THROUGH the historian's craft, Richard Hofstadter gave us a clearer understanding of our American political and intellectual heritage. He possessed a rare talent for illuminating the past as a means of interpreting his own times. To the field of history he brought methods and theories from sociology, psychology and related fields; in turn he furnished historical perspective to the behavioral sciences. Hofstadter was both a student of intellectual history and an historian for the intellectuals.

Much of Hofstadter's innovation has become so widely accepted and hence commonplace that it is easy to forget his contribution. It was he who in the American Political Tradition gave a more sophisticated interpretion than mere economic determinism or class struggle to American politics. There had been more consensus than conflict, he pointed out. To right-wing Republicans trying to pin the red label on the heirs of Franklin D. Roosevelt, this interpretation gave no comfort.

Then, during the hysteria Senator Joseph McCarthy was generating, Hofstadter in his Age of Reform pointed to some of the early agrarian, Populist roots of McCarthyism-a native, not a foreign blight. He followed with a full-scale study of the history of American anti-intellectualism, and essays on the paranoid style in American politics.

Now, this week of his death, there has appeared American Violence: A Documentary History , distinguished by its thoughtful, far-ranging, and eloquent introductory essay. Hofstadter continued to have much to say to the new generation.

While Hofstadter's writings make clear why he was so outstanding, they do not explain why his friends and students grieve so deeply over his death. He was personally warm, humane, and gifted with a rare sense of humor. Few men of his stature have been so genuinely modest and so little egocentric.

Hofstadter never liked to give a large lecture course but preferred the person-to-person give-and-take of colloquia and seminars. Dull students saw little of him, but for the rare brilliant ones he gave lavishly of his time and criticism. He was equally generous with friends. In his suggestions, as in his published work, he did not say what people might like to hear. Some of it was painful, but almost all of it was insightful. His was a creative mind providing direction in a confused age.