, finding the Soviet Union "essentially undemocratic" and the Communist Party rigid and doctrinaire. In the 1940s Hofstadter abandoned political causes, feeling that intellectuals were no more likely to "find a comfortable home" under socialism than they were under capitalism.

Biographer Susan Baker writes that Hofstadter, "was profoundly influenced by the political Left of the 1930's....The philosophical impact of Marxism was so intense and direct during Hofstadter's formative years that it formed a major part of his identity crisis.... The impact of these years created his orientation to the American past, accompanied as it was by marriage, establishment of life-style, and choice of profession."

Geary (2007) concludes that, "To Hofstadter, radicalism always offered more of a critical intellectual stance than a commitment to political activism. Although Hofstadter quickly became disillusioned with the Communist Party, he retained an independent left-wing standpoint well into the 1940s. Both his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), and The American Political Tradition (1948) were written from a radical point of view."

In the 1940s, Hofstadter cited Charles A. Beard as "the exciting influence on me". Hofstadter specifically responded to Beard's social-conflict model of U.S. history, which emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups (primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and workers) and discounted abstract political rhetoric which rarely translated into action. Beard encouraged historians to search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents.