I'm halfway through Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." I have a lot of thoughts on this -- in lieu of editing, I'll lay them out.

1) One of the major claims of the book is to relate "intellectualism" with "university" and "schooling" -- and to oppose this to unschooled, salt-of-the-earth common sense. He goes through a number of iterations of this (Methodist universities, Unitarianism, Jefferson, Tocqueville and the Sorbonne, next to Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, circuit ministers, etc). The differences is always, invariably, class-based --- "high church" vs. "low church," "gentlemen" vs. "professionals," "aristocrats" vs. "politicians" -- with the former having the benefit of a robust system of higher education.

2) For Hofstadter, this doesn't start with Jacksonian democracy, but with Evangelicalism and the low church movement, circa 1700 (?). McCarthy aside, he seems to be looking forward to figures like Jerry Falwell as modern variants of this split. What's interesting, though, is that this breaks down over access to education --- the argument of the Reconstruction Democrats isn't (or isn't only) that academic qualification is insufficient for practical political work, but that over half the population lacks access to it. Which is a problem! Hofstadter credits this -- he also credits a fundamental meanspiritedness, whereby, in lieu of advocating for real educational reform, the highly educated are held up for ridicule and namecalling, and effectively exiled to the far corners of political life.

I have thoughts on this -- on whether "utility" and "ineffectiveness" is a valid critique (a tangential issue), and, more centrally, on where the role of schooling and education falls in here. The other major -- and really cool -- part of the book, of course, is the roots between evangelicalism and Anglo-American intellectual life, which is something I'd really like to look into. That's all I've got to say for the minute, though.

It's quarter of eleven on a Saturday morning.

Library time!