Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

Anti-intellectualism in American Life was awarded the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. It is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.

Hofstadter set out to trace the social movements that altered the role of intellect in American society from a virtue to a vice. In so doing, he explored questions regarding the purpose of education and whether the democratization of education altered that purpose and reshaped its form.

In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were consequences, in part, of the democratization of knowledge.

Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, an outcome of her colonial European and evangelical Protestant heritage. Anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were functions of American cultural heritage, not necessarily of democracy.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, American History, Education

434 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 1963

About the author

Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history.

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.

As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Pulitzer Prize winner had long been on my to-read list, but when Sarah Palin became a vice presidential candidate, I moved it to the short list and read it. Now that Trump, that "stable genius," is our president, perhaps I should read it again.

What this book shows us is that anti-intellectualism in America has been around a long time. A generation before the Revolution, American revivalist preachers were already denigrating the university-educated ministers of the New England mainstream as over-intellectualized and therefore closed off to divine inspiration, and in politics the ridicule of the intellectual as too impractical a person to be trusted with the public good goes back to Jefferson at least. The exultation of the common man ("vote for the guy you'd like to have a beer with") got considerably worse with the Jackson presidency, and by 1840, during William Henry Harrison's "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign, it officially became the keystone of a party's election strategy. Hofstadter doesn't stop there, but goes on to show how this bias against the intellectual is a strain going through every aspect of American life, including agriculture, business, labor organization and even education itself.

Hofstadter writes in a clear accessible style, and--although the book is more than forty-five years old--it still has a lot to say to us about politics today. (Just ask Louie Gohmert. He'll tell you.)

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piety and Playfulness Forbidden

It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that America was founded and organised by intellectuals. For about a century, Puritan regard for scholarship and classical education dominated the colonial ethos. Community leaders were primarily Oxford and Cambridge graduates who shared a vision of not just a theologically learned church but also a culturally and scientifically learned population. Remarkably, only six years after the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard College had been established. Shortly thereafter its degrees were considered to be equivalent to those in England by their former Oxbridge colleagues.

Hofstadter gives Christianity its due in promoting the incipient American intellect. But he also documents convincingly how, as American Christianity evolved, it smothered not just the germ of intellect but the reputation of thought itself. The result has been a more or less permanent national aversion to intellectual tradition in favour of professional commercialism and the cultivation of manipulative intelligence. This aversion is demonstrated repeatedly from the mid-eighteenth century First Great Awakening to the revivalist rallies of Donald Trump. It is expressed persistently as a suspicion of reflective thought and resentment of those who practice it.

Hofstadter‘s key distinction is that between intellect and intelligence. “Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men.” This distinction seems to capture exactly my own experience of the American mind in business and academia. And it allows Hofstadter to conduct a profoundly revealing analysis of American society. One has only to watch Trump in action and his audiences’ reactions to know Hofstadter has had a profound insight.

The term ‘intellectual’ originates in fin de siècle France and refers originally to the academic and literary defenders of Emil Dreyfus against his anti-Semitic accusers. So from its beginning the term has had a liberal or leftist political connotation. And it still does. A conservative thinker like William F. Buckley would never have been referred to as an ‘intellectual’, but most likely as a ‘conservative commentator.’ Throughout the 20th century the term is used as one of opprobrium by right wing politicians, usually Republican, and evangelical Christians to suggest unAmerican, godless, and socially disruptive patterns of thought.

And this intended slander is probably fairly accurate. Intellectuals can appear to be unAmerican in the sense that their attitude toward knowledge and learning tends to be more vocational (in the religious sense) and elitist rather than commercial and egalitarian. They are also likely to question the historical validity and meaning of doctrinal religion. And because they are usually not constrained by the thought-limits imposed by faith or commercial necessity, they will not infrequently appear to stir up various simmering social pots. Hofstadter identifies two characteristics which are typical of his idea of an intellectual: piety and playfulness. Piety demands a level of serious reverence and humility about one’s intellectual endeavours. Playfulness implies the urge to go beyond the solution to problems, in fact to search for the problems which solutions cause. Both are somewhat seditious traits in American culture.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, despite its obvious refinement and nuance in its historical interpretation, is of course a product of its time. Originally published in 1963, much of it documents the effects of and the emergence from the intellectual persecution of the McCarthy era in the 1950’s. But even the frequent references to McCarthy’s tactics provide important insights that are relevant to understanding today’s political situation. For example, it is clear in Hofstadter’s analysis that the focus of the Senator’s efforts was not a grand Communist conspiracy, but the intellectual establishment itself. Communism was a tool not a target of his (and Richard Nixon’s) Congressional activities. Just as religion has been a perennial tool not a social objective of American politicians throughout the country’s history.

In light of Hofstadter’s analysis, political events today become much more comprehensible. For example, it is not simply Obama’s race against which Americans reacted in their last elections; it is just as likely to be an unfortunate legacy of his intellect. Americans never have had much tolerance for reflective thought in their leaders. Trump as the antithesis of the intellectual leader gives them respite. They love his hip-shooting, banal inanities and gaffes. They want his ignorant, often patently incompetent political appointments. They admire his intractability on factual matters like climate change and international tariffs. It is both comforting and terrifying to realise how consistent American culture has been since the Revolution.

Where Hofstadter got it wrong was in thinking, like many of us, that anti-intellectualism was in decline in America, that Richard Nixon was a fallen star along with the entire constellation of evangelical Republicans, that the American educational system would re-orient itself to promote greater intellectual competence rather than trade skills. Nevertheless, even his mistaken presumptions about the future are enlightening. I certainly feel less confused about American culture and politics than I did last week..

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hofstadter explores the development of the American bias against intellectuals. The intellectual is seen as wordy, conceited, pretentious, addled by over-examination of issues, contemptuous of practical men, a bleeding heart, and an outlier who defies faith, morality and egalitarianism. Hofstadter distinguishes between being intellectual and just being intelligent. Intelligent individuals place a higher value on useful and practical knowledge, they search for answers. The intellectual turns answers into more questions. The intelligent person has clear goals that can easily be appreciated by anyone. The intellectual is critical, creative and contemplative. He examines, ponders, wonders, imagines whereas the intelligent man grasps, manipulates and creates order. An animal can be intelligent, but intellect is human. Hofstadter traces the evolution of this bias in four sources: religion, politics, business and education.

RELIGION:

America was populated by religious dissidents who rejected the oppressiveness and decadence of European society. Escaping from aristocracy and a highly educated strictly structured clergy, evangelicals became firmly established in America. Primitivism, the favoring of intuition and faith over cultivated rationality, was seen as natural, intellectualism as artificial. The evangelical spirit embraced emotion, the heart over the mind, getting the Bible directly over stilted interpretations.

By the 1720’s, traditional Congregational and Presbyterian religions were losing meaning for frontier people and the less educated. The Great Awakening addressed this with revivalist preachers who emphasized the spirit over knowledge, the Bible over academic books. Revivalists competed with the established clergy and questioned the need for education, except to teach their particular religion. The Great Awakening marked the end of the Puritan age and the beginning of the evangelical. German Pietism and English Methodism were similar movements overseas.

By the 1790’s Americans were widely dispersed and the vast majority did not belong to a church. This provided fertile ground for preachers to establish new denominations that appealed to simple folk. Success depended on skilled recruiting and religion that was readily accessible. In early 19th century a second wave of evangelicalism changed Protestantism in America. At the time of the Revolution, most Protestants belonged to one of three established religions: Congregational, Presbyterian or Anglican. By 1850 evangelical Baptists and Methodists accounted for 70% of Protestants. The Methodists went from a few thousand American members in 1775 to more than a million and a half by 1855 becoming the largest single denomination. Methodist circuit riders took the word to the people and converted them. The Baptists less organized, less educated and somewhat less effective used similar tactics.

With industrialization and urbanization, revivalist preachers refined their pitch for large crowds, filling auditoriums and playing up to prominent business leaders for recognition and financing. Dwight Moody led this movement in the late 19th century and Billy Sunday in the early 20th. With modernism encroaching dramatically in the 1920’s the fundamentalist outcry went to new levels of passion. The “village Protestant individualist culture” of the 19th century had to confront relativity in morals, open sexuality, racial equality, Darwinism, Freudianism, Marxism, and Keynesianism in the 20th.

POLITICS:

In politics egalitarianism worked to the detriment of intellectuals. From Washington through the John Quincy Adams administration, men of learning and accomplishment were sought for government work. But with Jackson, such criteria were anathema. The common man was wanted with moral fiber being deemed more important than knowledge. In the minds of Jacksonians one excluded the other. Party and personal loyalty became the singular criterion. Congress became increasingly vitriolic and sharply divided.

