"...Near the beginning of his book, Hofstadter distinguished between "intelligence," which Americans always praised, and "intellect," a quality that had come under attack from Republicans in the Eisenhower era--not, as his book aimed to show, for the first time. "Intellect," he wrote, ". . .is the critical, creative and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole." Intellectuals, one might conclude, see issues in broad perspective, and not least in broad historical perspective, as Hofstadter constantly did and as I continually try to do here and elsewhere...." DK
Why not just call them Puritans, rather than Calvinists, although related?
Can one characterize the Puritan fathers as intellectuals? I guess in a sense they may have been, but not in the sense DK uses the term in the 21st Century. See Starr, p 51, last paragraph.
See Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts.
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