Stanley Hoffmann


Stanley Hoffmann was the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University.

Biography

Hoffmann was born in Vienna in 1928 and moved to France with his family the following year. He was born to a distant American father and an Austrian mother. The Nazis classified Hoffmann and his mother as Jewish, forcing them to flee Paris in 1940. They fled to the village of Lamalou-les-Bains in the south of France, where they spent the war hiding from the Gestapo. A French citizen since 1947, Hoffmann spent his childhood between Paris and Nice before studying at Sciences Po. In 1948, Hoffmann graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques.
In 1955, Hoffmann became an instructor in the Department of Government at Harvard. After several years he received tenure and later acquired the title of C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France. He founded Harvard's Center for European Studies in 1968. His main fields of specialization were French politics and society, European politics, U.S. foreign policy, and international relations. In 1997, Hoffmann became the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor. In addition to his teaching and prolific writing, Hoffmann also participated as an expert in the film The World According to Bush, dealing with the vicissitudes of the Bush administration after the 2000 presidential election. On September 13, 2015, Hoffmann died in Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 86.

Major Publications

As sole author