Lincoln’s administration was a brief exception. From humble origins as President he selected learned men for his cabinet and his advisers. After the war government quickly reverted to strict patronage. The cultured class was out. Intellectuals became reformers and as such were stigmatized as effeminate and incapable of dealing with the tough real world. Not until TR would this image change. His persona empowered progressives. Highly educated and intellectually accomplished, he also was a big game hunter, a Rough Rider, a rancher, a man’s man. Thus he was popular and his reforms were taken seriously. He brought in a host of talented educated men to his administration. His successor, Taft, quickly dropped TR’s reforms.

Wilson was an academic but still grounded in the Gilded Age. As President he did not fully embrace progressive issues and their intellectual proponents. He was a colonialist, opposed to minority and women’s rights. His objection to big business was more to help small business than the working man. The Great Depression empowered FDR to fully embrace academia to solve the nation’s problems. However attacks on intellectuals steadily mounted through his administration interrupted by WWII. Afterwards years of pent up resentment by the right wing exploded in the form of McCarthyism targeting not just communists and fellow travelers but all intellectuals, New Dealers and liberals. The decisive defeat of Stevenson, a complete but likeable intellectual, and the election of Eisenhower, a connoisseur of Westerns, evidenced the change. Subsequently JFK would restore the validity of academia in government. This is where Hofstadter ends, his book published in 1963.

BUSINESS:

The growth of business in America diminished the intellectual. It extolled the practical man who solves real problems, not the flighty one who doesn’t have to meet a payroll. As business became more powerful this perception gained strength. It resulted in an emphasis on practical education and applied science rather than philosophy, literature and basic science. At the bottom is the idea that our needs are better met by increased consumption than a fully developed mind.

The self-made man, a phrase first used by Henry Clay in 1832, was a popular 19th century concept. Rarely true as most successful people started with considerable advantages. This concept was a more reasonable notion when college education consisted of Greek, Latin and the classics and business practices were simple. After America became industrialized and business more complex, higher education began offering more engineering, accounting and law. Education became accepted as necessary for business, but traditional intellectual pursuits were still considered irrelevant.

EDUCATION:

Schools in America originally conformed to European standards as a way to prepare the upper classes for further academic studies. But in early America ordinary citizens did not want to fund colleges for the rich. Most communities would only pay the lowest possible salary for teachers for the most rudimentary education. Through the 19th and into the 20th century schools became increasingly seen as a way to learn skills necessary to make a livelihood and participate in democracy, while support for more academic education continued to erode.

By the end of WWII still only 4 in 10 graduated from high school. Many education experts felt that 60% of students could not benefit from an academic or even a high level vocational education. This was the advent of the Life-adjustment movement among educators and saw the introduction of socially oriented classes aimed at everyday living activities. Relying on interpretations of tests and IQ that were highly questionable, these educators determined that the minds of 60% of the people could not be developed beyond a minimal level. The author attributes much of this movement to a bias against intellectualism, the perception that it was not egalitarian and thus un-American, that somehow it was wrong for the average person to try to raise himself above his peers in intellectual pursuits. In the 1950’s this movement lost steam as parents became more highly educated themselves and wanted more for their children. Parents saw the world demanding more complex skills. The Sputnik scare helped.

CONCLUSION:

Intellectualism declined sharply in stature after its heyday in the early American Republic. The country’s founders were largely well educated men of ideas that led the nation into its bold experiment. After the 1820’s intellectuals lost power, became self-absorbed and reverted to their traditional role in the leisure class engendering distrust by the general population. Progressive politics in 1890 changed the intellectual. They began espousing the democratic values that were the basis for their own disdain putting themselves in an awkward situation.

During times in the 20th century when intellectuals were accepted, at least tolerated, many felt uncomfortable at no longer being alienated. Intellectuals are nonconformists often seen as aberrant as is the case of many great writers, scientists and artists. But it is these exceptional minds that offer us unique perspectives. Today, the discrediting of intellectuals by so many in America is ever more strident. Unfortunately this is at a time when we have never been in more need of the critical examination of thought and the new ideas that intellectuals provide.

[Infinite Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Journal entry #17; Year of the Gutwagon Slophound Repellent.

Today I found myself in a uniquely harrowing situation involving a backpack full of Ritz and a clutch of Wolverine Frogs. It happened while careening through Central Africa like a comet spewing uncontrolled jets of ethanol spirits, altering course unpredictability, propelled in a sort of Listerine fugue state. Feeling almost fatally ill from mouthwash ingestion, my breath effervescing like the Lord’s own seltzer. I have never felt more attractive than when I smiled helplessly at the Pousargues's mongoose, which, in hindsight, must’ve been warning me not to insist upon by current vector. For those of you who don’t know, a Wolverine Frog is the sideburns of Hugh Jackman (as the titular Wolverine) epoxied to the flanks of a decent sized amphibious bugger that is capable of breaking the bones in its arm in order to protrude them like claws for purposes of giving your scrote a tremendous rake, should it take a notion to. Now any organism that is bent so strongly on hurting you that it’ll shatter it’s own arm in order to fashion a shiv is a damn sight more committed to raising hell than I am to anything, with the possible exceptions of rebuffing the constant advances of sobriety, and ridding myself of this awful propensity to analyze everything, which, both being of common cause, could perhaps be rolled into one for the sake of eviscerating redundancies, but I can’t seem to conduct myself in a parsimonious fashion these days. All my thoughts carry with them wasteful recursive gymnastics. Everything is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. I have become what the Americans fear most. Effete. Ineffectual. Godless. Worst of all - Impractical. I find myself unable to prune decision trees related to my own subsistence. I was recently expelled from a Taco Bell after standing at the register for what seemed to me a reasonable amount of time (though I later learned I had stared at the register for no less than half an hour without engaging my eyelids once). I was attempting to persuade myself that any one option was better than the other. All of them possessed gross nutritional validity in their own processed way. Who was I to say that one was inherently more capable of taking me to Flavor Town than the other? Who can understand the capricious whims of the Horror Frog? Certainly not a drunken, hyper-intellectual, lush who recently engaged in acts of heinous larceny in order to obtain a brick of pure, uncut Ritz to propitiate a tribe of cantankerous frogs who might exorcise this demon called Intellectualism. So there I am, snaking through the Savannah on my belly, blaspheming against all sensible depictions of sinusoidal traversal, combat fatigues half down and hugging the terminating slope of my sun blistered posterior like a pair of assless chaps. A combat knife clenched between my teeth and a canteen of Everclear ready to dissolve moments of crippling indecision... [journal entry terminates here]

Journal Entry #8; Year of the Mesquite Tardigrade Beef Jerky.

This book is more interesting than I first thought. It traces the history of anti-intellectualism in American life to back before the revolution. I had no idea that the roots were so deep. Intolerance of airy, reflective thought, and the exaltation of trade skills has really left a mark on the character of the nation, hasn’t it? To understand the consequences, a person has only to undertake the unenviable task of engaging in conversation with their fellow voters. You’ll quickly see that the great majority of them have been conditioned to be incurious. To be comfortable with unquestioned assumptions, scant information, and the primacy of gut feelings. Even making these observations out loud might cause you to be labeled an elitist. That’s part of the machine. Certainly, we should strive to avoid a state of callous snobbery, but I’m beginning to wonder if the epithet “elitist” should carry the sting it does when concerning the quality of a person’s ruminations? It is my impression that healthy democracies have, as a prerequisite, a well educated citizenry. Should we be okay with this hostility towards something so crucial? Furthermore, should we not wish for our representatives to be our most studious and careful thinkers? Why is that we seek excellence in our doctors, engineers, artists, and so on, but are uncomfortable with making similar demands of people with much more responsibility? Is this not an indication of how fully this aversion to intellectualism has been inculcated in us? Though it indicates much else beyond the scope of this work, I’m sure that it is no small part of the picture. Interesting sections of the book examine how competing religious dogmas played a role in denigrating this beautiful capacity of ours. Revivalist preachers did yeoman’s work in stigmatizing academic thought while promoting the concept of evangelical intuition and revelation. It cannot be overstated how successful these manipulations were and continue to be in American politics, where the simple common man is seen to possess moral fiber, while the intellectual resides in their ivory tower, unfettered by moral concern and obsessed with theories that defy practical application. As pernicious a false dichotomy as has ever been inflicted on our collective psyche. The idea that people can not be both highly educated and moral is patently absurd. The assertion that people who value nuanced thinking cannot also be practical, a ridiculous caricature. Hofstadter does a credible job of examining the other vectors for this disease. In the educational system which incentivizes superficial learning, and in business where bean counting is selected for. It has made me consider that period of time in which the nascent republic seemed to evince a much different trajectory, where intellectual pursuits were not, in fact, vilified as superfluous, heretical waste, but were vital to the innervation of the project. What went wrong? There is a lot in here to unpack, regarding that question.

