By the 1950s and 1960s Hofstadter had a strong reputation in liberal circles. Lawrence Cremin wrote that "Hofstadter's central purpose in writing history...was to reformulate American liberalism so that it might stand more honestly and effectively against attacks from both left and right in a world which had accepted the essential insights of Darwin, Marx, and Freud." Alfred Kazin identified his use of parody: "He was a derisive critic and parodist of every American Utopia and its wild prophets, a natural oppositionist to fashion and its satirist, a creature suspended between gloom and fun, between disdain for the expected and mad parody."