Democracy and Leadership
By Irving Babbitt.
Liberty Fund, 1979 (1924).
Paperback, 392 pages, $14.50.
Reviewed by Michael P. Federici.
Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership celebrated its centenary in 2024. We asked several Babbitt scholars to reflect upon its importance and influence for the Bookman.
T. S. Eliot’s 1934 poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” captures an inherent flaw of humanitarian reformers, philosophical idealists, and amoral theorists.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.[1]
What Eliot crystallizes in this passage—that civilization requires virtue—is something that he likely learned from his Harvard professor Irving Babbitt whose courses, Eliot remarks, “opened up for me a new heaven and a new earth.”[2] While Eliot had his differences with Babbitt because he considers his New Humanism to be insufficiently attentive to the religious life, they share a concern for the centrality of the ethical life in the formation of civilization and community. Babbitt gained his wider reputation, as he did his influence with Eliot, by emphasizing the vital role of the inner life in human endeavors including politics.
Although Babbitt considered the inner life to be the root of most problems of order—economic, political, philosophical, and religious—it is not now, nor was it in Babbitt’s time, a well understood phenomenon in American culture. American ignorance and misunderstanding of the inner life and its consequences for political and social conduct are illustrated by a scene from the 2011 film We Bought a Zoo. The story’s protagonist, Benjamin Mee, is called to his son Dylan’s school to discuss his son’s deviant behavior. Dylan stole money from a school cash box, his fourth rules infraction, and his father is informed that Dylan is being expelled from school. In the course of a conversation about Dylan’s behavior, the principal walks Benjamin down the school hallway to view displayed student artwork. He points out drawings of idyllic images and humanitarian causes including world peace, love, recycling, and a sunflower. He then identifies Dylan’s sketch of a graphic decapitated head. With the contrasting images in mind, the principal remarks to Benjamin, “There is a darkness that we need to deal with.…As one parent to another, I would examine his inner life.”
The principal’s comments imply that examining the inner life is only necessary when outer darkness is visible and deviant behavior exhibited. There would seem to be no reason to examine the inner lives of children who sketch pictures reflecting idyllic and humanitarian sentiments. Presumably, they have healthy inner lives because they imagine the world idealistically. Babbitt, however, suggests that humanitarian sentiments and idealistic conceptions of life can be as, or more, pernicious than dark or diabolical depictions of existence. The former can lead to the latter. For example, romantic and idealistic conceptions of life promoting liberty, equality, and fraternity, like those in Jacobin France, resulted in the guillotining of thousands of individuals. The Marxist conception of equality has contributed to the mass murder of millions of innocent human beings. Although Jacobins and Marxists aim to transform the world, virtue, as Babbitt and Eliot understand it, is absent from their grand theories. The principal in We Bought a Zoo is oblivious to the continuity between the idyllic and the diabolical. Looks, as well as sentiments, can be deceiving. Babbitt’s writings include examples of humanitarians like Jean Jacques Rousseau and Woodrow Wilson whose romantic dreams led to great evils. For Babbitt, sober concentration on the inner life should be the focus of nearly every aspect of human society including religion, philosophy, literature, art, education, politics, and economics. Rather than diverting attention from or ignoring the inner life, Babbitt suggests that it be put front and center in human consciousness along with human’s fallen nature and corresponding need for humility. With cosmopolitan nuance, he argues for and evokes the moral realism that gave life to the American order.
The primary work in which Babbitt explains the moral foundations of politics is Democracy and Leadership. As the book reaches its centennial anniversary, we are reminded of Babbitt’s acute insights into the ethical requirements for political and social life. Few modern thinkers have made the ethical life the foundation for politics and civilization generally. By contrast, many fit the characterization of humanitarian reformers, philosophical idealists, and amoral thinkers in Eliot’s poem. They go to great lengths to escape from the reality and effect of the moral life as an ordering force by substituting for it seemingly amoral influences like mere power, institutional organization, and process, or what Babbitt calls sham spirituality.
Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, to name two seminal political theorists, have suggested that politics can be ordered by the whim of power, manipulation of cunning and fear, institutional organization, and audacity, as if these things can serve the highest aspirations of politics without moral discernment. Hobbes explicitly denies the existence of a summum bonum, a highest ethical good. Eric Voegelin notes that Hobbes’s political theory does not supplement the truth of the soul, it supplants it. In a conclusion strikingly similar to Babbitt’s,[3] Voegelin states that Hobbes “is faced with the problem of constructing an order of society out of isolated individuals who are not oriented toward a common purpose but only motivated by their individual passions.”[4] Machiavelli maintains a connection to the role that virtue plays in politics. Yet, when necessary and in the name of virtue (virtù), he advises political rulers to abandon or subordinate conventional morality to expedience. Babbitt argues what is, at best, implied in Machiavelli’s The Prince, that a morality appropriate for politics must avoid being ahistorical, abstract, and disembodied. It must mediate, as Babbitt argues, universality and particularity by discovering the moral path in circumstances that are never identical and that defy a priori, reified conceptions of the good. Universality is given direction, purpose, and meaning in particular circumstances. Rather than supplant traditional morality, as Hobbes does, Babbitt supplements it by emphasizing its experiential and philosophically ecumenical origins as well as its synthetic quality. For Babbitt, the moral life has much to do with mediating between universality and particularity.
In Babbitt’s view, the romantic naturalism of Rousseau has contributed, as much as anything, to Western and American neglect of and confusion about the inner life. Rousseau transforms the meaning of virtue by detaching it from what Babbitt considers its defining characteristics, self-scrutiny and self-discipline. The older Western Classical and Judeo-Christian as well as Eastern Confucian and Buddhist conceptions of human beings start with their fallen and imperfect nature, the need for inner reform, and the consequences of this moral realism for political and social life. Rousseau, however, turns humans’ attention from inner imperfection and inner reform to humans’ primitive, natural goodness and social justice. As the older tradition of political theory emphasized human depravity, Rousseau depicts humans as born free but corrupted and shackled by convention. The cultural and institutional restraints on humans that the older traditions deemed necessary for civilized order were identified by Rousseau as the source of injustice and inequality. The objective of Rousseau’s social contract is not to constrain but to liberate. Likewise, his ideal political regime is something akin to a pure democracy in which government slavishly follows the people’s will. Absent from Rousseau’s conception of politics is James Madison’s insight expressed in Federalist 51 that in forming a government “you must first enable the government to control the governed.”[5]
One of the most interesting and relevant aspects of Babbitt’s work that connects the moral life to politics is his theory of democracy. Of particular interest to contemporary American politics is Babbitt’s argument for aristocratic leadership that is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with radical forms of democracy like pure democracy or populism. Babbitt supports American constitutional democracy because it reflects the truths of the inner life and the historical and cultural heritage of the nation. He opposes radical and more direct forms of democracy because they defy the experiential truths of the inner life and what he calls the unionist tradition represented by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln. Explaining Babbitt’s democratic theory and its incongruence with radical forms of democracy requires review and analysis of three components of his political philosophy: the inner life, moral imagination, and aristocratic democracy.
The Inner Life
Following Plato’s anthropological principle that posits a relationship between the soul (the inner life of virtue and vice) and the city (political and social order/disorder), Babbitt insists that the quality of civilization is rooted in the quality of humans’ inner life, especially that of its political and cultural leaders. Virtuous character is a vital component of the good life and instrumental to the highest social and political ends. For Babbitt, the focal point of the inner life is the will to refrain (moral self-control) or what he terms the inner check. Because humans are morally deliberate, they are different than non-human animals; they are reflectively aware, to varying degrees, of moral duty and moral failing. Moral predicament is an inescapable part of human existence. Babbitt and Eliot draw on the works of ancient thinkers who, like Cicero, posit that the “man who defines the highest good in such a way that it has no connection with virtue, measuring it by his own advantages rather than by honorableness, cannot…cultivate either friendship or justice or liberality. There can certainly be no brave man who judges that pain is the greatest evil, nor a man of restraint who defines pleasure as the highest good.”[6] To be human, is to have moral capacity to govern passion, desire, and appetite. Having the capacity to morally govern the self is not the same as acting in accordance with moral standards. Because the right ordering of inclination does not come naturally to humans, it must be cultivated and encouraged by cultural influences like religion, education, community, and family.
