揺れ動くアメリカの市民像――リチャード・ホフスタッターとヘンリ・アダムズの歴史観をめぐって――

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  • Richard Hofstadter and Henry Adams: The Search for American Identity
  • ユレ ウゴク アメリカ ノ シミンゾウ : リチャード ・ ホフスタッター ト ヘンリ ・ アダムズ ノ レキシカン オ メグッテ

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<p>The national disrespect for intellectuals is one of the most conspicuous features in American life. We often describe it as anti-intellectualism, owing to the 1964 Pulitzer prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It was written by Richard Hofstadter. He was a leading liberal whose career paralleled the heyday of twentieth century liberalism. My essay examines Hofstadter’s historical interpretation within the changing context of American liberalism. I bring his liberal understanding of American history into relief by showing Hofstadter’s attitude toward the nineteenth century historian Henry Adams.</p><p>The contrast between Hofstadter and Adams seems very sharp. Hofstadter was christened in his mother’s Lutheran faith. But he was half-Jewish, and inevitably sensitive to an increasing ethnic diversity of American society. Adams was a prominent member of Boston’s Brahmin class. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. Adams was a famous pessimist who illuminated the degeneration of American civilization. Some scholars think that the pluralist course of the modern social development forced him to criticize emerging multiethnic America.</p><p>It is natural that Hofstadter disliked Adams. Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916, and raised to embody a secular and cosmopolitan atmosphere in New York. When he was a student of the graduate school of Columbia University, he attended meetings of the Young Communist League. He was a typical academic pink in the late 1930s and disappointed at strict dogmatic discipline of the Communist Party. He found out that the new beginning of America started with the Franklin D. Roosevelt government.</p><p>It seemed to him that Henry Adams was a defender for traditionalism, which prized Aryan Protestants over other ethnic groups. But Hofstadter’s feeling toward Adams softened since the late 1940s. Adams was a sincere intellectual who fought for a liberal cause of a different age. As a journalist, he wrote many articles exposing political corruption, and straggled for civil service reform in the 1860s and 1870s. He grew disappointed at horrible interest group politics, and published books which examined the dilemma of democratic society in which an egalitarian ideal inevitably tended to deny the leadership of virtuous patricians. His autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams revealed his unique pessimistic worldview.</p><p>Hofstadter was deeply interested in the democratic dilemma and pessimism presented by Adams. In his another Pulitzer prize winning book, The Age of Reform, Hofstadter severely criticized irrational elements of Populism and Progressivism, and described nineteenth century intellectuals’ agony by using The Education of Henry Adams. And again in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, he expressed his sympathy for Adams.</p><p>Hofstadter still felt the hatred of the racial discrimination of the WASP elites, but drew attention to a psychological peculiarity of American people, which might lead to an irrational oppressive regime. However pessimistic, Henry Adams believed in the popular sovereignty, for he trusted people’s political potential for self-improvement. Hofstadter could not share such a belief with Adams. This essay illuminates Hofstadter’s vacillated historical consciousness and deep doubts about American democracy.</p>

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