My understanding of American political thought and history has been influenced (a great deal, I confess) by the historian Richard Hofstadter, particularly his book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”. Published in 1964 (for which he was awarded his second Pulitzer) the book was a response to the political events of the fifties, McCarthy’s rise and fall particularly, and to the emergence of the extremist tendencies of the Goldwater movement. But Hofstadter’s address to what America witnessed in that period was the address of an historian…
“Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950′s. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background. An examination of this background suggests that regard for intellectuals in the United States has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations…”
Given our own contemporary period, with Rush Limbaugh and the other talk radio shows modeled on his, given Murdoch’s Fox network, given Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber there seems no question that this cyclical anti-intellectualism is again a signal aspect of political culture in the US.
It would be a fine thing indeed if every bookshelf had a copy of this work. And as it happens, your bookshelf can have a copy… http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170 I don’t think there is any other book on American thought and politics which I would recommend more highly than this one.
Bernie Latham
