Intellectualism

An American Model for Intellectualism

Do you hear any thing about the term of intellectualism? Absolutely yes!
This term accompanies with so different value judgments between elites and also ordinary people. Although, the time is an inflectional element to define this term; for example an especial political or cultural condition can change the position of intellectuals in a country. The United States is one of these examples when “McCarthyism aroused this fear that the critical mind and intellectuals can be a threat for national unity and security” (Hofstadter 3).
It seems good to define this critical term which tries to criticize itself. One definition which is more popular about intellectuals is who are separated from popular and low culture and belong to high culture. Morris Dickstein defines an intellectual as “someone concerned with general principles, devoted to thinking things through, beyond the confines of a single field” (Dickstein qtd in Edward and Goldman 3). Intellectualism gets its trace from the “Russian intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century and the French intellectuals of the late nineteenth century” (Arguing the World). But French thinkers have more important role to shape this concept; some influent ional thinkers such as Emil Zola, Anatole France and Marcel Proust.
World events such as great wars, revolutions, cultural evolutions and so on would be made responsive to the intellectuals. It should be noted that the intellectualist process usually begins in concern with political affairs such as French one (Dreyfus events), but ends to cultural and social affairs. Then, the history of American intellectualism was shaped by American Founding Fathers. They don't just as politicians but they are creator of the American civilization and culture. Rather these political elites and intellectuals, the American intellectual tradition was effected by a generation of reviewers, essayists and poets during early-mid nineteenth century such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.
The twentieth century was the time for emerging new kinds of intellectualism in America. The New York intellectuals who were settled in Greenwich Village had chosen an especial way of life which “the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up”(Brooks 10). They had selected the cosmopolitan way of urban life and sexual radicalism as well as artistic modernism as hippie’s way of life.



American intellectualism transformed to a kind of anti-intellectualism 1950s decade and with rising McCarthyism. However, this was not as a decline for American tradition of intellectualism, but had main impact in it.

References:

Edward, X. Gu, and Merle Goldman. Chinese Intellectuals Between State and Market. 1 ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise, The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon and Shuster Paperbacks, 2000.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Arguing the World -- About the Film | A Brief Historical Background." PBS.., n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2010. .