“Populism” provokes many associations, but rarely intellectualism. Paul Stob sets out to change that in Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People. Using a diverse group of Progressive Era writers and activists, Stob identifies five “pillars” of populist thought as applied to the pursuit of knowledge for personal empowerment. The case he makes for the relevance of populist tropes to intellectual engagement is convincing, and he joins a larger and welcome trend in contemporary left political commentary that hopes to rescue populism from its antidemocratic associations. However, Stob is less successful in arguing for the future potential and historical relevance of this public engagement strategy.
Stob devotes each of his five chapters to the public life of a single individual: the “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll; the founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy; Thomas Davidson, a less well-known philosopher; the African American educator, author, and orator Booker T. Washington; and the Pan-Indian activist Zitkala-Sa (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin). Despite their varying backgrounds and agendas, Stob isolates five rhetorical strategies that make up the key pillars of populist intellectualism: attacking intellectual culture’s established institutions and figures; affirming “the people” as stewards of inquiry; deploying “Americanisms” in the pursuit of knowledge; characterizing inquiry as radical conservatism; and visualizing a utopian community of thought. “Like political populism,” he writes, “intellectual populism is a discursive practice distinguished by a series of rhetorical markers that can be adapted to different purposes and situations” (xxviii). Yet all of Stob’s subjects, he argues, found these tropes useful for “bringing individuals often excluded from the world of thought into new, democratic communities of inquiry” (xv).
Stob strengthens his case for intellectual populism as an identifiable discourse by selecting a commendably diverse groups of individuals to illustrate the five pillars. Some are familiar, like Robert Ingersoll and Booker T. Washington, but his selection of lesser-known figures works just as well and offers the reader accessible introductions to these compelling examples of Progressive Era intellectual currents. Thomas Davidson, for instance, pursued the familiar course of a bourgeois intellectual early in his life, attempting to create an idyllic retreat where those who could afford it could come to contemplate fundamental questions. However, toward the end of his life, he found his true passion working with a group of poverty-stricken Jewish workers in New York City’s Lower East Side, and was so inspired by their Herculean efforts to seek enlightenment in the midst of squalor that he planned to move there in order to fully devote himself to the community. Stob also clearly shows how, while working the lecture circuit, Zitkala-Sa combined her advocacy with community work that brought Native American peoples together on projects of mutual empowerment, ranging from finding space for craft workshops to founding the National Council of American Indians in 1926. What these portraits reveal is a bridge across the often-assumed divide between intellectuals and the masses. As Stob argues, “Perhaps the remedy for populist frustration is populist intellectualism” (xliv).
In many ways, whether intended or not, both the strengths and the weaknesses of Stob’s book result from what is a markedly traditional approach to intellectual history. Stob is a scholar of communication studies, and his emphasis on rhetoric results in an analysis that refrains from passing judgment on its subjects’ claims, seeking instead to understand how the five pillars he identifies relate to each other on the terms laid out by the texts he engages. This approach brings a fresh perspective to the study of populism, and Stob’s five pillars of populist engagement are convincing and helpful in breaking down how populist appeals actually work. It also offers sharp insights into well-treaded terrain. Reading Booker T. Washington as a producerist in the populist vein, for example, works very well. Stob also connects his subjects with their broader context, illuminating both. His exploration of Mary Baker Eddy’s “divine healing science” as a revolt against the professionalization of knowledge, for example, brings into sharp relief the disempowering impact that professionalization had on many Americans.
Yet this rhetorical analysis is less successful when Stob tries to make more grandiose claims about the essential character of his subjects’ interventions. Even if Booker T. Washington made appeals that dovetailed with populist sentiment, that does not make him a radical. To argue that the Tuskegee Institute was “directed squarely at structural change,” for instance, does not stand up to scrutiny (151). Even if Washington’s gospel of self-improvement had somehow managed to convince white people to regard Black people as fellow citizens, calling the achievement of respectability by upwardly mobile Black people a “populist revolution” dilutes the meanings of both populism and revolution to little more than respectability politics (126).
The fundamental problem here is the attempt to describe and define ideas independent of power dynamics. Results matter. Whether or not Washington would call his ideas revolutionary, the reason he received such approval from white Americans is because they understood his teachings as quite the opposite. They understood them as respectability politics. This might seem like a clever rhetorical trick on Washington’s part had it worked, but it did not—which Stob only belatedly acknowledges in his conclusion: “The thinkers in this book generally failed to create the change they wanted” (228). Relegating this truth to an afterthought was a mistake; it has to be at the center of any analysis that also hopes to offer useable strategies for our current democratic crisis.
Stob clearly does hope to do so. He makes such connections explicit in his introduction and puts forward bold ideas in his conclusion for how we in the academy should rethink or rework our relationship with the public. It is unfortunate that the success of his five subjects does not seem more compelling, because many of Stob’s suggestions are good ones. He challenges us to end our reliance on the spaces of the university and to make our material available in more democratic venues. He also offers an extremely refreshing respite from our national obsession with civility by arguing that for populist movements to gain momentum, a common enemy needs to be identified. Examples for how such strategies have worked—or at least shown promising results—are available, but unfortunately absent in Stob’s otherwise commendable study.
