A Note on Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

In his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Richard Hofstadter pointed to four principal sources--business, organized religion, "Jacksonian democracy" and "progressive education."

It was easy enough to understand business, religion, and even Jacksonian democracy being listed, but I couldn't help wondering, why put progressive education on a level with them? Certainly no one would consider what he meant by progressive education (the Rousseau-Dewey tradition) as at all comparable in its effect as those other forces even on education, let alone American life.

A significant clue lay in the ideological characterization of these four forces. Hofstadter identified two of those forces with the right--business and religion--and two others with the left--Jacksonian democracy and progressive education. Such an identification seems to me awkward. Others (myself included) read Jacksonian democracy as right-wing populism, not the other kind. Additionally the progressive education of Hofstadter's time was not without conservative roots--not least, in its accommodating students' expectations with regard to career to an economic system which cannot give everyone "the good job."

The strain involved in putting progressive education into this grouping as if it were somehow equivalent to the others, the problematic characterization of these four forces, gives me the impression that in line with the liberal centrism toward which he was tending by this time Hofstadter wished to create an image of ideological balance. He ended up with a false balance, as the centrist version of balance so often tends to be, obscuring the reality that anti-intellectualism, at least where it has counted, has overwhelmingly come from the right.