Dissecting the political and social uses of ignorance by demagogues, crusaders, self-help gurus, and even reformers assured of their own good intentions, Anti-Intellectualism uncovers a persistent, multifaceted feature of our national culture. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Hofstadter offered groundbreaking and still urgent analyses of deep undercurrents in American life: a stubborn, irrepressible opposition to rationality, expertise, and higher learning, and the destabilizing pull exercised by conspiratorial movements on the right and left.Īnti-Intellectualism in American Life is at once a sweeping history of hostile attitudes toward ideas in the United States and, by Hofstadter’s own account, a deeply personal work of analysis, prompted by the “atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility” stirred up by McCarthyism. Here for the first time in a single authoritative annotated edition are two masterworks by one of America’s greatest historians, Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970).
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