Buy new: $25.00
2.8 km | POINTE-AUX-TREMBLES H1A 1R0
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Paperback – Feb. 12 1966
| Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
|
Kindle Edition
"Please retry" | — | — |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateFeb. 12 1966
- Dimensions12.95 x 2.36 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-100394703170
- ISBN-13978-0394703176
Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought
Product description
Review
"The most comprehensive, succinct, and well-written one-volume treatment of the subject now available."--Walter Laqueur
From the Publisher
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Revised ed. edition (Feb. 12 1966)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0394703170
- ISBN-13 : 978-0394703176
- Item weight : 336 g
- Dimensions : 12.95 x 2.36 x 20.32 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #111,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #94 in History of Education (Books)
- #124 in Government and Political Science
- #135 in United States Politics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from Canada
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Thank you.
Hofstadter's subject matter is the unique American disdain for intellectuals and eggheads - a term he actually uses several times, quite surprisingly for such an academic work. American folklore glamorizes the self-made man who conquers the challenges of nature, educating himself with experience - the school of hard knocks - as opposed to the isolated and condescending intellectual who has book smarts but no experience. At the time of writing, the end of the McCarthyist era, anti-intellectualism was especially strong and Hofstadter examines the history of this always shifting issue. He also makes the important distinction between intellectualism and intelligence. Folks usually distrust the former but still respect the latter. Some of Hofstadter's examinations seem highly irrelevant today, like the role of intellectualism in farming or organized labor, but his coverage of issues in public education (including the perennial evolution debate) is depressingly familiar. It seems some things never change.
The writing style is very academic, and dare I say intellectual, so it can be a struggle getting through Hofstadter's obscure issues and references that were more relevant back in 1963. However his political stance is very strong and levelheaded, and his examination of McCarthyism is surprisingly lucid. The only overall problem with this book is that Hofstadter keeps the anti-intellectualism issue at the academic or social-discourse level. There is no coverage of the effects of anti-intellectualism on real people and real social problems, as the fear and hatred of knowledge that was present both then and now can have very unfortunate effects for culture and society.
Top reviews from other countries
Finally, even though it was published when John F. Kennedy was President, it is decidedly not out of date. In fact, anyone reading it will be amazed how the problems described here, from 50, 150, or even 200 years ago, may still crop up today.
What is an intellectual? It is not necessarily someone with a genius-level IQ, or someone who speaks 5 languages, or even necessarily someone who discovers a new theory in physics.
An intellectual is simply someone who takes the same pleasure in the exercise of his or her mind, in exploring ideas, as healthy and physically fit people do when they're out throwing a Frisbee or playing touch football. The pleasure is in the activity itself.
Imagine a small child trying to see how many blocks she can stack up on top of each other before they fall. On the one hand, the child is playing--that is, doing something for no reason but that she enjoys it. On the other hand, she is perfectly serious and focused on her goal. If the stack of blocks falls down, she simply tries again.
The intellectual is the person who shows this combination of play and seriousness towards ideas. To use the analogy of blocks again, the intellectual takes each block and turns it over to look at it from all sides, stacks the blocks up, arranges them in various shapes, and so forth.
Of course this activity can have a serious purpose--e.g., thinking through the ethics of cloning--but to be a specifically intellectual pursuit, it must be done out of the love of the activity itself.
America has often had a love-hate relationship with intellectualism, and still does today. Ironically, one of the ages that prized the intellect most was the Puritan era, because Puritans valued a learned ministry; after all, it was they who founded Harvard. Later, many of the Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson and Franklin, had wide intellectual interests, from philosophy, to science and the arts. Up to the middle of the 19th century, even many businessmen were cultured and well-educated--indeed, the goal of that day was to make one's fortune in trade and then retire at a relatively early age to a life of culture and philanthropy.
Despite these notable periods of favor for the intellectual, it is equally true that something about American civilization has often worked against intellectualism. Part of it was that America, which began as pioneer settlements, always had to be very practical. Another aspect was the idea that cultured and educated elites were undemocratic--resentment of "the elites" didn't begin with today's Tea Party but was always an undercurrent of American life. A third aspect was that Americans tended to see the past as something dark and backward to be improved upon and then abandoned by American know-how and self-reliance.
In politics, the Jeffersonian philosopher type went out with the age of Andrew Jackson. For the rest of the 19th century, intellectuals were mostly ineffectual reform types, criticizing from the sidelines, in magazine articles; they were not consulted in public life again until the turn of the 20th century. Their favor was high during the age of Wilson, perhaps even higher with Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust," only to come under suspicion once more during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
In business, the shift from trade to railroad building and, later, manufacturing, left the businessman less leisure for intellectual pursuits, nor was he particularly interested in having men work for him who were preoccupied with theory and speculation--enough education to read, write, and handle business math was satisfactory. In religion, the scholarly minister was replaced by the barely literate circuit rider, who rode the mountains and forests for miles to preach in log cabins to backwoods settlers. Later, it was felt that too much education might undermine religious faith, and we had the spectacle of the Scopes trial. Meanwhile, practical businessmen of that day didn't care to know about theological ideas so much as the idea of religion as a "power source" that could be turned on at will.
