Hofstadter on Beard:
“When he wrote about the economic interests and activities of the Founding Fathers, especially those activities related to politics in a way not always above question from the highest standards of disinterested morality, he wrote fully and with illumination. When he dealt with their ideas about democracy, he was relatively casual; his mind did not become fully engaged with his object, and he was content with a spare and rather literal-minded compound of scattered quotations from the debates in the Constitutional Convention. The muckraking model of thought had brought with it a certain limiting and narrowing definition of reality and a flattening of the imagination.”[i]
[i] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan
No comments:
Post a Comment