Anti-intellectualism in American Life

             I’ve had it in mind to read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) for some time, now, but lighter entertainments have been more tempting during the current plague. Not that there is anything inherently difficult about Hofstadter’s book; his style is clear and his arguments methodical. But the book is dense and full of particulars in the way it sets out the historical background of the give and take between intellectualism and its denigrators. I have spent a few weeks, pleasanter than I expected them to be, slowly reading through his chapters, and I am ready to vouch for the book’s readability and its continued relevance at our historical moment.

            Anti-intellectualism is “older than our national history and “subject to cyclical fluctuations, writes Hofstadter. He defines it at “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind…and a disposition…to minimize the value of that life.” As used here, it involves social attitudes and political behavior. He begins with some examples. Ike didn’t like “eggheads.” America has a disdain for “pure science.” The far-right wing has characteristically expressed resentment of the educated, established classes, and McCarthy was the most notorious standard-bearer for them. The right wing also has a tendency to call universities Communist breeding grounds, to reflect the old Jacksonian dislike of specialists and experts, as well as a generalized anti-culturalism. Evangelicals have tended to see intellectuals as relativists and moral bankrupts, and to see education as primarily indoctrination. Another part of the population thinks educational standards of any sort, as well as any required curriculum, wrong. Anti-intellectualism is “a broadly diffused quality” in America, Hofstadter concludes his introduction by saying, which “first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion,” later “became associated with our passion for equality,” and became “formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”

            Considering what intellect is, Hofstadter in the second part of his introduction looks at popular usage and attitudes about it. Intelligence is distinguished from intellect in the public mind: intelligence is practical, while intellect is abstract. Most professional work—that of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and often even writers and professors—is not intellectual. The intellectual, he argues, has an attitude toward ideas that includes what he calls piety and playfulness. The dedication to the life of the mind is “like a religious commitment,” and takes as its essence Socrates’s assertion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The intellectual is engaged, committed, and feels that the intellectual life has moral significance. All this he calls its piety. As for playfulness, he may live for ideas, but is not obsessive about one idea. Harold Rosenberg says an intellectual is “one who turns answers into questions.” And since the “element of play seems to be rooted in the ethos of the leisured class,” and piety “is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals,” it is not at all surprising that the intellectual’s position is uncertain in a country that is “the home of the democrat and the antinomian.”

            Hofstadter argues that American ideas about the impracticality of intellectualism have changed now that intellectuals find their way, through brain trusts, councils of advisors, and quasi-governmental agencies, into policy management and real power. Now the intellectual is resented because he is the expert calling the shots. And experts don’t always get it right or avoid partisan decisions or venality, furnishing more ammunition for resentment. We have a populist tradition of government by the common man that means the elites and the experts are always under suspicion. Historically, the intellectuals found themselves in opposition to the right wing in politics. The allegiance of many intellectuals to Communism in the 1930s gave the right wing a perpetual talking point equating the one with the other. Moreover, the American heartland, often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and deeply conservative in values, resents the intellectual as being the harbinger of change and the modern, global in perspective, and skeptical in nature. A mythology has developed among its enemies about intellectualism: that it is opposed to feeling, values mind over character, and is anti-democratic.

            The main body of the book develops ideas about evangelism as being anti-intellectual, about populism in politics leading to scorn of anyone with special expertise, about the fluctuating fortunes of reform movements led by intellectual critiques of economic or political wrongs, and the way the expert advisor to power has sometimes been valued but is frequently the object of popular suspicion. Business, which Hofstadter calls “the most powerful and pervasive interest in American life,” tends to devalue the past—which means effectively a disdain for culture—and to set its practicality and modernity against the intellectual’s respect for the lessons of history and tendency toward abstraction. The American “self-help” strain is inimical to intellectualism. Hofstadter looks at “a popular culture that has been proudly convinced of its ability to get along…without the benefits of formal knowledge,” and points to some examples: farmers’ resistance to agricultural education and innovation, and the labor movement, which, though it began with an intellectual critique of capitalism, became effective only when pragmatic and non-intellectual leaders took over.

            Education and the American dream of its being available to everyone would seem to be the natural allies of intellectualism, but Hofstadter shows that it has not been so in the past, nor is likely to be so in the future. Horace Mann’s mid-nineteenth-century criticism detailing inadequate classroom buildings, insufficient funds, the abandonment of public schools by the rich, and the lack of competent teachers might have been written yesterday. Even if an adequately educated and respected class of teachers had been available, it would have faced the conviction that public school education was never intellectual in purpose, but had social, economic, and political indoctrination for its aim and always emphasized character over brains. Additionally, American public school education has been crippled by movements such as the “ill-fated life-adjustment movement of the 1940s and 1950s,” that insisted that school subjects had to be practical preparation for life and that reduced the college preparatory subjects taught to a fraction of the curriculum.

            Hofstadter concludes with a chapter called “The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity.” He points out that in colonial America and the early republic two groups of intellectuals held the power: the Puritan clergy and the Founding Fathers. “The Puritan clergy founded the tradition of New England intellectualism.” The Founding Fathers’ intellectualism was important until the expansion to the West diluted its power and the Jacksonian egalitarian ethos superseded it. But later developments such as progressivism, reform, and New Deal economic reconstruction have brought intellectuals back to the fore. An innate problem of the intellectual in America, though, has been the country’s anti-elite sentiments, grounded in democratic government. The intellectuals are, whether economically privileged or not, an elite class. Another problem is that intellectuals “are troubled…when power disregards the counsels of intellect,” but “when power comes to intellect for counsel” they are even more troubled by the possibility of their corruption by power. It is clear from Hofstadter’s discussion that the union of power and intellect depends for its success on the right politician asking for the help of the intellectual, and the right intellectual supplying it.

            In a 2014 Columbia Journalism Review article, Nicholas Lemann argued for the continued relevance of this book fifty years after its publication. I think the present contrast between an outgoing President of the United States who thought, à la Andrew Jackson, that any one of his friends and loyalists was capable of filling any government job, and an incoming President who is picking people with experience and expertise for those jobs—this contrast illustrates well the back-and-forth movement Hofstadter has described in American history, and the contrast also argues that Lemann is right about Hofstadter’s enduring relevance.