Journal Entry #1; Year of the Procedurally Generated Muzak Emitting Fanny Pack.

Listen here fellers. Why do many word when few word do? Dude I work with gave me this. Said it ain’t all bad to think about stuff. Me? I says to him: “Kev, I’m a do’er, not a thinker.” I got good intuition about things. When my Nintendo was on the fritz I gave it a good thump and I was back to playing Contra. That’s how it is with life. But I owe Kev for saving me from that bull mastiff I punched in the mouth. So I figure I’ll do him a solid and pretend I’ve read this shit. He tells me this here is a book about how thinking about stuff got a bad wrap. I says: “Kev. I think about what needs thinking. That’s a skill, Kev. I think about what needs fightin’, fixin’, or fuckin’. I’m a student of that, Kev. Straight A student.” Then he tells me that it’s about how thinkin’ about thinkin’ got a bad wrap. I says: “No shittin’ damn wonder, bud! What the HELL is that, Kev?.” And he tells me to trust him. Shit. I guess any man who warns you against hangin' onto the bottom of a truck while someone drives it in order to see if everything is hunky dory has earned a bit of that. So I says: “Fuckin’ fine, Kev. I’ll read it cover to cover. But I don’t read much. So it might take me awhile.” He says that’s fine and I should write my thinkings down to help sort ‘em out. Now that’s a big ask. But Kev tells me that if I do it then the drinks are on him. Good feller, that Kev.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Page 42 (my book)

The older America, until the 1890’s was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations… it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism… a centralized welfare state… the heartland of America filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice… has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

It is important to bare in mind that this book was published in 1963. Some of the observations are remarkably prescient to the current era in the United States (others not so much). In all probability anti-intellectualism has likely increased in the United States since.

This book examines four different subject areas – religion, politics, culture, and education.

Let us start with some of the author’s definitions of an intellectual:

Page 29

The belief[ of the intellectual] that in some measure the world should be made responsive to his capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and order.

Page 38

The intellectual as ideologist is an object of unqualified suspicion, resentment, and distrust.

Page 45

Intellect is always on the move against something.


The intellectual is generally alienated on the outskirts of society, away from the general population. Skepticism does not sit well with conservative America. Inevitably most intellectuals are on the left wing.

Page 37

[There] has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a type of creed; for this mind, group hatred takes a place in politics.
…Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants.

When this book was written the United States was just overcoming the latest wave of conservative persecutions from the McCarthy era in which many were tagged communists and infiltrators.

When Americans entered the twentieth century it was vaulted to a modern force in the world, more so during the F.D.R. time period. However, evangelism, revivalism and fundamentalism always lurked beneath the surface. As a reviewer of the book “The Evangelicals” mentioned – “They were always here. We were just not looking at them.” This became, and still is a strong anti-intellectual power in America – against Darwinism (and science in general), against the rights of women, and against labour. Since this book was written there has been a President (George W. Bush) whose faith played a significant role in the Iraq invasion of 2002 and the current vice-president is a fervent evangelical. It is almost impossible (in contrast to other developed countries) for any political candidate in the United States to be indifferent to religion – or worse to have no religious faith.

The author contrasts the new and emotionally invigorating religions with the older, staid institutional religions. This lack of institutional training has allowed these new religions to expand and flourish. They have a very rigid outlook on morality and this has expanded into the political sphere.

Page 119

The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness as evidence of toughness and masculinity (and in the footnote the author adds that they are terrified of their own sexuality).

Page 124

This feeling that the American public is sound at heart, but that spokesmen of the old American values somehow lack the means to compete with the smart-alecks of modernism runs through the utterances of the right wing.

The author correctly points out that even though the fundamentalists lost at the Scopes trial – the war still continues. They have also allied themselves with big business where they have much in common: against income tax, social reform, and unions - and have hidden segregationist tendencies.

The fundamentalist outlook has nothing in common with the liberal mindset which sees issues in shades of grey and is looking for compromise.

Page 236

In the United States, where government has done far less for the arts and learning than in Europe, culture has always been more dependent upon private patronage.

Business in America has placed a premium of utilitarianism which is in conflict with many intellectual values.

Page 233

In the entire body of modern American fiction… the businessman is almost always depicted as crass, philistine, corrupt, predatory, domineering, reactionary, and amoral.


I was disappointed with the chapters on education. There was a lot of word-play and I wondered if the author and those he quoted had ever been in a classroom (or had completely forgotten their school experience). It was like he was looking at the educational process while flying over at 20,000 feet and promoting ridiculous philosophies. More so after reading something like this -

Page 380

The teacher, of course, would no longer be a harsh authority imposing external goals through rigid methods. He would be alert to the spontaneous and natural impulses of the children and would take hold of those that led to constructive ends, giving gentle direction where necessary. The pupils themselves would take an active part in formulating the purposes of their education and in planning its execution. Learning would not be individual or passive, but collective and active.


This book can be very prescient. One can see the continued diminishing role of the intellectual in the news media such as giving political candidates in a debate two minutes or less to expound on their position of such subjects as foreign policy, health care, racial issues…

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

What are the roots of stupidity in America, and how did they grow so strong?

It’s a question historian Richard Hofstadter raises and answers brilliantly and unforgettably in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.”

Though the book was written more than three decades ago, it has lost none of its relevance to current life in America. What a prescient book. To read it is to attain a fuller understanding of the rise of modern political figures such as Sarah Palin, why our education system – particularly our high schools – are crumbling from the weight of lowered expectations and half-assed education policy, and how and why those in power tolerate intellectual freedom and creativity only to a certain extent.

Diving into religion, business, politics, psychology and higher education – among other subjects – Hofstadter shows that anti-intellectualism – very roughly put, the view that knowing how to correctly push the buttons on a dishwasher is more important than knowing how to design or manufacture one, or to explain how one works – is hardwired in American culture and life.

In Hofstadter’s book, for example, you learn about the key religious zealots in the country’s history who disdained books and adamantly believed that science was putting people on the path toward bad behavior.

You also learn about “one-hundred percenters,” people who know all they need to know, people who don’t want to hear or read another point of view, people who believe that all they need to know is what they glean from their own experience. Hofstadter illuminates: “The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness and masculinity.”

Ring any bells? Fox News: The one-hundred percenter’s cable news wet dream. George W. Bush: He doesn’t read newspapers, cuz, heh heh, those are just filters. Red State America: Jesus rode dinosaurs, God loves guns and America can do no wrong.

If you’re as dismayed as I am at current American dogma – and find yourself scratching your head over what went wrong – then Hofstadter’s book provides a deep way of getting your mind around the whys and hows of all the stupidity on display both in our public behavior and in our mass media.

I’m still thinking about the end of Hofstadter’s book. He is hopeful that liberal culture will endure despite various anti-intellectual viruses attacking it. I don’t know. I hope he’s right. In any case, I want to end my review with Hofstadter’s hopeful outlook, because it is powerful and worth heeding as we move forward:

“Dogmatic, apocalyptic predictions about the collapes of liberal culture or the disappearance of high culture may be right or wrong; but one thing about them seems certain: they are more likely to instill self-pity and despair than the will to resist or the confidence to make the most of one’s creative energies. It is possible, of course, that under modern conditions the avenues of choice are being closed, and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another. It is possible; but in so far as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it is not to be so.”

[Sebastien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished this a while back been meaning to write the review.

It is excellent and in depth and sadly much of it is still perfectly relevant. Also great for anyone interested in US history. Hofstadter's examination of religion and its role in American society is fascinating. It is by no means simple, there have been multiple factions in the religious sphere here, some were forces for enlightenment/reason/knowledge and others were anti-intellectual forces that cudgeled people with blind dogmatism and preached constant and full submission to authority. These forces waxed and waned, sometimes one gaining the upperhand over the other in the political sphere, each exerting different levels of power in various regions. There is also an interesting class angle that is intermixed within all this, the main one that comes to mind is the elite New England uppercrust religious intellectuals who held a lot of power and sway in that region and often times at the federal level. They helped establish many of the original higher level education institutions. Some fascinating dynamics between them and anti-establishment anti-elitist populist dogmatists who preached against reason and science because it didn't conform to their world-views. But they also hated the elitist New England brahmins because of their outsized power and their monopolization of the educational resources in this country.

