This reaction against Enlightenment Liberalism (EL) we call conservativism, right? Or perhaps we can call it a specific variant of conservatism - which is what Corey Robins seems to want to study: reactionary conservatism. Not sure. At any there are other reactions against Enlightenment Liberalis, to be fair, since you could also say that Marxism and its children and cousins are also reactions against, if not also products of and issued by, the Enlightenment.
But back to the C word. Why might you call it that? Because it is an ideology that emerges,initially, in opposition to Enlightenment ideology, no? It is the reaction against the enlightenment faith in reason and freedom. Conservativism emerges and speaks of its opposition mainly in terms of an opposition to the claims about human freedom and its unalloyed goodness and inevitability.
the first example of this, with which I'm familiar anyway, is Joseph de Maistre. His is a reaction against the idea that knowledge, science, and human freedom are an unfolding and moving us inevitably toward a perfect world on this earth.
Caution: it only sounds like I'm talking about ideas emerging and flowing and reacting against other ideas because I'm painting broad brush strokes and not addressing the material reason that undergirded these movements. Not enough time. I'll speak in shorthand here.
In the United States, this anti-intellectualism emerged with a vengeance after we officially (de jure) eliminated caste distinctions.
Think of it this way. Remember Thomas Lacquere's thesis in Making Sex? In that book, he argues that with the emergence of political egalitarianism - the claim of equality gender equality - was accompanied by an ideology of genders as polar opposition thus reinscribing women's oppression with the claim that women were emotion, men were reason; women where hearth and home, men were the public sphere; women were virtuous and men were not. Etc.
this same process went on with political egalitarianism. We broke down and delegitimated all claims to feudal class distinctions. But that leveling was only surface. The way caste distinction were reinscribed was the same way gender subordination was reinscribed: through, among other things, science.
Anti-intellectualism, understood in the best light possible, is the suspicion that professionalism, expertism, scientism, rationalism, academics, intellectuals, all this science stuff -- it is a sham, just another way to exercise subordination of one social strate over others. Just as the feminist suspicion that all this talk of women's essential polar opposition between the genders was a sham: just another way to reinscribe inequality and cement men's domination of women in ever new ways.
And not surprisingly, expertism, professionalism, science, and so forth were used as ways to institute and ensure the hegemony of a certain set of cultural norms -- those favored by that strate of people wielding such authority -- as the best cultural norms for everyone because they were undergirded by scientific claims how to live the right life.
Science was also used to control populations - in macro ways through statistics and in micro ways through claims about what to eat, when, and why; how to be healthy, what cause ill health, what habits of eating and cleaning were good, true, and beautiful - but also scientifically approved!
Science was used or could be, claimed progressives, to fix every social ill.
From the beginning, people were fighting progressive era claims about the inevitability of progress under the banner of science.
in the feminist literature, we can talk about the rise of an entire occupational caste filled by white middle single women from middling or well-to-do backgrounds: Women who became social workers, social researchers, social scientists, settlement workers, and charity workers. Among black feminist literature, this is sometimes talked about in terms of the tensions between well-to-do black women engaged in social uplift and the politics of respectability versus lower strata black women who worked as maids, servants, and laundresses during the Jim Crow era.
We could go on to discuss the ways in which the lives and practices of ordinary people - the way they grew backyard gardens, the way they canned vegetables, the way they raised children, cleaned their homes, cooked their food and even what food they ate, the books they bought if they bought any, the forms of entertainment they took in, they way they spent their money, anything and everything -- is subjected to scientific scrutiny.
In order to turn immigrants and black people into properly behaved docile workers, these professionals and academics and bureaucrats and scientists set about to destroy folks ways and replace them with scientifically sanctioned ways of rearing children, cleaning their bodies and their homes, dressing, exercising, etc. (you saw this in the workplace as the Empire of the Foreman gave way to the Dominion of Management...)
This process generated resentment.
....
More later. It's not really an answer to your question, of course.
At 10:58 AM 1/28/2013, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Does anyone know of a text (book, article, e-mail post, published diary,
>letter to the editor, etc) in which the word "intellectualism" is used
>WITHOUT any reference to "anti-intellectualism"? Or, alternatively, does
>anyone know of a text referring to "anti-intellectualism" that _also_ uses
>and defines the positive content of the word "intellectualism"?
>
>Wikipedia is really bad on the word "intellectualism."
>
>Carrol
>
>P.S. Would anyone on the list try to discuss Intellectualism WITHOUT
>referring to "anti-intellectualism"?