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Note from the Editor
Robert Johnston will confirm that when he first proposed that the journal commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, my initial reaction was to hem and haw. By comparison to Hofstadter's other writings, I had always—and mistakenly, as Johnston and Gillis Harp stress—regarded The Age of Reform as having passed into the Hades of mere historiography. When I first encountered progressivism in a systematic way in the early 1980s, the organizational synthesis was at the height of its influence and the new institutionalism was picking up steam. Both of these approaches, with their stress on the modernization of state institutions, public administration, and policy formation, made Hofstadter's concern with the political psychology and sociology of populism and progressivism seem irrelevant or wrong. In those days, for me at least, the living Hofstadter was the darkly impious sophisticate of The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (which in the late 1970s and early 1980s I read several times with glee), as well as the thoughtful historiographer of The Progressive Historians.
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