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Society
Published in: Society 2/2018

20-02-2018 | Symposium: Richard Hofstadter and The American Political Tradition

The Tradition Industry: Hofstadter and Santayana on Politics, Culture and Capitalism

Author: David Brown

Published in: Society | Issue 2/2018

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Abstract

Richard Hofstadter’s provocative interpretation of what he called The American Political Tradition has long interested students and scholars. Often read as a response to the crisis times of the depression 1930s and interventionist 1940s, the book’s origins are actually rooted in deeper cultural changes in the United States. This paper argues that George Santayana’s earlier essay, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), anticipated several key aspects of Hofstadter’s argument and proved to more accurately foresee the ideological course of twentieth century American politics.
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Footnotes
1
George Santayana Persons and Places: The Background of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 58–9.
 
2
Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 15.
 
3
Daniel Cory, ed., The Letters of George Santayana (New York: Scribner’s, 1955), 226.
 
4
George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States, ed., James Seaton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 3.
 
5
Ibid., 5. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 234.
 
6
Santayana, Genteel Tradition, 13.
 
7
Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 326.
 
8
Ibid., 90.
 
9
Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 17, 20.
 
Metadata
Title
The Tradition Industry: Hofstadter and Santayana on Politics, Culture and Capitalism
Author
David Brown
Publication date
20-02-2018
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Society / Issue 2/2018
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-018-0239-9

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