Even literature and the arts suffered. America, unlike Europe, had no ruins of the Parthenon or medieval castles, nor did it have the same traditions of civilization. Artists and writers could certainly portray what they found here and did, but there was still a tension between merely celebrating this new land and achieving the critical distance with which the intellectual examines everything.
Even education itself was not without its challenges. If you think that "the good old days" of education, when every child had 3 years of foreign language, 3 years of math, 3 years of science, and 2 years of U.S. history, lasted continuously until a couple of decades ago, read chapters 13 and 14 of this book, and they will startle you. In the name of progressive educational theories, traditional education underwent such radical changes beginning in 1910, culminating in the "life adjustment" movement of the 1940s and 1950s, that the U.S. Navy found that many of its World War II recruits required remedial math, and the president of Yale wrote, in 1954, about a high school graduate who seemed intelligent enough to attend Yale but whose high school transcript showed mostly electives in subjects like school choir, social adjustment, etc., with just a smattering of English, history, and the more traditional academic subjects.
Hofstadter's final chapter addresses the tension between intellectuals who are willing to apply their knowledge and abilities to the service of institutions, including government and industry and those, on the other hand, who fear that they will "sell out" and be co-opted by conventional norms if they cooperate too much with society. Hofstadter was optimistic that it was possible for intellectuals to adopt a balanced outlook, cooperating with society and using their talents for its benefit, while always remaining independent-minded enough to apply their own original thinking to society's problems and not simply go along with the crowd.
Hofstadter's untimely death from leukemia at 55, in 1970, certainly deprived America of one of her foremost thinkers. This book, one of about 6 major works that he wrote, is around 450 pages, arranged in chapters of about 30 pages apiece, with notes at the end of each chapter. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand how the world's most advanced society can sometimes seem, at the same time, to contain knuckleheads and dunces--some, unfortunately, in positions of power. Again, this is not new--the only question is how we will respond and what kind of society we wish to have.
Religion in America
In early, dispersed America, learned preachers with their dry approach to religious services were less effective at filling the pews than charismatic laypeople. In response to the challenge, Protestant sects began to debate the value of formal education for religious leaders. Many early Americans believed that direct interpretation of the bible did not require formal instruction, that formal education might actually be an impediment to connecting with the spiritual world. The reverence for the formally trained seminarian began to slip and in many corners of American spiritual life, has never recovered.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the tensions between the intelligentsia and fundamentalists grew as the marketplace of ideas expanded and science began to offer more explanations for the natural world. Nothing highlights this conflict more than the public controversies surrounding Darwinism and evolution, a true turning point for American society that persists to the present day. Then, as now, parents became concerned that formal science instruction would rob their children of their religious faith. They saw resisting these scientific ideas as an struggle to defend their families, homes and very way of life. "Unknowledge" became preferable to tolerating threats to belief.
A strain of thought emerged in which emotion and instinct were valued over reason. Some saw the reliance on instinct as part of the frontier American spirit. America's very success was evidence that formal education was unnecessary. (After all, the country's pioneers never needed it to be successful.) A militancy of "100 perceters" emerged within whose ranks there could be no compromise, no dissent and no questioning--a "you're either with or against us" mentality.
Education in America
Interestingly, the esteem for teachers has always been low in America and their pay has always been poor as compared to more highly valued business occupations. The inability to find teachers of high quality given these two factors has been a standard complaint in the U.S. that we hear even now.
Though most Americans are unaware of it, compulsory education was not a requirement in most states until the early 20th century. Labor interests were often responsible for driving enforcement of compulsory education into higher age ranges in an effort to reduce child labor exploitation (and protect adult workers from cheap competition).
The concern that students are poorly educated and are generally uninterested in education is long-standing as is the lament that our educational system is poorly resourced and often disgraceful compared to other developed Western nations. The problem of unwilling and hostile students appeared when compulsory attendance was extended into secondary school, another problem that continues to this day.
At the turn of the century, there was considerable debate over the role of the high school. Was it to provide students with life skills or prepare them for college? Today, we naturally assume it's the former, but this is a relatively recent view. The very role of schools changed as a result of mass European immigration to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Schools began to assume the role of provider of life-skill instruction to immigrants whose children did not understand the native language and in some cases needed to be educated in the ways of basic hygiene in order to promote good health. This is yet a further drift away from the the school's one time role as instructor of the classics, foreign languages and mathematics, curricula which Hofstadter's believes teach students how to think critically and creatively.
