Richard Hofstadter's distinctive contribution to twentieth-century American historical literature continues to sustain his powerful historiographical presence, though his renown has diminished since his death in 1970. David S. Brown's study of the Columbia historian's entire life and thought is the first such biography, and locates Hofstadter's trajectory during “the heyday of twentieth-century liberalism (1933–68)” (xiii).

Brown's portrait is of an urbane liberal, born in Buffalo but all his adult life a New Yorker, who engaged in a creative and sophisticated critique of the progressive history dominant during the interwar decades. Hofstadter appears as a modernist by inclination, one among an extended family of “anti-Progressives” who “celebrated urban culture; blamed McCarthy's popularity on mass democracy; traced their intellectual lineage to central and eastern Europe, modernity, and Sigmund Freud” (103). The secular, half-Jewish son of a Polish immigrant, briefly involved in Marxist activism in the 1930s, Hofstadter might seem typical of other “New York Intellectuals” who crossed from radical left to liberal centre, and further to the right, after the war. Yet Hofstadter is an awkward representative of collective trends; above all, he “prized intellectual independence” (50). Pinning any fixed political identity on Hofstadter tends to misrepresent his thought. Consequently Brown's detection of “a neoconservative sensibility that would have been described in the fifties as simply ‘liberalism’” seems anachronistic and inadequate (88).

To Hofstadter's landmark publications, such as his 1955 classic The Age of Reform, Brown gives due attention, deftly dispensing with Hofstadter's misleading reputation as a “consensus historian,” and emphasizing the importance of Hofstadter's use of social-scientific concepts and commitment to academic freedom. Deeper insights lie in his exploration of Hofstadter's less-read work, and personal correspondence – though Brown is unavoidably hampered by his inability to quote Hofstadter's papers directly. Here Hofstadter's deep and playful sense of irony, functioning in tandem with a melancholic disposition, comes to light; expressed in fine prose, this outlook gave him the air of, as Paula Fass puts it, “a tragic philosopher” (quoted on 250). Articulating this mentality, and making it historically and politically relevant, is Hofstadter's lasting contribution, while his historical interpretations have been revised on many fronts. As an intellectual history Richard Hofstadter prompts further questions about the internal variations and dynamics of postwar liberalism. As a biography it is an effective treatment of an important figure, revealing its subject as a deeply appealing, yet ultimately distant, personality, wrought by his own acute sensitivity to the anxieties of his own times, as well as to those of the past.