Radical Southern Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s, and: Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State, and: Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism, and: Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (review)

Reviews 195 writes are viewed and the way one interested in understanding Afro-American culture goes about reaching that understanding. In Beloved the awesome dialectic of personal and racial history is clearly no plaything. Its evolution requires self-acceptance and community understanding, and the absence of either is a necessary and sufficient condition for slavery. In ThelweU's book we find the history of a specific era being explored and massaged for whatever light it might throw on our past, present, and future. This act, when seen through the modes of expression Thelwell chooses (fiction, political essays, Uterary criticism) makes his a welcomed necromancy. Stuckey has produced a definitional work by illustrating the influences of irreducible forms of AfroAmerican expression; additionaUy, the methodology he employs says so much more than the fine and readable assortment of facts that comprise the book. Of the three books, Beloved is the one that most compels this reader, for like the best that the daughters and sons of Africa have to offer, it is not so much a book, an artifact, as it is an experience. It is the force behind the words that leaves me breathless and soaring. NORMAN HARRIS Radical Southern Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s by Susan Stout Baker. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,1985. pp. 268. $35.00 (cloth). Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State by WilUam Buxton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. pp. 331. $14.95 (paper). Daniel Bell and the Decline ofIntellectual Radicalism by Howard Brick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. pp. 280. $30.00 (cloth). DanielBelland the Agony ofModern Liberalism by Nathan Liebowitz. Westport, Connecticut : Greenwood Press, 1985. pp. 293. $29.95 (cloth). One of the major concerns of the generation of academics who came of age between 1945 and 1955 was to redefine the meaning of the 1890s as a period of dramatic cultural change. Richard Hofstadter's doctoral dissertation, pubUshed in 1944 as SocialDarwinism in American Thought, provided an extended footnote to the definition of the 1890s found in Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise ofAmerican Civilization. Progressives Uke the Beards had beUeved that an industrial democracy began to appear in the 1890s which promised to replace the capitaUst aristocracy that had dominated the nation since 1789. As Progressives, the Beards' criticism of capitalism was based on their commitment to the tradition of republican virtue which distinguished between productive private property and parasitical capitaUst property . An undergratuate at the University of Buffalo in the early 1930s, son of a Jewish immigrant father and a German-American mother who was a Lutheran, Hofstadter became a Marxist. It was commonplace for young people Uke Hofstadter to see no sharp distinction between the Progressive and Marxist critique of capitalism. Hofstadter had footnoted the Beards' economic interpretation of the Civil War in his undergraduate thesis and used their method in his master's thesis. Now in his Columbia dissertation, he provided the details which gave substance to the Beards' claim that an anti-capitalist industrial democracy was emerging between 1890 and 1917. Susan Stout Baker's contribution is to provide detailed information on Hofstadter's participation in Marxist communities in Buffalo and New York, including membership in the Communist Party. But her analysis of his historical writing does not focus on the stark contrast between Social Darwinism in American Thought and his book of 1955, The Age of 196 the minnesota review Reform. With the letter's publication, Hofstadter became the leader of the "Consensus School" of historians who rejected the Progressive historians of the 1930s. Gene Wise's analysis of this change in American Historical Explanations (1973) ignored the dimension of poUtical values, and Baker, after demonstrating the relationship of Hofstadter's "radical" political values to his early writings, also avoids Unking his "conservative" values to the narratives of his later books. Baker, like Wise, seems to assume that Hofstadter's generation was converting from an aUentating ideology and accepting the given social reality. In 1944, Hofstadter argued that capitalism was an alienating ideology and democracy was the social reality. But in The Age of Reform, he reversed himself and argued that democracy was the alienating ideology and capitalism was the social reality. This...