Richard Hofstadter is probably one of the most widely read historians of the 20th century, but he is certainly one of the most quoted, especially by journalists and pundits. Whenever a writer laments “anti-intellectualism in American life,” or warns of a recrudescence of “the paranoid style in American politics,” he is invoking Hofstadter. It is not just the pithiness and flexibility of these phrases that makes them so popular with intellectuals, however; it is the way they express one of the intellectual’s deepest anxieties. This is the sense that the values he cherishes – cosmopolitan tolerance, the life of the mind – have never really been welcome in America. Under the surface of American life, Hofstadter taught, there is a crude reactionary populism, always threatening to lash out at anyone and anything that appears too sophisticated.

The way a historian sees the past always says a great deal about the way he sees the present, and even about the way he sees himself. And Hofstadter’s achievement, as the great historian of postwar liberalism, could hardly be a more perfect mirror of his age. As David Brown shows in his fascinating new study, “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography” (University of Chicago, 292 pages, $27.50), Hofstadter’s life and times prepared him to be the kind of historian he was. Indeed, the sometimes unsettling insight that drives Mr. Brown’s book is that each generation of historians reads their own experience into the American past, turning historiography into a kind of biography.

Hofstadter was born in 1916 and died, tragically early, in 1970. More than 35 years after his death, none of his teachers and very few of his peers are still alive to be interviewed for a biography. Mr. Brown diligently located those who are, interviewed Hofstadter’s children and students, and consulted the correspondence and journals of some of his friends – notably, the novelist Harvey Swados, whose sister was Hofstadter’s first wife, and the critic Alfred Kazin. But the source material for a rich personal portrait of the historian simply isn’t there. As a result, Mr. Brown’s book is genuinely an “intellectual biography,” a study of Hofstadter’s work and milieu more than his private life.

In Hofstadter’s case, this is not really a cause for regret, since the only adventure in his life was his writing. Otherwise, he led the sedentary, regulated existence of the scholar,and spent most of his adulthood in the orbit of Columbia University, as a graduate student and then, after an unhappy sojourn at the University of Maryland, as a professor of history. The one thing that separated him from other members of what was jokingly called the “Upper West Side kibbutz” – Jewish faculty and friends like Lionel Trilling and Daniel Bell – was that Hofstadter had not grown up in New York City. The son of a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother, he was raised in Buffalo and lacked the clear ethnic identification of most of the “New York Intellectuals.” At his funeral, Mr. Brown writes, his student Linda Kerber, now one of the leading historians of American women, was surprised to hear the Kaddish recited.

Hofstadter’s Jewishness, however, is central to Mr. Brown’s portrait – not in itself, for he was not at all religious, but in the way it shaped his urban-immigrant outlook on America and its history. Hofstadter’s first book,”Social Darwinism in American Thought,” published when he was 26, was a blistering attack on the late-19th-century WASP elites who had cloaked their status anxiety, and their commitment to pure laissez-faire economics, in a quasi-scientific racism. Hofstadter’s expose of the ideology of “Anglo-Saxonism” clearly belongs to the same generational impulse that shaped the work of Jewish writers like Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, and Saul Bel low – a rejection of genteel WASP prejudices, and an assertion of a new kind of American identity.

Mr. Brown argues that the same principle was at work in Hofstadter’s groundbreaking books of the 1940s, “The American Political Tradition”and “The Age of Reform.” Hofstadter’s vision of American history involved an Oedipal struggle with the older generation of historians, men like Charles Beard and V.L. Parrington, whose influence dominated the academy during his own student years. Mr. Brown is at his best when illuminating the historiographical debates that shaped Hofstadter’s career, showing how much historians’ views of the past depend on their own personal histories.

Beard and Parrington were arch-Progressives, taught by the social unrest of the 1880s and 1890s to detect the class tensions running through the nation’s history. For them, the heroes of recent American history were the rural Midwestern activists, Populists and Progressives, who advanced a Jeffersonian vision of democratic independence in an age of industrial and financial monopolies. Hofstadter, on the other hand, saw Progressivism itself as indebted to obsolete American myths about the virtue of small farmers, myths that continued to blind Americans to the need for a welfare state. Worse, they often shaded into anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic bigotry. For Hofstadter, populism itself was the great danger in American history, starting with the know-nothings and continuing all the way down to McCarthyism.

This interpretation, Mr. Brown shows, aroused a vigorous debate among historians – not just about its accuracy but about who was entitled to interpret the American past. Many colleagues felt threatened by Hofstadter’s exposure of the dark side of Progessivism. Historians “invested in the democratic spirit of Beard’s … scholarship,” Mr. Brown writes, “labeled Hofstadter a metropolitan outsider, unfamiliar with the Midwest and thus wary of the popular politics that energized the reform era.” Brown calls this “a fair assessment,” but offers plenty of evidence that the backlash against Hofstadter was often motivated by sheer nostalgic prejudice. In 1962, the president of the American Historical Association went so far as to give a speech denouncing historians “of lower-middle-class or foreign origins … [who] feel themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past.”

Hofstadter’s achievement,Mr.Brown shows, was to stake his generation’s claim to that American past in ways that reflected its own experience. But just as he helped to overturn the Progressive generation of historians, so Hofstadter’s own liberal generation was being swept aside, toward the end of his life, by twin challenges from the new left and the resurgent right. Mr. Brown is especially good on Hofstadter’s ambiguous role during the upheavals at Columbia in the late 1960s when, true to form, he prided himself on being a moderate consensus-builder. In 1968, with President Kirk persona non grata among the students, Hofstadter was chosen to deliver the commencement address in his stead – the first, and still the only, faculty member to do so.

Mr. Brown is clearly in sympathy with Hofstadter’s brand of liberalism, and it is not hard to see why. Writers like Hofstadter and Trilling did not just make up the most brilliant constellation of minds in Columbia’s history. More important, they advanced a vision of civilization that is complex, ironic, tolerant, and humane – values that are never in abundance at any time or place, and that still need defending.

But rather than lament their displacement by a more radical left and right, as Mr. Brown does, it is better to see intellectual developments after 1968 as a dialectical response to the shortcomings of elite liberalism. The culture wars of the 1960s, driven in part by the new left, advanced the causes of racial and sexual equality in ways that liberalism never accomplished. And the rise of conservative populism, starting in the 1968 election, was a necessary rebuke to a technocratic liberalism that was, and still is, often condescending and undemocratic. As Mr. Brown shows, Richard Hofstadter has receded into the American past he helped to illuminate; but he remains one of its most honorable figures.

akirsch@nysun.com