This Week You Need To Know

History as Drama:
The Transit of a 'Cold War' Liberal
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S. Brown; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; 320 pages, hardcover, $27.50. As reviewed by the New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhous, "The Education of Richard Hofstadter," Sunday, Aug. 6, 2006.

August 8, 2006

If the presently imperilled U.S.A. is to be saved from that virtual state of bankruptcy, and worse, which it has permitted itself to enter today, the relevant lesson from the history of ancient Athens must be applied to not only our own citizenry, but that of western and central Europe. The recently revived attention to the case of ex-Communist and "Cold War Liberal" Richard Hofstadter, is a relevant case in point. Thirty-five years after his death, the effects of the influence of this "Cold War Liberal" and other ideologues of his type, are erupting like an old volcano on our world of today.

A philosophical Liberal, such as Hofstadter became, is one of a species of follower of Venice's New Party founder Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623): a figure like the Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was the student and follower of Sarpi's lackey Galileo (1564-1642), and who belonged to a category of ideologue which never breeds exactly true to its type. It is for reason of his slippery lack of a well-formed moral character, that such a brutish figure as Hobbes is rightly classed as a Liberal. It is ironical, that in the self-doomed ancient Athens whose Democratic Party perpetrated the judicial murder of Socrates, these types were known as the Sophists, the ancient name for our Liberals of today....

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