Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the Fosdick-Masten Park High School in Buffalo, New York, Class of 1933. This building is now City Honors School. Hofstadter then studied philosophy and history at the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually might have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.

Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: "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. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now." In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany. He remained anti-capitalist: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it".

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860—1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late nineteenth-century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless "dog-eat-dog" economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of Social Darwinism, as identified by William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagree with his interpretation.

In the 1940s, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that: "Beard was really the exciting influence on me", specifically the social-conflict model of U.S. history that emphasized the struggle among competing economic groups (primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and the workers) and discounted abstract political rhetoric that was rarely translated into action. Historians following that model must search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents. As such, Charles Beard perceived the American Civil War (1861—65) as a South-to-North transference of political power, progressing from slavery to industrial capitalism, because neither the Union nor the Confederacy was truly interested in resolving the cultural and constitutional contradictions of American slavery.

After 1945, Hofstadter philosophically broke with Charles Beard and moved to the right in his leadership of the "consensus historians". In 1946, he joined the Columbia University faculty; in 1959, he became the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History.

In 1948, he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, incisive interpretive studies of twelve major American political leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Besides critical success, the book sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive". Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still "owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background", it was ironic and paradoxical in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present. Each chapter title illustrated a paradox: Thomas Jefferson is "The Aristocrat as Democrat"; John C. Calhoun is the "Marx of the Master Class"; and Franklin Roosevelt is "The Patrician as Opportunist".

As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of socio-economic group conflicts. He thought that all historical periods could be understood as an implicit consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington had:

...put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed.... It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it, and yet that no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history. Of course, obviously, we have had one total failure of consensus, which led to the Civil War. One could use that as the extreme case in which consensus breaks down.

Later works

As an historian, Hofstadter’s ground-breaking work came in using social psychology concepts to explain political history. He explored subconscious motives such as social status anxiety, anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia...as they propel political discourse and action in politics.

The rural ethos

The Age of Reform (1955) analyzes the yeoman ideal in America’s sentimental attachment to agrarianism and the moral superiority of the farm over the city. Hofstadter...himself very much a big-city person...noted the agrarian ethos was "a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins, however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct values, hence their political behavior." In this matter, the stress is upon the importance of Jefferson's writings, and of his followers, in the development of agrarianism in the US, as establishing the agrarian myth, and its importance, in American life and politics...despite the rural and urban industrialization that rendered the myth moot.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe the provincialism in American society, warning it contains much anti-intellectual fear of the cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his contemporary time. His dissertation director Merle Curti noted about Hofstadter that: "His position is as biased, by his urban background . . . as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies".

Irrational fear

The Idea of a Party System (1969) describes the origins of the First Party System as reflecting fears that the other political party threatened to destroy the republic. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Charles Beard's historiography; the book "signalled a growing support for neoconservatism". In the event, Turner said that, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter no longer was a useful guide, because his ideas were too isolationist, and too often had "a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth".

Consequent to the radical politics of the 1960s, and especially because of the student occupation and temporary closing of Columbia University in 1968, Hofstadter became more conservative. His friend David Herbert Donald said: "He was appalled by the growing radical, even revolutionary, sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach". Moreover, he was "extremely critical of student tactics, believing that they were based on irrational romantic ideas, rather than sensible plans for achievable change, that they undermined the unique status of the university, as an institutional bastion of free thought, and that they were bound to provoke a political reaction from the right". Despite strongly disagreeing with their radical political methods, he invited his students to discuss goals and strategies with him. He even employed one, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on American Violence: A Documentary History (1970); about the book, Hofstadter student Eric Foner said that it "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements".

Richard Hofstadter planned to write a three-volume history of American society, but at his death from leukemia in 1970, he had only completed the first volume, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971).

The sharpest criticism of Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860—1915 focused on Hofstadter's weakness as a research scholar: he did little or no research into manuscripts, newspapers, archival, or unpublished sources. Instead, he primarily relied upon secondary sources augmented by his lively style and wide-ranging interdisciplinary readings, this producing very well-written arguments based upon scattered evidence he found by reading other historians.

Hofstadter showed scant interest in his students. In undergraduate classes he read aloud every day the draft of his next book. As a senior professor at a leading graduate university, Hofstadter directed more than one hundred finished doctoral dissertations, but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; that academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history. Some adopted New Left perspectives that he rejected, among them were Herbert Gutman, Eric Foner, Lawrence W. Levine, Linda Kerber, and Paula Fass, while others, such as Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins, were more conservative than he; hence, Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school of history writing.

Conservative commentator George Will called Richard Hofstadter "the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension", who "dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders ... a 'paranoid style' of politics rooted in 'status anxiety', etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension."

• "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (Oct., 1938), pp. 50—55 full text in JSTOR
• "William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinist," The New England Quarterly> Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1941), pp. 457—477 online at JSTOR
• "Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941), pp. 391—400 JSTOR
• "William Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy," Political Science Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 581—594 JSTOR
• "U. B. Phillips and The Plantation Legend," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1944), pp. 109—124 JSTOR
• Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); 1992 edition with preface by Eric Foner. ISBN 978-0807055038
• The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948). online edition
• "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea," American Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1950), pp. 195—213 JSTOR
• The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Knopf, 1955). online edition
• The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). (with Walter P. Metzger)

* Hofstadter's contribution was published separately as Academic Freedom in the Age of the College, Columbia University Press, 1955, 1961.

• The United States: the History of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1957), college textbook; several editions; coauthored with Daniel Aaron and William Miller
• Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).
• The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). edited excerpts.
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). ISBN 978-0226348179
• includes "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", Harper's Magazine (1964)
• The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).
• The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
• American Violence: A Documentary History. co-edited with Mike Wallace (1970) ISBN 978-0394414867
• America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971)

Richard HofstadterRichard HofstadterRichard Hofstadter?????????????Richard HofstadterRichard Hofstadter???·?????