At one time, it was thought that children who lacked aptitude or drive should be released from secondary school, that to keep them against their or their family's will was detrimental to the classroom environment and the advancement of other students. Discontinuing secondary school in favor of vocational education was seen as more appropriate for such students. But American democratic ideals demand that all students be treated as completely equal regardless of their aptitude or interest. In the 1940s and 50s, there was a push to match the educational system more closely to the needs of children who in an earlier time would have been deemed "uneducable." Alarming high school drop out rates are, contrary to evening news reports, nothing new. They've been a continuous American preoccupation since compulsory secondary schooling laws went into effect. Believing that everyone can be educated to the same standard, we have been chasing the dream of "no child left behind" ever since. Hofstadter's view is that academic standards have been so diluted in order to allow the lowest common denominator to achieve success in high school, that the curious and driven student is left neglected.
In the least interesting, least compelling part of the book--the Conclusion--Hofstadter spends a lot of time mulling over the role of the intellectual in modern American life (in his case, the mid-1960s)...to me, a seemingly fatuous debate over whether American intellectuals (whatever they are exactly) have been co-opted by their acceptance of American culture. His thesis seems to be that if they're not complaining or otherwise decrying our political, cultural or capitalist system, they're no longer "true" intellectuals.
The book is built upon a key insight, the essential difference between intellect and intelligence. "Intellect . . . is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind" (p. 25). We have always valued it less than raw intelligence or practical expertise. We pay applied scientists more than basic scientists; we pay orthopedic surgeons more than we pay laboratory scientists seeking to cure cancer or arthritis. We are skeptical of `eggheads' and those who dwell in the world of `theory' rather than fact.
Why? In part because of our religious fervor and the nature of that fervor. In part because of well-meaning but wrongheaded educational theorists. In part because of our politics and our practical culture.
Hofstadter does not enter this culture war with an uncritical sense of intellect's claims. He knows, full well, with Orwell that there are some notions so silly that only intellectuals could entertain them and it is entirely possible that he would share William F. Buckley's desire to be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phonebook rather than by the Harvard faculty. He does not take a partisan position that is essentially uncritical or naïve. He knows the world of the intellectual in his blood, bone and marrow because, in his relatively brief life, he was a leader there.
The book is a very thoughtful one, characterized by an exceedingly broad range of subject matter (from Puritan sermonizing to differing responses to Dadaism and the beat `generation'). At bottom, the book's genius lies in its understanding of the issues and its ability to trace the etiology of our current situation.
The long and the short of it is that we now live in a world of specialization, specialization that is often detached from intellection. Intellection may be dangerous and its missteps sometimes striking but at its heart (the critical, creative, contemplative) it is essential to human life and culture. Until the 19th century (one might say, especially in the 18th century) intellect and power were far more closely aligned. The period's thinkers "hoped that knowledge would in fact be broadened by a conjunction with power, just as power might be civilized by its connection with knowledge" (p. 427). This is the ethos of the founding fathers. As Hofstadter writes, Jefferson read Adam Smith; President Eisenhower read western fiction.
However, the society of the 18th century was unspecialized. "Today knowledge and power are differentiated functions" (p. 428). And at what cost? We can grant the difficulties accompanying the growth of knowledge. How possible can it now be to have a figure such as Goethe who could participate in politics on a large stage, write one of the enduring masterpieces of western letters, make contributions to light and color theory and achieve a major discovery in comparative anatomy? But what of an education system which often gives up any thought of generalized genius at the outset? Speaking as an intellectual, with the same stature as Hofstadter, the great Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan once commented that most great leaps in scholarship occur because of general education, because, as per Kuhn, most researchers are doing routine work, in tunnels. What takes them out of those tunnels are insights and perspectives drawn from other disciplines. What are the prospects for such breakthroughs when we opt for pragmatic vocationalism rather than classical liberal arts education?
While performing the historian's task of elucidating the causes of our current circumstance, Hofstadter invites us to consider the implications of that circumstance and the larger questions which it entails.
One might quibble with details; e.g., in his discussion of religion, Hofstadter contrasts reason with emotion. Hume (in his decisive discussion of the two) would have said `faith' rather than `emotion', though in fairness to Hofstadter, pivotal elements of American religion are decidedly emotional. The possible quibbles, however, are dwarfed by Hofstadter's achievement here. This is a very, very important book.
The major weakness of his argument concerns cause and effect. Although each section is full of examples in which excessive education is criticized, Hofstadter does not convincingly explain why American society gravitated towards simplistic and anti-intellectual tendencies. For example, the rise of evangelistic religions in which excessive academic training is seen as a hindrance to salvation is presented as a factor that contributed to anti-intellectualism. Shouldn't the real question be why Americans gravitated to evangelism rather than to faiths which required more formal training of their ministers? Not until the section on business does Hofstadter propose that the economic success of immigrants who previously belonged to the lower (and uneducated) classes was critical to the success of anti-intellectualism.
50 years after its publication, it is easy to see that Hofstadter's optimism that anti-intellectualism had died out was premature. And sadly, the one area that Hofstadter had never seen evidence of anti-intellectualism, namely knowledge of the physical sciences, has now become a key battleground in American politics with the current doubt of climate change.