Human beings are ethically dualistic; they live in tension between good and evil inclinations. These inclinations are filtered through a process of moral deliberation and assessment that is an exercise of higher or lower will that can result in virtuous or unvirtuous behavior. In the virtuous individual, inclinations contrary to the ends of human existence, (e.g., justice, the good, social harmony, liberty, happiness) are not only examined by the inner check but vetoed. Inclinations that enrich and are consistent with the ends of human existence are considered and put into action in ways that promote virtue, social harmony, and civilization. Babbitt refers to the human agency of the inner life that results in virtue as ethical work, appamāda in the Buddhist tradition. In his view, Americans were increasingly distracted from ethical work that requires abiding by what Emerson calls the law for man, by the work of science and technology, discovery and application of what Emerson calls the law for thing.[7] Concentration on the law for man and the inner life are made difficult, as well, by the confusion of a pseudo-morality that inspires humanitarian reform for the genuine virtue of self-reform. Babbitt suggests that the cost of material progress and focus on the law for thing has been “spiritual blindness.”[8] In fact, Babbitt argues that scientific and humanitarian causes often join forces giving what is little more than the will to power a moral façade. The consequences of inattention to the inner life include the increasing imperial tendencies of idealistic American foreign policy and the loss of harmony, civility, and liberty in domestic political life that stems from social justice thinking that uses class and identity-based scapegoats to locate the source of injustice outside the individual.
Moral Imagination
Imagination is described by Babbitt as the human faculty that perceives and conceives reality. Like human nature itself, imagination has contrary possibilities. It can enhance perception and conception of reality or distort them. Imagination fills in the gaps of limited, imperfect human understanding and unifies perceptions that are seemingly unrelated. Some imaginative unities deepen and sharpen conception of reality and others obscure and distort it. The standards that are necessary for the promotion of civilization in art, literature, politics, economics, and culture generally, depend on the work of moral imagination acting in unison with ethical will including rejection of an idealized conception of reality produced by idyllic imagination. In short, a healthy imagination puts life in moral focus. A distorted or idyllic imagination, however, draws humans away from the community-forming power of the inner life and directs their attention to aspects of the outer world that, it is thought, can be reorganized in ways that significantly reduce or eliminate injustice. Eliot’s poem identifies this dubious core-assumption of humanitarianism and naturalism generally: social harmony and justice are possible without self-reform.
The role of imagination can be illustrated by Rob Peace, a 2024 film that depicts the real-life story of a young man who was raised in difficult circumstances that include divorce, poverty, drugs, crime, and violence. Rob is an exceptionally gifted child who, at a young age, helps his mother with household finances and his father navigate the criminal justice system when he is prosecuted for a double homicide. Rob’s mother is a counterweight to his father. She is a decent, hard-working woman who encourages Rob to use his talents to rise above his circumstances. She enrolls him in St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey from which he wins the school’s highest award for academic achievement and a scholarship to Yale University. Rob graduates from Yale with honors and majors in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. At age thirty, he is murdered in a drug-related shooting.
How can one explain the tragedy of Rob Peace? The message of the film and Jeff Hobbs’s biography on which it is based is that Rob was the victim of systemic problems like poverty and racism that pushed him into selling drugs which contributed to his murder. There is, however, another plausible reading of the story when viewed through a Babbittian lens. Rob’s initial involvement in the drug trade starts at Yale and becomes a means for him to raise money to help his father get out of prison and provide him with adequate healthcare for his brain cancer. Yet both Rob’s mother and his girlfriend, Naya, urge him to focus on his education and professional development. Rob, however, feels compelled to help his father who is serving a life sentence and insists on his innocence. Rob also uses his intelligence and his childhood friends to sell drugs in the hope that he can earn enough money to support his real estate business that aims to improve the quality of his rundown childhood neighborhood. He schemes and engages in crime as a means to what he sees as higher ends. One “temporary” foray into drug trading leads to another until he loses control of the situation.
