Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. Written in response to the anti-intellectual climate of the 1950s (McCarthyism’s equation of intellectualism with communism, Eisenhower’s preference for businessmen over eggheads, the cultural celebration of the “practical man”), the book traces anti-intellectualism as a persistent structural feature of American culture rather than a temporary aberration.
Hofstadter identifies four domains where anti-intellectualism operates: religion (evangelical Protestantism’s suspicion of educated clergy and preference for emotional conversion over theological learning), politics (democracy’s tendency to distrust expertise and celebrate the common man’s “common sense”), business (the practical man’s contempt for theory and the self-made man’s hostility toward the educated), and education (progressive education’s emphasis on socialization over intellectual rigor, the school system’s subordination of academic excellence to democratic inclusiveness).
His analysis is historical rather than polemical: he traces each strain from its origins (the Great Awakening, Jacksonian democracy, the rise of the corporation, Dewey’s educational philosophy) through its development to its mid-twentieth-century manifestation. The effect is to demonstrate that anti-intellectualism is not a bug in American democracy but a feature — built into the culture’s deepest assumptions about equality, religion, and the relationship between knowledge and power.
The book’s relevance has, if anything, increased since 1963: the phenomena Hofstadter diagnosed (suspicion of expertise, celebration of ignorance, equation of education with elitism) have intensified rather than diminished.
Collecting Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $8–$20