U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Post-Conference Thoughts on “Anti-Intellectualism”

Last weekend, the tenth S-USIH Conference took place in Chicago.  It was wonderful to reconnect with longtime S-USIHites and meet first-time attendees, from brilliant graduate students to very senior faculty members.  I am deeply grateful to Conference Chair – and USIH blogger – Tim Lacy and his committee for putting together such a great program.

I often devote my first post after the conference to some post-conference reflections. And I came out of this year’s conference thinking about its theme: Anti-Intellectual Sensibilities…though the word that appeared in many panel titles and that seemed to be on most participants’ lips was “anti-intellectualism.”  As a conference theme this worked extraordinarily well.  “Anti-intellectualism” could be connected to any number of topics in intellectual history that interest S-USIH members – from piety to politics, fitness culture to “Founders Chic.”

But I came into the conference suspicious of “anti-intellectualism” both as a distinct phenomenon and as an analytical category.  And I can’t say I left feeling any better about it as either one.

When most of us in the history biz hear “anti-intellectualism” we think immediately of Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). It’s been decades since I read the book in graduate school, but it’s not a favorite of mine.  I largely share Dan Rodgers’s sense (expressed in a question during the Friday evening plenary on “Christianity and the Problem of Anti-Intellectualism”) that, like his account of Populism in The Age of Reform, Hofstadter’s critique of anti-intellectualism is driven by his suspicion of democracy. I’d add that from the spring of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life have flowed decades of lesser, crankier, and even more clearly anti-democratic books, such as Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008).[1]

But the problem of “anti-intellectualism” as a category go beyond the politics that frequently accompany it.  As a number of people pointed out during the conference, the term is enormously slippery. Among other things it can mean:

  1. A hostility to thinking.
  2. A hostility to people who think.
  3. A hostility to a certain kind of thinking.
  4. A hostility to a certain group of people who think.
  5. Stupidity.
  6. Opposition to something called “intellectualism.”

I think that the last of these options is a little silly.  As in “anti-semitism,” the “ism” in “anti-intellectualism” is, as It were, added after, not before, the “anti.” “Anti-intellectualism” is the system of thought of people who are anti-intellectual.  Defining “intellectualism” is as unnecessary to defining “anti-intellectualism” as defining “semitism” is to defining “anti-semitism.”

But the first four meanings are all potentially useful. The problem is that they often bleed into each other in sloppy ways. “Anti-intellectualism,” like other essentially protean concepts, can easily be used in ways that avoid clarifying which of the four you’re actually talking about. And in many cases, “anti-intellectualism” ends up being just a highfalutin’ way of saying #5.

But while all of this will likely keep me from deploying “anti-intellectualism” in my own work, the concept’s very pliability made it an excellent node around which to build a conference.

For example, all four of the participants in the terrific Saturday Plenary roundtable on “Populism, Democracy, and Anti-Intellectualism” — Heather Cox Richardson, David Sehat, Jennifer Rather-Rosenhagen, and the panel’s chair and moderator Sophia Rosenfeld — took full advantage of the slipperiness of the concept (as well as of that other famously slippery category “populism”).  Both Sehat and Richardson, in different ways, explored our particular political moment and scholars’ relation to it.  Rather-Rosenhagen traced the genealogy of a particular critique of America. In each case, identifying the object of discussion – the nature of the political challenge we face or of that critique – was part of the point. And the concept’s open-endedness served the open-endedness of their answers, which was particularly perfect for a roundtable format.

There are many things I hope to take back from a conference, but among the most important are new questions to think about. And I think that’s why Anti-Intellectual Sentiments proved to be such a fruitful conference theme.  I remain unconvinced that the concept of “anti-intellectualism” can be the basis for many satisfying intellectual historical answers.  But it certainly raises a lot of interesting questions.

Notes

 

[1] I just checked to see whether Jacoby mentions Hofstadter (I had remembered that she did). As it turns out, this is how the book’s introduction begins:  “It is the dream of every historian – especially in a culture permeated by lies – to produce a work that endures and provides the foundation for insights that my lie decades or centuries in the future. Such a book is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life…” Jacoby goes on to say that her book was ”motivated partly by a desire to pay homage to Hofstadter.”

10 Thoughts on this Post

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  1. The Jacoby book is truly awful. I listened to it on audio book back during my first year of graduate school and couldn’t get all the way through it — and that was back when my politics were some bizarro combination of socially liberal and identity & loneliness driven backlashey notions. (Even *that* Robin knew it was a mess, lol!) I’m not even sure what distilled thesis there is in that book, other than “look at all these stupid people who believed stupid things weren’t they stupid.”

  2. One of the more common terms used to describe anti-intellectualism is “protean.” We might also say capacious. I made it “anti-intellectual sensibilities” because I wanted to explicitly bridge the reason-emotion gap in the minds of those pondering theme-related proposals. I’m glad to see, Ben, that you felt this worked as a theme.

