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A review by alexisrt
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
5.0
After 50 years, Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of anti-intellectualism in America is not just a historical curiosity; it’s a vital work that continues to inform modern thought and policy. When we see attacks on the liberal arts, on the purpose of the university, on science, on history courses in high school that do not function as mere patriotic indoctrination, when we idealize Bill Gates the college dropout, we see that tendency in full flower today. Though Hofstadter’s history stops in the early 1960s—at a culturally critical break point—if we want to understand the roots of modern Know-Nothingism, we could do far, far worse than to revisit this book. It is a book we should know, and not only know of. It is not a light read, but Hofstadter maintains a clear tone. He does not dumb down or make concessions, but neither does he stoop to pedantic jargon or pretentious pseudo-academic language.
That said, the book is 50 years old, and as such, it’s worth assessing it critically in light of the intervening decades. To do so is not to devalue it, but to enable it to inform our current perspectives. The most striking note is that this is almost entirely the history of the white male. This is almost inevitable to some degree, given the scope, though the debates between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, as an example, also exist within the same tradition. One particularly curious limitation is that it’s the history—and in the religion section, explicitly so–of the Christian white male. The word “Jew” is not mentioned, even when discussing opposition to Louis Brandeis. The Founding Fathers are discussed with a degree of adulation that would not be seen in a comparably liberal text today; the dismissal of accusations against Jefferson is striking, given what we now know to be true. The link between the feminization of the US teaching profession and its lack of prestige or respect is well noted and continues to be, but would probably have been expressed differently today.
The section on education raises the most questions for me. It is in this sector that the tensions between democracy and elitism, as Hofstadter defines them, are most pronounced in contemporary America. The primary weakness of the book, such as it is, is that it takes the benefits of the democratic tendency to be well taught and therefore self evident, and so the benefits of the elite are those that are highlighted. Although both conservative suspicion of intellect and what he sees as the progressive bigotry of low expectations—attacking the viewpoint prevalent in the early 20th century that a large proportion of children were not educable—he does not fully explore the need for a more democratic, less tiered system in the US, despite acknowledging the barriers of poverty and racial prejudice. At the same time, examining the system today, I can imagine Hofstadter railing against it and continuing his dual pronged attack: while we talk now of rigor and high expectations, we continue to prioritize intelligence over intellect, on both sides of the political spectrum. At the time of writing, the US was moving into a “mass preparatory” age, and we have yet to learn how to do it well.
Despite its age, however, far too much of the book feels immediate and fresh when read today. Adlai Stevenson is nothing more than a figure in a textbook to me, but the parallels came fast and thick: contemporary evangelical Christianity would have flowed easily from the discussions on early American religion; our continued belief that success in business, being a practical matter, is more preparation for public office than theoretical knowledge acquired as a specialist; our lack of support for science and art that we do not deem to be practical. Much has changed since 1964, but the tendencies Hofstadter describes so well have not.
That said, the book is 50 years old, and as such, it’s worth assessing it critically in light of the intervening decades. To do so is not to devalue it, but to enable it to inform our current perspectives. The most striking note is that this is almost entirely the history of the white male. This is almost inevitable to some degree, given the scope, though the debates between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, as an example, also exist within the same tradition. One particularly curious limitation is that it’s the history—and in the religion section, explicitly so–of the Christian white male. The word “Jew” is not mentioned, even when discussing opposition to Louis Brandeis. The Founding Fathers are discussed with a degree of adulation that would not be seen in a comparably liberal text today; the dismissal of accusations against Jefferson is striking, given what we now know to be true. The link between the feminization of the US teaching profession and its lack of prestige or respect is well noted and continues to be, but would probably have been expressed differently today.
The section on education raises the most questions for me. It is in this sector that the tensions between democracy and elitism, as Hofstadter defines them, are most pronounced in contemporary America. The primary weakness of the book, such as it is, is that it takes the benefits of the democratic tendency to be well taught and therefore self evident, and so the benefits of the elite are those that are highlighted. Although both conservative suspicion of intellect and what he sees as the progressive bigotry of low expectations—attacking the viewpoint prevalent in the early 20th century that a large proportion of children were not educable—he does not fully explore the need for a more democratic, less tiered system in the US, despite acknowledging the barriers of poverty and racial prejudice. At the same time, examining the system today, I can imagine Hofstadter railing against it and continuing his dual pronged attack: while we talk now of rigor and high expectations, we continue to prioritize intelligence over intellect, on both sides of the political spectrum. At the time of writing, the US was moving into a “mass preparatory” age, and we have yet to learn how to do it well.
Despite its age, however, far too much of the book feels immediate and fresh when read today. Adlai Stevenson is nothing more than a figure in a textbook to me, but the parallels came fast and thick: contemporary evangelical Christianity would have flowed easily from the discussions on early American religion; our continued belief that success in business, being a practical matter, is more preparation for public office than theoretical knowledge acquired as a specialist; our lack of support for science and art that we do not deem to be practical. Much has changed since 1964, but the tendencies Hofstadter describes so well have not.