The story seems to indicate that Rob was mostly doomed from the start because of his circumstances and that even his exceptional intelligence could not save him. Yet, while Rob may be gifted when it comes to mathematical calculations and natural science (the law for thing), he exhibits poor moral judgment repeatedly regarding the law for man, the moral law. He is prone to viewing his father and his own ability to navigate the drug trade with idealistic ignorance. There is something prideful about Rob Peace that leads to his Nemesis. His bad fortune, in his adult life, is, to a large extent, his own making. What is missing in his life is what Babbitt claims is missing from modern American life generally, the spiritual ballast that results from a habit of concentrating on the inner life and mediating its challenges. Rob’s distorted perspective is evident in his humanitarian interpretation of the quote written over the entrance to St. Benedict’s: “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me,” a variation of the passage from Genesis about being your brother’s keeper. Rob seems to think that he must take on the responsibilities and problems of his father and his neighborhood friends by using his superior intellectual ability to outsmart drug dealers. He meddles when he should mind his own business. He schemes when he should accept the limitations of circumstances and his own ability. He lacks the central virtue of Babbitt’s humanism, humility. Rob’s problems stem from an idyllic imagination that romanticizes his father’s character and his own ability to control fortune. He struggles to find his way in difficult circumstances because he is spiritually blind.
Democratic Theory
Babbitt’s democratic theory relies on a distinction between competing types of democracy, direct and indirect (plebiscitary and constitutional). The former is what Madison refers to in Federalist 10 as pure democracy. It assumes that human beings are good or mostly good by nature and do not need to be checked and restrained by government, culture, or virtue. This radical form of democracy draws individuals away from the inner life of ethical work because it assumes that there is no existential division in the soul to mitigate. The tension of the soul is transferred to tensions in society between classes and interests. As Rousseau suggests, if humans follow their natural inclinations, they will what is just and good. There is no need to check and restrain individuals who are naturally good; ethical work becomes a matter of social reform not self-reform. Given this idealistic view of human nature, the objective of government is to reflect and empower the popular will as directly as possible by eliminating obstacles to it including the independent judgment of representatives. One method of making democracy more direct is to use ballot measures such as referendum, initiative, and recall allowing voters to govern without the interference of representatives who are assumed to be corrupt elites incapable of using power in accordance with the common good. Such instruments of direct democracy are limited in their capacity to realize the popular will because they exist as exceptions to indirect and constitutional politics. A populist leader can more efficiently implement the popular will because he controls, to some extent, the laws and legal apparatus of government. Coopting the institutional apparatus of constitutional democracy is more apt to realize intended reform than relying on direct democracy measures. With sufficient popular and institutional support, the populist leader can use the instruments of indirect democracy to promote the populist agenda without having to radically reconstruct the constitutional system. For a populist leader to carry out the will of the people, power must be centralized, something that populists decry when in the hands of non-populist elites, their political opponents.
Indirect or constitutional democracy is what the eighteenth-century American Framers created at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. It assumes that human nature is universal; it is a mixture of good and evil tendencies. Neither rulers nor the people can be trusted completely with freedom and power. Consequently, freedom must be limited, and power must be limited, checked, balanced, and divided. Constitutional democracy assumes that no one group or interest holds a monopoly on knowing the truth or conceiving the good. The common good is more likely to be realized if competing interests and groups are represented in government and institutionally and culturally compelled to find common ground, to compromise and synthesize their competing interests. Leaders who are capable of “refining and enlarging” the public views are vital to the success of constitutional democracy.
Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Babbitt believes that constitutional democracy requires elements of aristocracy to realize its greatest potential and avoid its collapse into majority tyranny. Babbitt identifies in the modern age the retreat of aristocracy and the advance of democracy. Democracy and Leadership is an attempt to reconcile democracy with natural aristocracy. Some advocates of democracy discount the need for democratic leaders because they believe that democratic majorities make leaders obsolete. Babbitt suggests that “democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders.”[9] The aristocratic principle must be observed in a democracy, of which there are two parts: the undeliberative masses cannot govern themselves, and the many must be represented by the few who possess the character to exercise constitutional responsibility. Good democratic leaders possess moral imagination, the ability to see life for what it is and to anticipate the path of prudence. Moreover, good leadership stems from good character that is the product of a sound inner life. Like any other form of government, democracy achieves the aspirations of civilization in proportion to its ability to produce men and women of character who concentrate on the inner life. The crisis of American democracy was, for Babbitt, a crisis of character and leadership.
Babbitt and Populism
Babbitt’s democratic theory is difficult to reconcile with populism because the latter tends to substitute idealized conceptions of politics for the unavoidable and difficult task of cultivating leadership. Populism ignores the ethical requirements of leadership while it romanticizes the working class. Babbitt placed the success of democracy squarely on the shoulders of individuals of character who were humble, moderate, and imaginative. Character formation requires a culture attuned to what Simone Weil called the needs of the soul.[10] Babbitt, like Edmund Burke, identified moral restraint as the primary need of the soul. Failure to recognize this core truth of the inner life has dire consequences for social and political order. For example, the persistence of crime in America is due, Babbitt believes, to humanitarian sympathy for the underprivileged combined with belief that “the criminal is the product of his environment and so is not morally responsible.”[11] Babbitt reminds his readers of a foundational truth at least as old as Plato, what we reap in politics is what we sow in culture.
Measured against Babbitt’s democratic theory populism appears to be philosophically and temperamentally inconsistent with American constitutionalism and the moral realism on which it is based. Populism is part of the effort to purify democracy and empower the people’s will while weakening, removing, or coopting nondemocratic and legal obstacles to it. Populist leaders rail against conventional leaders and institutions in the name of the momentary popular will and working-class interests. Populism encourages and is fueled by a revolutionary, even pseudo-Marxist and Jacobin temperament that is inclined to tear down institutions that serve as restraints on momentary popular passion and the populist leaders who embody and express it. Stephen Bannon described the recent American and global populist movement of which he is a leader by stating that “We’re not an imperial power, we’re a revolutionary power.”[12]
Populist leaders are not, typically, men and women of high character or statesman-like temperament. Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and Father Charles Coughlin are representative of twentieth-century American populists. They are more apt to flout conventions and customs, disparage traditions and legal processes, and act as if their will, seemingly a representation of the people’s will, is a higher standard than the rule of law. Such “ungoverned spirit,”[13] as Alexander Hamilton called it, refuses to subordinate itself to internal standards of virtue, Babbitt’s higher will or inner check, or to external standards of order such as decorum, custom, tradition, and law.
Madison recognizes in Federalist 10 that in some circumstances representatives of the people will know better than the people themselves what is in their best interest. In other circumstances, ruling elites become corrupted and “betray the interests of the people.”[14] Here lies a key difference between Publius and populists. Publius acknowledges that political rulers can deviate from the public good. They can be deficient in republican virtue. The solution to corrupt leaders, however, is not to abandon the architecture and spirit of constitutionalism; it is to use them to restrain the misguided leaders. Populism, by contrast, aims to subvert and, in some cases, destroy constitutional and legal structures that obstruct the popular will and the will of the populist leader. Populism rejects constitutional restraints not only because they inhibit the immediate practical objectives of populist leaders, but also because they do not comply with the philosophy of populism or the temperament of its leaders. The temperament and character of populist leaders works to wriggle free of legal and constitutional checks and restraints because such leaders are uncomfortable functioning inside the elaborate system of constitutional restraints. Yet, they are more than willing to use those constraints to hamstring and punish their political opponents. An essential part of the populist leader’s justification for this double standard are conspiracy theories that undermine civility and the rule of law on which constitutionalism depends. They justify subversion of legal checks on power and conventional legal processes because, as populist leaders see it, desperate times call for desperate measures. Disagreement with the populist leader is commonly interpreted as evidence of character deficiency and/or conspiratorial design. From the perspective of the populist leader, it makes sense to push polarization to greater degrees as part of opposing and defeating the conspirators. It is unthinkable to compromise with conspirators.