One particularly interesting fact that Hofstadter hits: sometimes the greatest anti-intellectuals emanate from the intellectual sphere, reactionary intellectuals who might be perfectly intellectual within a broad array of subjects but in certain arenas are completely blind and retrograde. It was an interesting point and I think very true, I consider them the most pernicious because they leverage their credentials and operate from a larger platform from which they push their wacky anti-intellectual arguments. They are insiders who (sometimes) revel in torpedoing the knowledge establishment (and colleagues) from the inside. I imagine this is generally done in good faith, but sometimes I have to imagine there is jealousy or anger towards colleagues or the intellectual establishment that prompts this sort of thing. I don't know. We can all be blind to our biases, even the highest level experts and intellectuals... but these people can end up doing a lot of damage, the public seizes upon their arguments to confirm their conspiracies or push their anti-intellectual agenda.

Highly recommend this book. Hofstader is a great writer and historian imo. The scope of this book is broad but there is a lot of nuance and in depth examination. It is not a book you read in one sitting though, best to read in slow morsels, digest, think about... Maybe it will be a grinding read for some but I found it completely spell-binding as it really got me thinking and I think helped me learn quite a bit of US history as well. Also a great examination on the philosophy of education, the US education system, attitudes towards education and knowledge, and how these have all evolved. Education and knowledge are not not very high up on the totem pole (as compared to sports and entertainment and worship of power and money). The fact that the word intellectual is still a dirty word here in this country is very telling. We face many of the same problems now that we did 50 years ago when this was written, which is really a mind-bogglingly sad fact.

Maybe we face a new dark age? I have no idea. The paradox is that we have access to more information than ever before but it seems like we only consume and accept what will reinforce narratives we already believe in (in pointing this out I'm not saying I'm immune to this myself haha! but I try to recognize and fight my tendencies but it is certainly not easy). That's why a proper approach to education and instilling critical thinking and curiosity via the education system (but also via family and community) is so important imo, it takes resources and a lot of trial and error, but we are going down the wrong path that is for sure.

Anti-intellectualism is not only an American thing. But we have a rich history of it, and its influence in our culture matters a lot given our power and influence in the world. But if we can't invest in our education system and instill curiosity, love of learning, valuing of knowledge, and an ability to appreciate and practice a certain level of critical thinking within our populace we will gradually lose power in the world. That's how I see it. We've managed to stay on top for a long time, even when our education system wasn't the best because we had a nice brain-drain going for us (along with a lot of fantastic fundamentals like a wealth of natural resources). With current policies we might end up reversing the brain-drain which we have relied upon for so long, it has masked the flaws in our education system and its classist fundamentals. If this happens the flaws of our education system will likely be magnified beyond belief, and we will all bear the economic repercussions (which are already being felt but will only get worse).

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional book. First published in 1964, it is still very much worth reading as a primer on how America got to where it is today, with the President, his party, and almost half the country having enthusiastically embraced anti-intellectual dumbassedness. If there is any hopefulness to be found, it is that this is not a new condition. All the way back to the colonial days, before the Revolution, anti-intellectualism was already playing a large part in religious and political life, and over time that would extend to culture and education as well.

The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in official circles during the 1950’s was mainly the traditional businessman’s suspicion of experts working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps. Far more acute and sweeping was the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated.

Many of the early arrivals to North America were fleeing the sanctioned discrimination of the hierarchical established Church, with its stultifying conformity and oppressive insistence on orthodoxy of interpretation and practice. Instead, they embraced the Reformist idea that each person should be his own priest, following the interpretations and dictates of one’s own soul. This meant that class and education would play a large part in how religious sects developed.

The style of a church or sect is to a great extent a function of social class, and the forms of worship and religious doctrine congenial to one social group may be uncongenial to another. The possessing classes have usually shown much interest in rationalizing religion and in observing highly developed liturgical forms. The disinherited classes, especially when unlettered, have been more moved by emotional religion; and emotional religion is at times animated by a revolt against the religious style, the liturgy, and the clergy of the upper-class church, which is at the same time a revolt against aristocratic manners and morals.

As the country developed and literacy increased, more people lived in towns where they could discuss and share ideas, and the old-style religion started to lose its hold, although it would not surrender its position without a fight.

By the end of the [19th]century it was painfully clear to fundamentalists that they were losing much of their influence and respectability. One can now discern among them the emergence of a religious style shaped by a desire to strike back against everything modern—the higher criticism, evolutionism, the social gospel, rational criticism of any kind.

As bad as it was that many of them saw their influence slipping away, even worse was the idea that their children might be infected by the ideas of modernism and stray from their family’s beliefs. "When Clarence Darrow said at Scopes’s trial that ‘every child ought to be more intelligent than his parents,’ he was raising the specter that frightened the fundamentalists most. This was precisely what they did not want, if being more intelligent meant that children were expected to abandon parental ideas and desert parental ways."

The fight against new ideas spread beyond the sphere of religion and became a general distrust and anger at anything that challenged the old ways of thinking. We can see striking examples of this in contemporary society.

Religion, for many individuals or groups, may be an expression of serene belief, personal peace, and charity of mind. But for more militant spirits it may also be a source or an outlet for animosities. There is a militant type of mind to which the hostilities involved in any human situation seem to be its most interesting or valuable aspect; some individuals live by hatred as a kind of creed, and we can follow their course through our own history in … a variety of crank enthusiasms.

There are many people who believe, passionately and whole-heartedly, but possess only the most superficial understanding of what it is that they believe.

There has been a progressive attenuation of the components of religion. Protestantism at an early point got rid of the bulk of religious ritual, and in the course of its development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went very far to minimize doctrine. The inspirational cult has completed this process, for it has largely eliminated doctrine—at least it has eliminated most doctrine that could be called Christian. Nothing, then, is left but the subjective experience of the individual.

The lines had been drawn, between those who accepted compromise as essential to civilized society, and the growing intransigence of fundamentalist religion.

Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane. The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?)"

It was not just religion that was infected by the anti-intellectual spirit. “The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag. Since the 1930’s, fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations."

Many people came to view pluralism as a form of weakness. The ability to see multiple points of view and perform sophisticated analyses of complex situations was anathema to many Americans.

As popular democracy gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do. Just as the evangelicals repudiated a learned religion and a formally constituted clergy in favor of the wisdom of the heart and direct access to God, so did advocates of egalitarian politics propose to dispense with trained leadership in favor of the native practical sense of the ordinary man with its direct access to truth.

These ancient animosities cast a long shadow over our current Red State/Blue State divide, "the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament."

Just as today’s Congressmen are a sorry lot, they weren’t exactly towering examples of statesmanship and probity back in the day. "The small-town lawyers and businessmen who are elected to Congress cannot hope to expropriate the experts from their central advisory role, but they can achieve a kind of revenge through Congressional investigation and harassment, and, understandably, they carry on this task full of a sense of virtuous mission."

Sometimes politics is just politics, but sometimes it is a platform for display of vicious pathologies. "There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies."

Just as is the case with religion, politics is often seen as a zero-sum game where allowing other ideas to percolate through the system risks loss of power and patronage, and electoral defeat. “To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question."

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life even contains what is perhaps a prescient comment on what future United States and Western elections will look like. Andrew Jackson won the presidency on a furious populist platform that cast his opponents as unpatriotic, corrupt, and ineffectual (sound familiar?). Having found that to be a winnable election strategy, it was not long before his opponents copied it for themselves.

It was not merely Jacksonianism that was egalitarian—it was the nation itself. The competitive two-party system guaranteed that an irresistible appeal to the voters would not long remain in the hands of one side, for it would be copied. It was only a question of time before Jackson’s opponents, however stunned by the tactics of his supporters in 1828, would swallow their distaste for democratic rhetoric and learn to use it. Party leaders who could not or would not play the game would soon be driven off the field.

Anti-intellectualism has also played out in the field of public education, with surprising results.

In the nineteenth century, when the well-to-do sent their sons to college, it was a fair assumption that they were sending them not for vocational training but out of a regard both for intellectual discipline and for social advantages (the two are not always easily distinguishable). In the twentieth century, they may send them, rather, for the gains measurable in cold cash which are supposedly attainable through vocational training.

There were furious debates over what should be taught, and since only a small percentage of the students would be going to college, the curriculum was changed to emphasize a “good enough” level of practical skills over any form of intellectual development.