    There can be no doubt that capacious terms like anti-intellectualism will be abused. Like Ben, the least interesting iteration is “against intellectualism” or also “against intellectuals.” Few people are against either, despite the political currency, or expediency, of seemingly taking that tact. More useful for polemics is anti-elitism. “Elites” range beyond professors into robber barons and power-hungry exclusionists (yes, that’s a word/noun).

    The usefulness of putting “anti-intellectualism”—in its most capacious sense—to work depends entirely on the extremity of the events being analyzed. There are very few human endeavors not worth some degree of doubting, or about which we can raise real and legitimate questions. I think it’s most useful analytically when the event or action, in the field of thought, is most blatantly lazy, simple, stupid, thoughtless, ignorant, obviously ideologically motivated, or emotionally reactionary. In this way, it’s similar in deployment to pseudoscience. Here I’ll draw a parallel to something laid out by Michael Gordin in his 2012 book, *The Pseudoscience Wars*—reviewed here by in 2014).

    Utilizing the work and reflections of Martin Gardner and Albert Einstein, Gordin argues that there is no clear and bright line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. The same thing applies to the continuum of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. That said, there is, at a times, a qualitative difference—using Gardner’s line of thought—between science and pseudoscience (and intellectualism/anti-intellectualism)—that justifies a polemical dismissal.

    Despite that justification for using anti-intellectualism to describe a phenomenon, I still think the term is overused. It’s definitely been overused, uncarefully to the point of uselessness, in describing, for instance, Trump and his followers since 2016. I tend to see the use of anti-intellectualism as a sign that some other phenomenon deserves exploration—racism, problems with capitalism, political performance, sexism, gender, etc. And then there’s Robert Proctor and his invention of the “agnotology” neologism—structured and purposed ignorance.

    Anyway, that’s enough from me. Thanks so much for raising the points of above. – TL

  3. There is something a bit stale about the anti-intellectualism debate right now. Just a simple suggestion. Perhaps we should begin to incorporate more of a comparative dimension into the debate about what anti-intellectualism is or is not and how we can best measure it. Here Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds is useful as a guide. As I remember it, he noted that the intellectuals of almost every national culture think their situation is the most dire, i.e. the most anti-intellectual. As I remember it, there was a general consensus that French intellectualism was strongest within the European and North American sample. I personally think that there is also an argument to be made that American academics and intellectuals beat themselves up over this issue, excessively. Anyway, just a thought

  4. Thanks for these reflections, Ben. The question of anti-intellectualism’s utility as a historical category in, say, early America is equally tough to parse. I’m thinking of the standard historiography on everything from the Salem witchcraft trials, to the rise of evangelicalism, or even on the so-called “age of Jackson” and the self-interest of a generation (often painted as plucky and rough-hewn) that drove the market revolution. Your suggestion to investigate the genealogy of this idea is fascinating, given its deep roots.

  5. Thanks for all the replies!

    I think Salem and evangelicalism are good examples of where its fogginess makes “anti-intellectualism” both a possible, yet not very useful, description.

    At least in the work of Increase Mather, the witchcraft trials were thoroughly intellectualized. Which is not at all to say that we shouldn’t be critical of works like Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. I just don’t think that the term “anti-intellectual” gets us very far in describing what is wrong with them.

    In the case of evangelical Christianity, “anti-intellectual” applies better, but is far too unspecific. Evangelical Christianity certainly believed in the limits of reason and the power and significance of spiritual forces that cannot entirely be grasped by it. But a word like “irrationalism” captures that quality much more precisely than “anti-intellectualism.” And it’s hard to deny that leading evangelicals like Finney and Moody were themselves public intellectuals (though I suppose one might object to that term being applied at all in Finney’s day).

  6. This is where I swoop into the comments to encourage everyone to read Amy Kittelstrom’s book, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition, which offers a thorough reading of the moment when what she calls “the American Reformation” or “Reformed Christianity in America,” which had a long legacy of empiricism and intellectual rigor, began to drift into two separate camps, one concerned with evangelical conversion and one concerned with the pursuit of virtue via right reasoning. (Not that the theological systems of the evangelical wing lacked intellectual rigor!) Her framing does a very good job, I think, of demonstrating the long durée of (perfectly mainstream) Protestant thought (the virtue-focused Christians) that long infused American intellectual life as religious thought, not a “secularized” version of the same. The willingness of Hofstadter and others to cede to the “neo-Calvinists” or the “evangelicals” their own claims of Christian orthodoxy, and assume that Christianity, or even religiosity as such, was “left behind” by Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and champions of self-culture, is part of the question-begging that too easily assumes the religious anti-intellectualism it attempts to prove.

    [I may borrow a chunk from this comment for my post next week. In the meantime — everybody should read Kittelstrom’s marvelous book!]

  7. Ben Alpers’ passing comment in the OP, w/r/t Hofstadter, about the latter’s “suspicion of democracy” leads me to make this comment, which has nothing do with Hofstadter but something to do with the current political moment in the U.S. and with issues perhaps raised, if obliquely, by the slippery notion of anti-intellectualism. (I assume, btw, that by “suspicion of democracy” in that Hofstadter context Ben meant something like suspicion of “the people,” however defined, or suspicion of “the masses” or of “the median voter,” or some similar thing.)