A few months after the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Will Herberg published an anti-populist article in The New Leader titled “Government by Rabble-Rousing.” The circumstances in which Herberg wrote were not unlike our own. Liberals were agitated by a populist demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and many conservatives, Bill Buckley included, were inclined to defend McCarthy because he was an anti-communist. In Herberg’s view, liberals overreacted to McCarthy and conservatives were too quick to defend him. Both sides missed the true danger of his populist nationalism and incivility. McCarthy was a natural product of previous rabble-rousing political leaders, such as FDR, who used mass communication and mass media to circumvent the institutions of American constitutionalism. Roosevelt may have been a civil and cultured individual, but he helped undermine American constitutionalism in a way that made McCarthy possible. FDR used mass communication for partisan reasons, to stir up the masses to his political cause. He did what the American Framers feared populist demagogues would do: he gave voice to the momentary, undeliberative popular will and disparaged those, such as Supreme Court Justices, who opposed it. It is more accurate to say that FDR used his popularity to manipulate public opinion and once it was on his side he claimed that those who opposed it stood in the way of progress and the democratic will of the people. For members of Congress and the federal courts, opposing Roosevelt came at the risk of losing respect, influence, and professional station. Herberg concludes that what America needed in 1954 was a new conservatism, a neo-Burkean conservatism that recognized the pitfalls of both progressive liberalism and conservative populism. Babbitt was, in part, responsible for the rise of Burkean conservatism in twentieth-century American politics. Democracy and Leadership was an important part of creating American philosophical conservatism.
Near the end of his life, Russell Kirk, who was greatly influenced by Babbitt, warned against deformed variants of conservatism including populism. In his book The Politics of Prudence, he reminded young conservatives of the characteristics of genuine conservatism. Among these characteristics were an embrace of variety, the need to subordinate human will to transcendence and tradition, and the habit of dining with the enemy. Populism rejects these and other conservative characteristics.
Babbitt’s theory of democracy is derived from a philosophy of moral realism that is at odds with radical forms of democracy such as populism. His argument for aristocratic democracy reminds us that the American constitutional system depends for its success on the presence of imaginative leaders who are attuned to the inner life and who possess a quality of character that prepares them to exercise the responsibilities of constitutional politics. A central characteristic of constitutional character is moral imagination, the ability to see life for what it is and to differentiate between the possible and the impossible. As Americans reflect on the recent rise of populism, Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership is essential reading. It provides philosophically enriching analysis of constitutional democracy and calls into question the prudence of radical forms of democracy such as populism. Most importantly, it anchors politics to its ethical ground, the inner life, and reminds us, as Eliot and Babbitt did, that civilization is dependent on virtue.
Michael Federici is professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University and the author or editor of several books, including The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton.
[1] T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot: 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1967), 106.
[2] Frederick Manchester and Odell Shepard, Irving Babbitt Man and Teacher (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 105 (page references are to reprint edition).
[3] Babbitt argues that Hobbes “repudiates the whole side of experience that belongs to the realm of the human law.” Democracy and Leadership, 64.
[4] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, with a Foreword by Dante Germino (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952; reprint, Midway, 1987), 163, 180.
[5] Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 269.
[6] Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3.
[7] Babbitt defines the law for thing as “a mechanical law for phenomenal nature.” Democracy and Leadership, 348.
[8] Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 37.
[9] Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 38.
[10] See, Simone Weil, The Need for Roots with a Preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Routledge, 2001).
[11] Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 281.
[12] Rudyard Griffiths, ed., The Rise of Populism: Stephen K. Bannon vs. David Frum (Canada: House of Anansi Press, 2018), 67.
[13] The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (27 vols., New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-1987), vol. 1: 176-178.
[14] Madison, The Federalist, 47.
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