• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Support
  • Way of Improvement
  • About John
  • Vita
  • Books
  • Speaking
  • Media Requests

Commonplace Book #223

John Fea   |  October 19, 2022 Leave a Comment

The intellectuals’ self-image, it will be seen, had come to coincide with the popular stereotype of the intellectual. The popular stereotype, contrary to a widespread impression among intellectuals themselves, was not unfavorable. By the 1960’s it was a well-documented fact that the intellectual professions stood high in the sociologists’ hierarchy of social prestige. Although the content of the image of the intellectual cannot be documented with much precision, one can summarize it approximately: the intellectual was typically a graduate of an Ivy League college; he wore Ivy League clothes with the same casual authority with which he talked about books, wine, and women; he had traveled widely, mostly in Europe; he lived in a modern house filled with Danish furniture; his boys had long hair instead of crew cuts; his political opinions, like his other tastes, were vaguely unconventional and advanced; he was always questioning things the rest of us took for granted. In short, he was “sophisticated.” The older images of the intellectual as absentminded professor, or again as wild-eyed, long-haired political agitator, were no longer current. The new intellectual was a bright young man, not a bumbling academic; and even when he appeared as an agitator, he retained his Harvard accent and his club tie…The intellectual’s cosmopolitanism became un-American, his sophistication snobbery, his accent affectation, his clothes and his manner the badge, obscurely, of sexual deviation. But the point about the “anti-intellectual” image of the intellectual is that it agreed with the picture of the intellectual as a young executive; it merely put a different construction on the same evidence.

Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1965), 313-314.

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Commonplace Book

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Patron Access

Way of Improvement blog banner

Commonplace Book #232

January 30, 2023 By John Fea

Why do Republicans call it the “Democrat Party”

January 30, 2023 By John Fea

When Congress got rid of a George Washington statue…in 1908

January 30, 2023 By John Fea

Episode 108: “The Life and Legacy of C. Vann Woodward”

January 30, 2023 By John Fea

Evangelical roundup for January 30, 2023

January 30, 2023 By John Fea

More Blog Posts

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Footer

Contact Forms

General Inquiries
Pitch Us

Search

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide
Subscribe via Email


Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide