About this title: A book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.
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Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Random House Inc
Date Published: 1963-06-01
ISBN-13:9780394703176ISBN:0394703170
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780394703176. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1966
ISBN-13:9780394703176ISBN:0394703170
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
"A excellent (Pulitzer Prize-winning, actually) look at the state of the intellectual in American society and culture from the Puritans to the Beatniks. I loved it in that it gave me great insight into the current state of intellectual thought in the US; particularly, Hofstadter's review of Dewey and the Progressives clarified my ambivalent stance toward that movement within my profession. I highly recommend the book, as it is not only insightful, but also well written. Hofstadter's academic voice breaks every once in a while, revealing a flirty wit. As with other great historians, his work makes me want to read his source material."
"I couldn't finish this the first time I tried. Just wasn't in the mood at the time. I thought it would be kind of interesting reading on whacked out stuff like the Know-Nothings, the KKK, nativism, the Birchers, and so on, but it turns out it's mostly about the influence of Evangelicals on our politics and culture throughout American history. And I thought I wanted to know more about that too, but it turned out to be pretty boring in practice, so I dropped it, for now. I'll finish eventually, because it feels like stuff I ought to know, in the light of current events.
I ended up finishing this up a couple of years later. It was mostly good, but what he groups under anti-intellectualism gets a little too broad for my liking. I mean, that's the thesis and what the book is setting out to do, and most of it probably does count as anti-intellectual under a strict definition of the term, but it sort of rankled to see any form of populism or attempts at democratic participation in institutions getting lumped in with Bircher loons. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean to make those equivalencies, but it's sort of a problem with the project. When you start to make progressive and non-canon education look like it's somewhere on a continuum with Bircher wingnuttiness, something has gone wrong, category-wise. All that might fall under the rubrik of "anti-intellectual," but that's putting forward an awfully narrow and conservative idea of what "intellectual" is. Plenty of credible intellectuals were for the educational ideas and some of the other demo-populist social trends he covers, whereas you can't find many if any who were for the loonier stuff.
I dunno, maybe I just had the wrong idea about what this book was setting out to do to begin with, as, like I said above, I thought it was going to focus much more on the really nasty nativist, racist, patriarchal, etc strands of American anti-intellectualism than it did."
"Hofstadter's style is at times dryly ironic and always a model of deliberateness and lucidity. The range of reference and depth of penetration make this a commanding study--all in all a superior book, richly suggestive and potentially central to American cultural and literary study. I have read this book steadily since 1967."
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