American historian, Columbia professor from 1946 to his death in 1970, and the most influential single interpreter of American political culture in the postwar decades; author of The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), both Pulitzer winners, and of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), an essay whose title phrase has re-entered general usage in the twenty-first century with a vengeance.
Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916 to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother, took his BA at the University of Buffalo, and did his doctorate at Columbia, where he was taught by Merle Curti and influenced at a distance by the Niebuhr tradition of Christian realism. His first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), traced the late-nineteenth-century American reception of Spencerian evolutionary competition and its uses in business apologetics. The American Political Tradition (1948), a set of biographical portraits from Jefferson to FDR, argued against the progressive-versus-conservative frame dominant in American historiography and for a "consensus" reading — that the leading figures of American politics had all worked within a narrow band of commitments to property, competition, and opportunity.
The Age of Reform (1955), his Pulitzer-winning study of Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal, is the book for which he was most criticized and most widely read. The argument — that Populism was partly a status-anxiety movement of declining rural Protestant America, shot through with anti-Semitic and nativist currents, and not simply the proto-socialist democratic revolt the Wisconsin-school historians had described — was taken as a libel on American agrarian radicalism by the New Left historians of the 1960s and has been argued over ever since. The underlying method — a social psychology of political movements — is the signature Hofstadter contribution.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) is the cultural companion: a book-length argument that a recurring strain in American life, running through evangelical revivalism, business practicality, and progressive education, has treated the life of the mind as suspect. The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), written for the Harper's after the Goldwater campaign, is the essay in which Hofstadter gave lasting vocabulary to the conspiratorial-apocalyptic register of American right-wing movements; its revival in the 2010s and 2020s as a reference for Trumpism has made it probably the most quoted American political essay of the second half of the twentieth century.
Hofstadter was a secular, Cold War liberal skeptical of mass movements of any kind — the quality that made the New Left suspicious of him is the quality that now reads as prescient. He died of leukemia in 1970, at 54; the unfinished America at 1750: A Social Portrait was posthumous.