The older ideal of a classical liberal education, as expressed in nineteenth-century America and elsewhere, had been based upon two assumptions. The first was the so-called faculty psychology. In this psychology, the mind was believed to be a substantive entity composed of a number of parts or “faculties” such as reason, imagination, memory, and the like. It was assumed that these faculties, like physical faculties, could be strengthened by exercise; and in a liberal education, through constant mental discipline, they were gradually so strengthened.

The prevailing view came to be that education needed to have practical purposes, limited to preparing students for business and to fulfill their civil duties. “The high schools, they insisted, were meant to educate citizens in their public responsibilities and to train workers for industry, not to supply the colleges with freshmen. The high schools should be looked upon as ‘people’s colleges’ and not as the colleges’ preparatory schools.”

Many people were strongly opposed to publicly supported education which would, they believed, mainly benefit the upper classes.

A particular hostility was expressed toward universities and colleges, as places where poor men’s sons could never go and where “millions are annually expended in teaching the sons of the wealthy some new brutality in football.” Quite understandably the labor editors feared that the universities would be bound by their endowments to teach that the status quo was beyond criticism, and that colleges and universities would become “incubators” for scabs and strikebreakers. What could be expected to be taught at a university endowed by Rockefeller? Would it be the rights of man or the superiority of the wealthy?

In the end, public schools and universities were created, but, since they were supported by tax dollars, funding was always a problem.

something very important has been missing from the American passion for education. A host of educational problems has arisen from indifference—underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms, double-schedule schools, broken-down school buildings, inadequate facilities and a number of other failings that come from something else—the cult of athleticism, marching bands, high-school drum majorettes, ethnic ghetto schools, de-intellectualized curricula, the failure to educate in serious subjects, the neglect of academically gifted children.

The democratic impulses that led to public education also embraced the idea that all children should be able to benefit from the experience, even if it meant the lowering of academic standards and limiting opportunities for those students who planned on going to college.

Formerly, it had been held that a liberal academic education was good for all pupils. Now it was argued that all pupils should in large measure get the kind of training originally conceived for the slow learner. American utility and American democracy would now be realized in the education of all youth.

Anti-intellectualism has played a big role in United States history, and its effects are plainly visible today in disbelief and strident opposition to evolution, global warming, vaccinations, and the multitude of positions based on a rejection of science and a firm embrace of emotion, the sense that no expert knows more than an average person with a passionate belief. No good will come of this, and political parties which encourage it do great harm to the country. “The aging Jefferson warned in 1816: ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’”

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading that has not aged at all. There was so much here--commentary, history, and well written analysis of current events. Though the current events are now history, it was still totally relevant. This is a must read.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not nearly as snotty as the title makes it sound. It's full of amazing unknown social history of early America and draws a startling line showing many of the ways that the unique American character was formed from the early 1600's on. And it does so largely without judgement, even though the overall thrust of the book is an argument that the disapproval of education and knowledge for their own sake tend to undermine our social structures and retard our advancement as a nation. It's a very well-written, highly readable (if sometimes dense) book and it will alter forever your perceptions of America. If that's what you're into.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book in my Intellectual History of the United States class when I was in college a hundred years ago and I've felt the need to revisit it about every decade. In light of the level of what constitutes political, social, and cultural discourse in the United States today and out of total frustration with my college students who have emerged from schools that want them to "feel good about themselves" and have both lowered expectations and inflated grades, it was time to pull it off the bookshelf, dust it off, and give it a reread. Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in History for this book in 1964 and much of what he says is true today. He highlights a thread of "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it" and traces that thread from early American history to the period in which he was writing. Hofstadter demonstrates that some social movements in the U.S. have divorced intellect from other human virtues and treated it as if it is a vice and in doing so he sees much of American history in education, politics, business, and religion as a pitting of intellect against emotion, character, practicality, and democracy. This anti-intellectualism has had a long history and staying power. It has been used to disparage individuals throughout our history such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Adlai Stevenson. And, in Hofstadter's view, it has fostered an unshakable belief in "the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish, wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati". And these attitudes have consequences. Hofstadter believes that an intellectual approach to life accepts the premise that conflict is a constant and there is a need for spirited discussion and an openness to compromise. But, again in his view, the anti-intellectual bias has produced a society that "looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and, accordingly, it scorns compromise (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities." Sadly, this conclusion seems as current in 21st century America as it has been in our past.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

With slight modifications this book could be written today. The lack of respect school teachers have today is still prevalent. There’s probably some state (maybe even a majority of states) where the Governor’s cook earns more than the average school teacher as Hofstadter mentioned in this book for Florida, but so what? Cooks can be just as valuable as school teachers and we might as well let the market determine fair value.

Hofstadter can’t use the words ‘politically correct’, ‘trigger warning’ or ‘snowflakes’ because they had not yet been invented when he wrote this book, but he criticizes schools for that kind of behavior in his day. He believes that education in 1960ish is leveling the playing field too much and trying to become utilitarian by considering only the greatest good for the greatest many. Today, I see people make the same complaints about high schools and colleges, and I just find it silly and think people are just manufacturing a problem from the anecdotal.

Billy Sunday, D L Moody and Billy Graham (and in Graham’s case, Hofstadter was absurdly favorably disposed towards. The only nice thing I can say about Billy Graham is he is not as vile as his son Franklin Graham) are still familiar names today as they were in Hofstadter’s day. The puritans and the religious awakenings and Jonathan Edwards, Methodism, Episcopalians are overly familiar to most readers. The Scopes Monkey Trial and the vile Creationist who ignore science that story has already been told. All of these stories have been told before he wrote this book and after he wrote this book.

David Thoreau to Walt Whitman and the Romantics through the transcendentalist are mentioned prominently and favorably as intellectuals. Thoreau’s ‘Walden’s Pond’ is mostly an ode for learning Greek and reading Homer and writing bad poetry and complaining about trains making too much noise, it is not about ‘living deliberatively’, and Walt Whitman wants patriotism as an end in itself and for itself, and I would say patriotism is antithetical to the ‘life of the mind’ since patriotism is always characterized by holding one’s own ideas and or mores superior to another only because it is part of the tribe they were born into or have adopted for themselves thus allowing them to exclude the other from their tribe.

The book covered politicians who manipulate the truth from Andrew Jackson down through Eisenhower with an anti-intellectual spin, and he puts a pro-intellectual spin on Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson, and Thomas Jefferson. I would say the problem is not the politician, the problem are the people who want to be led and manipulated in order to remain ignorant and to justify their hate of the other.

Even when I get past the familiar stories told in this book, I’m troubled by how the author saw the problem in his day. He considers intellectuals as a class, a class that doesn’t know itself and which needs to redefine itself in order to morph knowledge into power for creating activity (he definitely frames his narrative that way).

Ayn Rand wrote a book slightly before this one was published ‘The New Intellectual’, she knows herself and saw no reason for redefining herself and as always with her she offers nothing but platitudes. Her book is really a piece of work and offers no nuance and read like a comic book with its black and white absolute view of the world. She made the ‘business man’ (and with her it’s always ‘man’) the Ideal. She’s as big of an advocate for the ‘life of the mind’ as anyone else, but she’s also in fantasyland with her ‘objective’ certainty. She defends the ‘intellectual’ and wants to reclaim the word from the ‘leftist’, ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’. Even non-thinkers such as Ayn Rand can claim to be ‘intellectual’. Ayn Rand has no doubts. She is certain within her muddled ‘objectivism’. She’s the archetypal anti-intellectual. I would have framed ‘intellectuals’ such that Rand is not one. (Hofstadter doesn’t mention Rand, but she would qualify by his reckoning).

Intellectuals doubt their own reason and anti-intellectuals have no doubts in their own certainty. The anti-intellectual is always certain that their feelings and intuitions are all that is necessary, and anything that disagrees with that is ‘fake news’ and to them ‘alternative facts’ are real if it fits their needs. Anti-intellectuals have no need for data because they have no doubts. Intellectuals always welcome more data and love nothing more than to be shown wrong and develop even better theories about the world.


There is a real creepiness to those who deny science or think like John Birchers or KKK or support Joseph McCarthy (all of who were mentioned in this book for the creeps they were). The problems in 1963 were just as bad as the problems we have today. Those who want to manipulate by fear and hate and want us to stop thinking and trust our feelings as channeled by their crazy ranting and want us to ignore everything but what they say aren’t going away. Tolerance and understanding are not required when dealing with those who have no basis for their reason and who appeal to certainty by authority or feelings for their truths. People still deny evolution today, but science makes it all the easier to ignore them, and we don’t have to redefine who we are in order to defeat them as Hofstadter says we should. Our schools didn’t fail us in 1962 and they aren’t failing us today.

