The intellectual life of workers is not a subject that has received much attention from US historians. In Europe, it has been a more important area of study. The thinness of the historiography makes Tobias Higbie’s Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life especially welcome. Higbie argues that intellectuals generally have not believed that workers have a mental life categorically equivalent to their own. He finds the divide between them “both tragically real and frequently crossed” (5).
Higbie’s title is somewhat misleading, because he defines “intellectual life” narrowly, concerning himself with “the social history of reading, writing, and teaching” (5). His primary interest is worker engagement with types of texts and modes of expression recognized as intellectual activity by the dominant culture. The deep ponderings of an illiterate sharecropper or the complex belief system of an evangelical worker-preacher do not fall into the category “intellectual life” for the purposes...
