미국 반지성주의의 근원과 현상들

초록

This essay aims to trace down the origins and explore the phenomena of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. focusing on transcendentalist's writings including Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. In turn, the essay read thorough Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to show what kinds of anti- intellectual factors in the U.S. a foreign intellect could detect. And then, the essay consolidates whole arguments in the context of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Analyzing Emerson's essays, this research finds out contradictions between spirtuality and practicality as well as between romantic vision of the world and prejudices against others. Tocqueville also noticed and critiqued contradictions and anti-intellectual elements in American democracy. Hofstadter presents genealogy of anti-intellectualism to discuss what makes common people in the U.S. ignore and even hate intellectual's ideas or practices by delving into the long history of contradictions in religion vs. science and populism vs. academism.

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