I want to be fair to Hofstadter. This book is not bad. He tells a good but familiar history, and it was free from Hoopla and was listenable. He puts the focus of his story in the wrong place and his narrative against ‘modern’ education and how he sees ‘modern’ intellectuals is dangerously naïve. Did people support the John Birch Society because they were ignorant or did the John Birch Society make them ignorant? I believe that the people follow the pseudo-intellectuals because it justifies their quest for not thinking and helps them channel their hate of the other. Trump channels the hate today, he did not create it.

[Anna Biller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although American society is clearly riddled with scorn against learning and knowledge, and smart people are regularly mocked and denigrated, it's always been difficult for me to sort out why this is, and whether or not it's a product of postwar consumer culture. As Hofstadter painstakingly and brilliantly explains, the problem is much older and runs much deeper than that. Everyone who is interested in why Americans are so mistrustful of intelligence, how we got so stupid, and why we form cults around populist figures whose lack of any special intelligence or expertise is a major part of their appeal, needs to read this book, which is more timely than ever.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

So the question isn't where did the current anti-intellectualism come from. It's: where did it go for a few decades?

Hofstadter's mission is to explain how we ended up here:

One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world. Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane.
The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this; it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism which, as everyone knows, is atheism.

This elegantly states what we all complain about. But how did we get here? Hofstadter provides the background, the development of the various strains of both intellectuals and antis at work. I most enjoyed the first half or two-thirds, which was a historical overview. There is much good material on the New England Puritan clergy well-spring, and the counter-force of the evangelical preacher. This section rolls on through Progressivism, the New Deal brain trust, and ends with McCarthy and Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower, and a ray of hope in Kennedy. It discusses how business ended up in the anti-intellectual camp, as opposed to, say, the closer relationship between business and intellectual life in Tory England.

Then there is a long, I think outdated, tirade about the 'disastrous' impact of John Dewey's writing on the US education system. You can skim it; the Sputnik era changed things enough to need a new assessment.

He finishes with an analysis of the estrangement of the contemporary (1963) intellectual. The identity of the intellectual, he argues, has become 'to be estranged.' Whereas the proper identity of the intellectual is to reason oneself into objective positions from which you may become estranged from society through criticism of the status quo. He also presents the choice intellectuals feel themselves facing: (1) to have power within the system, now that former standard intellectual roles are obsolete, by working for the big organizations, and making the necessary compromises, or (2) to keep one's integrity by working on the fringes and resign oneself to suffering in impotence.

My advice is read the first half to two thirds, which build the foundation of the quote at the beginning of this review, and skim the rest. But it's definitely well worth it.

[Julio Pino · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You can tell Donald Pleasance is the villain in the group because he's the only member of the crew who believes in evolution."---film critic Pauline Kael, reviewing FANTASTIC VOYAGE.
Americans hate intellectuals. Americans hate the intellect. Americans hate just plain intelligence. Want proof? There was a U.S. ambassador to Singapore once who went around the city-state asking questions like "What is this Islam everyone keeps talking about?" and "There are two Koreas, you say. Why is that? "The late, great historian Richard Hofstadter was urged to find out the source of American anti-intellectualism in trying to explain the horrors of McCArthyism and why political demagoguery proved so popular with the American public. Also, non-demagogues: during the 1952 presidential race Dwight Eisenhower boasted "Of course, I'm not the educated candidate". (Comparisons to Trump and Trumpism are too obvious to elaborate on here.) Hofstadter traces these willful imbecilities to America being founded by "doers, not dreamers" who sought neither utopia nor El Dorado, followed by the frontier experience of "every man for himself" where brawn, not brains, brought you land (at the expense of the natives), crops and slaves, and finally the industrial era from Henry Ford ("History is more or less bunk") which prioritized mechanics and routinization over thinking. All of these insults to the brain are dissected with style, black humor and great insight. Perhaps Eisenhower's opponent in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, summed up the premise of this book best. Visiting Vassar College one young woman shouted out to him, "Don't worry Governor Stevenson! Every intelligent man and woman in America will vote for you", to which Adlai replied "That's true. Unfortunately, I need a majority to win." Stevenson lost to the illiterate Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956.

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recent political development in this country make it seem that gossip, hearsay, "alternative facts," wishful thinking, invective, and shaming the intellectual class have become coin of the realm at the highest levels of government. Though it may seem these motives are brand-new, they are not. Richard Hofstadter's 1964 masterwork reminds us that these are enduring (though, happily, not always dominant) themes in our political discourse.

This book points backward to the formation of anti-intellectual tendencies in American history, and points to the present and future with concern. It also is a ringing endorsement of what the intellectual CAN do in our society besides just serving as scapegoat or whipping-boy. ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE is a book that should be read; the fact that it's now over 50 years old does not really "date" it because it does so well in spotting recurring (some may say, chronic) features of our public life.

[Camelia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anti-intellectualism in America has been around for a long time. It's hard to comprehend a country built by intellectuals and where all the founding fathers were intellectuals, also has such a long and winding history of anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is an analysis of how intellectuals and anti-intellectualism played out in the last four hundred years. This 1963's book has aged well.

Reality has an ancient soul. Many anti-intellectualism arguments described in the book sound very familiar, for anti-intellectualism is on the rise again. Would Richard Hofstadter be surprised that the anti-evolution has never truly faded and the latest reincarnation, the creation theory, is taught public schools? He surely wouldn't be surprised that a man like Trump can market himself as the practical man, the business man, the man who speaks common English, using the same tactics like many anti-intellectuals in the past.

"We have strayed far afield from the good and old American ways that have made this country great. Our colleges full of leftists and these bright young boys want to make this country into a bright new world. " Sounds familiar? This is from Eisenhower election campaign in 1953.

Some quotes:

“A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.”

“If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.”

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the early 1960's this book has shaped my thinking like few others. Goes a long way to explain the history of intellectual life in America, examining religion, formal education, business, and politics. If we wonder why Americans seem "dumber" than ever, this book offers an argument that stands up well today. One of my all-time favorites.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The old academic curriculum, as endorsed by the Committee of Ten, reached its apogee around 1910. In that year more pupils were studying foreign languages or mathematics or science or English — any one of these — than ALL non-academic subjects combined. During the following forty-year span the academic subjects offered in the High school curricula fell from about three fourths to about one fifth.

The first half of the 20th century was the turning point, educationally at least, towards anti-intellectualism. The numbers of enrolled high school students also increased by 4x through compulsory education and increased immigration so that was also a factor. This is only one facet of the book as there are lengthy sections on religion, politics and industry.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was the winner of the 1964 Pulitzer for Non Fiction. Written in the decade following McCarthyism, it is simply one of the best books I’ve ever read by an academic. It has aged a bit but most all of the conclusions are relevant today. The story of America’s blindspot began way back in the late 1600’s when religious dissenters like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams thumbed their noses towards the Puritan clergy, who were some of the most educated people in the world at large, and made new lives in places like Rhode Island, Long Island and Pennsylvania.

There are four parts to the book beyond the intro and conclusion.

1. Religion of the Heart.
2. The Politics of Democracy
3. The Practical Culture
4. Education in a Democracy

Religion of the Heart in particular is 5 star material and the Education in a Democracy section is even better.


5 stars overall. Although I share many of the same world views espoused in this book I also found the writing to be especially good for an academic treatise.

[Andrew]

Hofstadter's main problem, as far as I can tell, is that he doesn't have a working definition for intellectual. At some points, he's more than happy to include artists and writers in the camp of "the intellectual," but at other times, he only refers to those intellectuals working within a specifically positivist tradition. This makes a great deal of sense given the time in which the book was written, but comes off as a bit preposterous today. This, to me, makes me question the work as a text in the history of ideas.

