Making history.

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S. Brown (Chicago, 320 pp., $27.50)

FROM the publication in 1944 of his doctoral dissertation as the classic Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, to his death from leukemia at age 54 in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Even today, his landmark work, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, sells 10,000 copies a year (though one suspects much of that number is owing to high-school and college course requirements, the way in which, almost a half century ago, I was indoctrinated in it). His extraordinary intellectual influence, both in his own time and today, calls for a biography as meticulous and analytical as this volume by David S. Brown.

Which is not to say that this is a candidate for most conservatives' libraries. Hofstadter was always a man of the Left, from his early four-month sojourn with the Communist party in the 1930s through the various permutations of his liberalism. Indeed, Goldwater's candidacy in 1964 was enough to convince him that America was "visibly sick," and he later provoked outrage by joking that conservatives should be put into mental hospitals. It may be only natural that his biographer would share the same general inclination. But what are we to make of some of Brown's phrases--"the authoritarian roots of WASP behavior," "age of American and Soviet expansion"? Observe, also, the linkage in "the Moscow trials, the Holocaust, or McCarthyism."

The shadow of Joe McCarthy hangs heavily over this volume, as it apparently did over the mind of Hofstadter himself. And why would anyone, in mentioning atheistic Communism, put the modifying adjective in quotation marks, as if to suggest there was some doubt about the matter? But let Brown speak for himself: "Perhaps there is something at the core of American conservatism that is erratic, emotional, and receptive to the moral absolutism and prosperity theology celebrated by Pentecostals and free marketers." Apart from the rest of that remarkable sentence, the misuse of the label "Pentecostal" is of a piece with Brown's misuse of "antinomian Christianity" and "evangelical" and, for that matter, Hofstadter's misuse of "fundamentalism."

As was the case with Hofstadter, Brown's range of vision is narrowed by slogans masquerading as political science: The Far Right and Radical Right seem to have encompassed anyone less liberal than Nelson Rockefeller, who, by the way, was Hofstadter's idea of a responsible Republican. Because Hofstadter, in the 1960s, penned an article on "The New American Right," Brown freely applies the term "New Right" to conservatives way back then. Was there no one in his college's poli-sci department who could tell him that, for the last three decades, that label has had a very specific contemporary meaning, and not just among conservatives: a meaning that has nothing to do with the people or the era in which Hofstadter lived?

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To Brown's credit, he is informative about his subject's quirks and shortcomings. We learn of Hofstadter's youthful wish to join Mississippi sharecroppers at their labor; Brown skewers this desire as "sharecropping as an introduction to the science of socialism." Brown recounts Hofstadter's negative view of his Italian-American students and his contempt for America's denominational colleges. As an instructor, he was no Mr. Chips; he once terminated a course prematurely because his teaching had consisted of merely reading his current manuscript--and he had finished it. "I'm not a teacher," he once said, "I'm a writer."

Brown is also admirably candid in discussing Hofstadter's aversion to doing the work most historians think is their central duty: the investigation and analysis of primary sources. Hofstadter referred to them as "archive rats." That attitude not only brought him academic criticism; it distorted his own writing. Here's one example from my personal experience. In his antipopulist, anti-conservative manifesto, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, his first subjects are the hyperventilating anti-Masons of upstate New York in the 1830s. If Hofstadter had bothered to immerse himself in the popular literature of that era, or if he had ever rummaged in the Library of Congress's collection of handbills, broadsides, and political tracts of the time, he would have had to conclude that either everyone in the country exemplified the same paranoid style, or that no one did. But Hofstadter rarely visited the nation's central library during the three years he taught at the nearby University of Maryland.

More than anyone else, Hofstadter exemplified and legitimated the melding of history with the social sciences, especially psychology, and he used the new hybrid as a weapon. William F. Buckley Jr. memorably observed that Hofstadter analyzed liberalism but diagnosed conservatism. Again to his credit, Brown refers to the "thinly concealed elitism" of 1950s social science. One of Hofstadter's admiring students noted that the professor "could not conceal his disdain for the hopelessly muddled thinking of ordinary Americans." Hofstadter's corrective response to the public's shortcomings was to explain the past as a way of influencing public policy.

Like almost all his peers among postwar historians, he really believed that their Left-Liberalism was to be, now and forever, the "center" of a great American consensus. Hence his, and their, stunned reaction when both the New Left and the resurgent Right of the 1960s rejected the establishment academicians' self-satisfied consensus. By the end of his life, he anticipated with foreboding a "radical right" reaction that would bring all sorts of horrors upon this country. He did not live to see the Reagan Reign of Terror.

Brown's book is marred by typos, but at least he writes in a language alien to much of today's professoriate--intelligent English, with occasional memorable phrases, as when he describes Hofstadter's flawed and magisterial The Age of Reform as "history without the safety net of economic causation." Unlike his subject, Brown is an "archive rat," and he is a master of detail. More important, he can observe, with fairness, that "liberals, when faced with a stiff political challenge, manifested the symptoms of their own paranoid style." One can therefore hope that his future research will give him what escaped Richard Hofstadter: an accurate understanding of the conservative movement in the second half of the 20th century.

Mr. Gribbin was a senior White House staffer in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. He is the author of The Churches Militant: The War of 1812 and American Religion.