HOFSTADTER, Richard

Historian with special interest in identifying factors involved in shaping political behaviour and by implication human behaviour more generally. The relevance for moral education is in its exposure of the complex and often unconscious motives that operate in public and professional lives, and which therefore deserved to be brought to personal awareness much sooner. The relative position of economic self-interest as compared with social reputation is already a live issue in family and school.

Life

• Brief Britannica biography of Hofstadter

• Very brief biography of Hofstadter from Columbia University pages

Works

• The Paranoid Style in American Politics

• Anti-Intellectualism in American Life