But all of that being said, it's an entertaining romp through the history of my home country's idiocies. Back then, the Tea Partiers were called Birchers. And it turns out they had more than a few antecedents. Jerks.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another game changer. I loved some of the ideas that this book brought out on intellectualism and anti-intellectualism at the same time. The book is essentially a study of the rampant anti-intellectualism that is strife in America today and as it was in 1962 when Richard wrote this book. You could say the same about most of the countries that are just slaves to the Benjamin’s, fast cars, big houses and other supra-chavvy desires and whimsical whims! The book talks about the foundation of America and how intellectual the founding fathers of America were and how they must be flipping from side to side in their graves if they are looking down at that mutation Trump at the helm(et) in American today! As I have said many times before I love books that take my mind to walks along paths and directions that I just would not have been led before and this book takes you on many many walks ...
One of the most acutest points in the book for me was the difference between intelligence and intellect. Richard seemed to imply overall that intelligence is intelligence inside a system and cognition of all the assumptions that come within that system. Intellectualism is a form of intelligence that sits outside that system and has the ability to look at the “system” from a distance and questions those assumptions. Richard words this more eloquently when he says that (and this is the key theme in the book): “intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.”
Here were some of my favourite bits:
• “Thomas Colley Grattan a British traveller observed of young American businessmen: “they follow business like drudges and politics with fierce ardour. They marry. They renounce party going. They give up all pretension in dress. They cannot force wrinkles and crow’s feet on their faces but they assume and soon acquire a pursed up, keen and haggard look. Their air, manner and conversation are alike contracted. They have no breadth either of shoulders, information or ambition. Their physical powers are subdued and their mental capability crammed into narrow limits. There is constant activity going on in one small portion of the brain; all the rest is stagnant. The money making faculty is alone cultivated. They are incapable of acquiring knowledge on a broad or a liberal scale. All is confined to trade, finance, law, and small, local provincial information; art, science, literature are nearly dead letters to them.”
• “Tayler Lewis objected that American boasted of its individualism while encouraging mediocre sameness in its utilitarian education. (WOW WHAT A LINE!!) When may we look less of true originality he asked than at a time when every child is taught to repeat this inane self-laudation and all distinction of individual thought is lost because no man has room for anything else than a barren idea of progress, a contempt for the past and a blinding reverence for an unknown future?”
• “The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not to fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is. That is what I want to preserve, or rather... recover”
• "Since the time of Tocqueville it has become a commonplace among students of American that business activism has provided an overwhelming counterpoise to reflection in this country. Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was enabled by the democratic and business-like character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decisions and the prompt seizure of opportunities and all these activities were not propitious for deliberation, elaboration or precision in thought. “Anti-intellectualism Schlesinger remarked has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
• “Brooks exposed what seemed to the terrible truth about a race that has never cultivated life for its own sake. From the beginning he thought the American mind caught between the hopeless imperatives of the puritan code and the stark realities of business self-assertion had developed a kind of unwholesome doubleness that militated against the creation or at least the fulfilment of first rate artists and thinkers. It had forged on the one side a wild of ideals and abstractions uncommitted to any reality and on the other a world of possession the soulless accumulation of dollars; caught between them was a thinking class that passed at a frightening pace from youth to middle age and the to slow relentless decay. A country whose life was in a state of arrested development a national mind that has been sealed against that experience from which literature derives all its values had given rise to a gallery of wasted deformed and unrealized truths.”
• “Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men”
• “You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of every block of every city in America and you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.” - wow what a massive castigating statement ... is Richard American even????? !!!!
• “The professional man (businessman) lives off ideas not for them”.
• “There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes, or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothings, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.”
• “The original American hope for the world in so far as the older American thought about the world at all was that it might save itself by emulating the American system that is by dropping formal ideologies, accepting our type of democracy, apply itself to work and the arduous pursuit of happiness and by following the dictates of common sense. The irony is that Americans now suffer as much from the victory as from the defeat of their aspirations. What is it that has taken root in the world if it is not the spirit of American activism, the belief that life can be made better, that colonial peoples can free themselves as the Americans did, that poverty and oppression do not have to be endured, that backward countries can become industrialised and enjoy a high standard of living and that the pursuit of happiness is everybody’s business.”
• Moses Coit Taylor said that “in its inception New England was not an agricultural community, more a manufacturing community not a trading community: it was a thinking community an arena and mart for ideas; its characteristic organ be in not the hand not the heart nor the pocket but the brain. .. Probably no other community of pioneers ever so honoured study, so reverenced the symbols and instruments of learning. Theirs was a social structure with its corner stone resting on a book …. only six years after John Winthrop’s arrival in Salem Harbour the people of Massachusetts took from their own treasury the fund from which to found a university; so that while the tree stumps were as yet scarcely weather browned in their earliest harvest fields and before the nightly howl of the wolf had ceased from the outskirts of the village, they had made arrangements by which even in that wilderness their young men could at once enter upon the study of Aristotle, and Thucydides of Horace and Tacitus and the Hebrew Bible … the leader class was indeed an order of nobility among them.”
• “The mind is also a threat for marriage, because introversion undermines marital happiness. Divorced people turn out to have more intellectual interests than happily married people. A liking for philosophy, psychology, and radical politics and for reading the new republic are much less auspicious for marital bliss than a liking for YMCA work, bible study and the American magazine.”
• “One realizes that that new education if indeed trying to educate the whole child in that it is trying to shape the character and the personality of its charges and that what it aims to do is not primarily to fit them to become a disciplined part of the world of production and coopetition, ambition and vocation, creativity and analytical thought but rather to help them learn the ways of the world of consumption and hobbies of enjoyment and social complaisance, in short to adapt gracefully to the passive and hedonistic styles summed up in the significant term: ADJUSTMENT.”
• “The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.”
• “ The more one looks at great examples of creativity the more evident it becomes that creative minds are not typically nice or well-adjusted or accommodating or moderate that genius is often accompanied by some kind of personal disorder and that society must come to terms with this disorder if it wishes to have the benefit of the genius.”

[Ci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anti-intellectualism in American Life

This book is not a militant intellectual ranting against the conventional philistines. This is an essential history of US along the strand of the uneven relationship of intellectualism and the society at large. Each segment - from politics, religion, cultural and education — is traced with the shifting or cyclical position of intellectual life.

This is a well-written, engaging account. I would recommend for anyone interested in US’s history.

Here some notes —

I did not know Richard Hofstadter before reading this book, which first published in 1964, winner of the Pulitzer of that year. In the current, 2016, presidential election year, we may find poignant insights in the layout of the Primaries. As the author, a political scientist and an academic, said about Eisenhower’s era: “After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.” We are now in the general theme with some variation, this time is a loud-mouth, loud colored businessman himself.

I learnt about the difference between being “intelligent” and being “an intellectual”. As the author said: “intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality— one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues.” An intelligent person is a practical, rational human who functions competently. However, “Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind”. One can not differential an intelligent man from an intellectual from the professional job they do, it is “the professional man lives off ideas, not for them.”. The search of comprehension for its sake instead of looking for utility in the external world is the source of intellectuals’ frayed reputation in a pragmatic society such as America.

But it is not just the businessman’s irate or politicians’ suspicion that drives the anti-intellectualism. The author traced the roots of America’s Puritanic religious experience and the uneven relationship with the more conventional religious institution. The fundamentalistic, militant fraction of the population pits its battle in all aspects of social life with the elite, often by 20th century, the intellectuals. The fundamentalist religion with a fundamental Americanism often exhibits a mind totally committed and entirely refuse of challenge. These are what the author called “the one-hundred percent who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness and masculinity.”

It is unfair to say that American is a land dominated by barbarism, but there are certain moments that one wonders about it.

[Andrew Galloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars! America is crazy, and now I understand a little better why. This book was extremely simple in its outlook but very detailed in its research: it set to explain why “America”, purportedly built on idealism, freedom, and the future consistently demeaned and discredited its finest thinkers.

It gave pattern to the progressive/regressive swings of the pendulum throughout America’s short history, and gave logical explanations of each. I felt Hofstadter was particularly adept at setting the mood, the tone, the attitude of each epoch. Get those politicians campaigning on log cabins and hard cider!

It’s incredible to think this book was written in the 60s when ALL of its tenets are in very public display in the year 2020. Sometimes the only thing that predicts the future is the past.

[Helga Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hofstadler’s book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-fiction in 1964. It is still relevant in our society today. Hofstadler explores the development of the American bias against intellectualism. He covered topics ranging from religion (which by nature strangles intellectual thought) to education (where humanities are losing funding to strict business-applicable sciences.

This book illustrates how anti-intellectualism in American revivalist preachers were scorning the university educated ministers of New England. It is confounding to believe that America was actually founded and organized by intellectuals like our founding fathers and others. Six years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard College was established.

The author discusses reforming the education system which never took place and we are suffering to this day. The final chapter is a call for American intellectuals to counter act the ignorance that exists within our country, and not stand for being conformed into the current American society. America is more focused on the practical as opposed to the theoretical-economically focused rather than intellectually focused. America will continue to deal with bias against intellectual members of society for many years.

This is essential reading. It has commentary, history and an analysis of current events that is history but quite relevant today and especially this administration.

