Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University and one of the great American historians and intellectuals. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Age of Reform and for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
Hofstadter's status theory helps us understand a political history that goes far beyond the issues of the fifties and sixties which it was invoked to explain. * The New Republic *