    As one who is somewhere to the left of center on the political spectrum (I’ll leave that for now deliberately vague), I’d make a couple of observations about the current U.S. political climate. First, I think it’s undeniable that the alt-right is a phenomenon that should not be dismissed or minimized; it’s pretty clear that the overlapping categories of ‘white nationalists’, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and assorted other racists and xenophobes are more active, and more vocal and visible, in the U.S. now than has been the case for some time. This is obviously very alarming, to use an inadequate word. Policies of the Trump admin that reflect this sentiment, e.g. on borders and immigration among other things, are in my view unconscionable.

    At the same time, I suspect that it’s probably a mistake to think that the large majority or all of Trump voters fall into the categories of irredeemable racists and/or alt-rightists. This seems to be the assumption or view of, for example, many of the people who comment at the blog Lawyers Guns and Money (LGM), the comments sections of which these days, based on an occasional glancing visit, often seem to consist of people engaging in repetitive, and sometimes empirically contentless, denunciations of all the racists and xenophobes who comprise not only Trump’s base but, on this view, virtually everyone who votes for the ‘R’ candidate on a ballot for any office anywhere.

    It’s true of course that the Republican Party has been at least temporarily taken over by Trumpism and that its center of gravity has moved correspondingly rightward. (Not that Goldwaterism and Reaganism and Bushism were left-wing phenomena.) But if Trumpism is in part characterized or fueled by a sort of anti-intellectualism, embodied preeminently in Trump himself, I’d suggest that it is arguably anti-intellectual for opponents of Trump and Trumpism to spend time preaching to the converted (i.e., each other) via collective, repetitive denunciations, as for instance in some of the comment threads at LGM. Such rituals seem to be mostly about proving their bona fides to each other, or simply venting. This reinforces the much remarked echo-chamber effect and, at a certain point, probably doesn’t accomplish much of anything.

    Now I suppose there might be a case to be made that as long as there are right-wing sites devoted to partisanship and outrage, there should be sites devoted to partisan outrage on “our side,” esp. in a context where the establishment media sometimes cling to notions of “balance” that may be factitious, irrelevant, and/or oblivious to the current discursive environments. But that’s a case that should be made, I think, not simply assumed.

    P.s. The above, btw, should not be taken as a wholesale indictment of Lawyers Guns and Money, whose front-page bloggers sometimes do useful and interesting work. (And should there be any responses to this comment, the necessity for some offline time means I probably won’t be able to respond to them as quickly as I’d like.)

  8. After the conference, I came to the conclusion that anti-intellectualism is a spoiled concept, too murky, various and over-used to be a viable analytical term in history. Hofstadter himself said that “its very vagueness makes it more serviceable in controversy as an epithet,” and that a formal definition would be “historically arbitrary.” [6-7]

    But were the question to be considered, one might look into some of the distinctions he makes. For instance, he declares most anti-intellectuals have not been philosophers, and that anti-intellectualism isn’t the same as the “philosophical doctrine” of “anti-rationalism”; that it’s “not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to ideas,” and “leading anti-intellectuals are usually…deeply engaged with ideas,” sometimes looking for acceptance as insiders; that anti-intellectualism more often takes a “mild and benign” than a rabid, extreme form; and that we should avoid the trap of abstracted binaries used often in anti-intellectual attacks ”to make a defense of intellect as against emotion or character or practicality.” [8, 21, 19, 46]

    At the same time, no one appears to have examined the book in relation to the rest of Hofstadter’s work, or how it was received in the context when the prominence and problems of intellectuals were hot topics. Hofstadter mentions people such as Merle Curti, Jacques Barzun and Morton White, the last whose distinction between hostility to intellectuals and hostility to a way of thinking, he draws upon in his closest approach to definition. [7]

    In a review in the AHR, Arthur Bestor remarked on the book’s lack of clear definition and tendency to reify anti-intellectualism as if it were a single force; for him it was best read as the history of a prominent “style” of American politics and public life, thus linking it to his later work. [AHR 70, 4, July 1965, 1118-1120.] Rush Welter reviewed it for JAH and said it might be seen as a “protean” concept, “difficult to employ wisely in historical analysis.” [JAH 51, 3, Dec 1964, 482.]

    An earlier number of the Journal of Social Issues [11, 3, Summer 1955] devoted to anti-intellectualism included articles by an interdisciplinary collection of scholars including William Leuchtenberg, Carey McWilliams, Bernard Barber, Rollo May, and others. Hofstadter had helped set the stage for these and other treatments in an earlier article on “Democracy and Anti-intellectualism in America,” Michigan Alumnus Q Review 59, 21, Aug 8, 1953.

    Certainly the aim of the conference wasn’t to historicize the concept; but more of that might have served its broader aims.

    • Bill: My essay in American Labyrinth traces the reception history of the book. I study many reviews and historicize (and historiographicize) the book. I also look at a few successor works (Noll, Jacoby, Liu), and talk about how they perpetuate errors or simply build on Hofstadter’s AIAL. I then call for new directions and ways to use anti-intellectualism as an historical sign and signal. – TL

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