[Xavier Patiño · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having lived through the last 4 years of the Trump presidency, I can't help but wonder what the hell had happened to the United States. According to the polls, half the country blindly supported him, regardless of what he said or did, regardless of any institutional norms he managed to destroy. His speeches (or, really, rambling rants stinking with the filth of racism, sexism, jingoism...) managed to make no difference in his followers' undying loyalty. Coming from 8 years prior with an intellectual president, Barack Obama, it was a complete 180 in the direction many thought the country would head to. If you were paying attention, then you were trying to search for answers as to why an anti-intellectual imbecile was voted to the highest office in the land.

My personal search brought me to Richard Hofstadter and to this very well researched work. He tackles the underlying theme of anti-intellectualism that has been prevalent in four major pillars of American society: the religious, political, educational and business institutions. He offers a broad look of history, jumping in between pre-Revolutionary times until the mid 20th century. Within all of these, it seems that practicality was deemed more important than being educated in a classroom. Here are some examples I remember:

1. In religion, it was said that the one true book anyone ever needed to read was the Bible, and to dive into other works was foolish and unnecessary. A learned preacher was looked at with suspicion, and his sermons were thought of as being too intellectual for the simple man to follow, too difficult to understand. As one group of evangelical workers had put it: "It is more difficult to labour with educated men, with cultivated minds and moreover predisposed to skepticism, than with the uneducated."

2. Politics suffered from the same accusations. A man who tilled the land and worked with his hands knew more about how to run a government, how to speak to the layman; the "egghead" with his face shoved in books couldn't possibly understand any of this.

3. Colleges were looked at with dubiety as well. It was believed that only the rich and educated could send their kids there; the son of the farmer had no chance of being accepted. Not to mention that taxes had to be paid to support these institutions of higher learning, and that didn't jive well with the common people.

4. Practicality and business went hand in hand in the early 18th century. As industrialism began to grow, it became apparent that the need of college-educated men was needed to tackle the increasingly complicated workings of a growing economy, and international commerce was beginning to become a thing. Regardless, intellectualism was still being attacked.

In our current times, anti-intellectualism is still alive and well. In media, the scientist is still portrayed as a wily-eyed, wild-haired maniac who's esoteric dialogues only aim to confuse. The educated were looked at as effeminate -- real men worked with their hands and were not leisurely lounging around with their heads clouded in reverie. How many movies depict the 'nerd' being bullied around by the athlete? Whenever the 'nerd' speaks about the wonders of the universe or the complexity of biology, what to make of the looks of disgust and the eye-rolls they are given?

If you are wondering how we in America got here, this would be a great place to begin.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally read this book that I was supposed to have read decades ago in school, I was hoping it would shed some light on the cultural backwater history of the United States which Noam Chomsky has written so eloquently about. Two of Noam’s many points are that presently under 10% of Americans believe in evolution, and you have to go and chat with old women in Sicily to find beliefs similar to the U.S., where three-quarters of our population still believe in religious miracles. Richard’s single thesis is that throughout the entire history of the United States, there have been both intellectuals and those who despise them. For over 400 pages, Richard slogs through examples of the same unsurprising story – intellectuals and their haters were ebbing and flowing in power but coexisting throughout our history – who knew? At one point, Richard prattles off twenty cool names in American Literature in two sentences so the book looked deeper, but unlike the vast majority of reviewers of this book, I was not a big fan even though I had high hopes. If people read Noam’s collected writings on Anti-Intellectualism in American Life instead, there would be no comparison. I expected Richard to remark on the historical role of spectator sports as a fountain of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. (Noam discusses it frequently), but Richard says nothing about it here.

Anyway, what did I learn from THIS book? The best line in this book is from Irving Howe who said the biggest issue facing intellectuals was the “slow attrition which destroys one’s ability to stand firm and alone” which is seen by Richard as a chain of small compromises. Other interesting tidbits: A bible society travels west in the early 1800’s and “found community after community which had been settled many years but which had no schools and no churches and little interest in establishing either.” “The evolution controversy and the Scopes Trial greatly quickened the pulse of anti-intellectualism.” Walter Lippmann, former apologist for U.S. empire later wrote, “If I had to do it all over again I would take the other side…we supplied the Battalion of Death with too much ammunition.” And one final interesting pop fact: Before the 1840’s, the only two authors who made money were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Who knew? Again, I’ve learned 100 times more about this subject through books by Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Thomas Frank than by reading the 1963 award winning book. This book was plodding, albeit much better than reading Talcott Parsons after a root canal.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was a relief—a reassurance that America is not going off the rails but merely passing along the well-trod track of its own never ending debate between, on the one hand, practical and business-minded people with common sense and, on the other hand, those namby-pamby college-educated nitpickers who want to change America into some kind of unrecognizable communistic state where guns and families are outlawed and the EPA gets to decide how often we can use the toilet.

All kidding aside, reading this book reassured me that, with different phrases but always in the same tone of alarming hyperbole, it’s all been said before. Shortly after the end of Washington’s term as President Americans were off to the races in a power struggle between entrenched business interests on one side and idealists on the other side; Jefferson (too cerebral); John Adams (too much book-learning and time abroad); Jackson—a man of the people; Lincoln (caused a lot of trouble); Henry Adams (a man-milliner’, his ilk interested only in ‘snivel service reform’); Teddy Roosevelt (who tried his damnedest not to appear intellectual and bragged about not finishing any books); America’s political and social reformers were criticized for ‘forget[ting] that political parties are not built by deportment or ladies’ magazines …’ etc., etc. You can hear the echo of the term ‘femi-Nazis’ down through the years all the way to before the Civil War.

And yet, somehow or other, America had managed to make it through and boost the bulk of its population to something better than they had before … at least to until around the Moon Shot. But since the 70s the Chamber of Commerce went big business and big business went global and now what happens to the commoners seems to be of little interest to the movers and shakers attending their global economic forums and dude ranch golf outings. But they might well take heed, because concentration of wealth leads to bad economies. It’s even in the Bible—the parable of the unfaithful servant. Look it up. Or ask me. I would be happy to supply details.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like much of Richard Hofstadter's work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is both dated and timeless. Dated because Hofstadter, an historian-political scientist writing within the framework of postwar American consensus, captures well how mid-century writers viewed and analyzed politics. Timeless because much of his analysis remains pertinent as ever. Hofstadter, writing in 1964, uses the McCarthy era as a springboard for discussing how large tracts of Americans, from ordinary citizens to political, religious and even cultural leaders, reject intellectual pursuits, and intellectuals themselves, as wrongheaded if not actively dangerous. From Puritan times to the age of Goldwater and Nixon, demagogues won easy points questioning the wisdom and loyalty of the "elites," their attacks (however factually dubious) striking a chord with a public disinclined to trust experts of any stripe. Hosftadter views these attitudes as an unfortunate side effect of American democracy; if "all men are created equal," the syllogism implies, then surely that applies in matters of thought as well as race or creed. Except, as Hofstadter demonstrates, that very much isn't the case, and assuming so can be very harmful when these ideas are given force and weight, from anti-immigrant hysteria and Scopes Monkey Trials to communist witch hunts, pseudoscientific racism and (unsurprisingly) anti-vaccination campaigns. Published the same year Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in a moment of liberal apotheosis, the book's thesis that such ideas can be addressed through tolerant suasion seem like a comforting naivety. But it's discomforting that the tensions Hosftadter identifies here, however imperfectly, remain a powerful (and extremely harmful) force in the United States - and in the era of "fake news" and "alternate facts," there seems no ready solution.

[J Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in 1964, this book outlines the history of anti-intellectualism in our nation. Because the book was written almost 50 years ago, it delves deeper into the subject matter then most contemporary work. This book has become a cornerstone work on the subject, and is a must read for anyone interested in the subject matter. Sadly, the same problems that existed at the time of this work still have not been addressed today. The author could not have imagined the propaganda machines that political machines would create to perpetuate the anti-intellectual fever in America. Sadly again, the later part of the book focuses on reformation of the education system, something that never truly took place. We are suffering for it to this day, to be honest. And the history presented shows that America will continue to deal with bias against some of the most intelligent member of society for many years to come. This is just a reality we must deal with. As for the book itself, it starts out strongly, yet begins to drift near the end. The latter part, as mentioned, focuses on reformation. This subject does not jive with the current realities, making it difficult for today’s reader to fully connect.

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition" in high school, and I'm kind of surprised in retrospect that an author as critical of (honest about?) America was allowed into the halls of that stodgy institution. But, good news, dear reader: everyone was either too sleepy or disaffected (or high) to do the readings, so we never got at any true criticism. I think it would have been harder to avoid had we read this book.

It started off great, accounting for the suspicion of the learned that has existed in this country since long before the Declaration of Independence was signed. It veered into some particularly boring territory covering the educational philosophy of John Dewey, but about half of this was compelling and gratifying.