Democracy and Leadership
By Irving Babbitt.
Liberty Fund, 1979 (1924).
Paperback, 392 pages, $14.50.
Reviewed by Jason Jewell.
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.
The casual observer might be tempted to dismiss Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (1924) as irrelevant to 21st-century concerns. Much of its text deals with the vanished world of the European and American empires that circled the globe in the early 20th century. It engages at length with the ideas of many forgotten statesmen of Babbitt’s day. Its insistence on attention to the inner life of the leader can seem naïve in the age of nuclear weapons and the faceless bureaucracy of the administrative state.
Yet Russell Kirk, who in 1979 wrote the foreword to the Liberty Fund edition of Democracy and Leadership, calls it “one of the few truly important works of political thought to be written by an American in the twentieth century—or, for that matter, during the past two centuries.” He saw clearly that Babbitt’s diagnosis of the post-WWI moment was rooted in a deep understanding of timeless elements of the human condition. Moreover, because the trends Babbitt discussed in the 1920s have continued largely unabated since that time, his critique of them and prescriptions to remedy them remain salient.
Here are five lessons from Democracy and Leadership that remain relevant 100 years after its publication:
The “New Dualism” Saturates Our Public Life: Babbitt expounded at great length in various places on the significance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) for the modern world. He devoted an entire book, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), to the subject, blaming Rousseau’s ideology, which he dubbed “sentimental humanitarianism,” for many of the social and political pathologies of his own day. In Democracy and Leadership, Babbitt identifies Rousseau as “the most eminent of those who have attacked civilization.”
Like some other early modern philosophers, Rousseau indulged in airy speculation about prehistoric society and man’s state of nature, creating in essence a new mythology of human origins. In Rousseau’s “golden age of Phantasy” (his phrase), humanity lived in idyllic harmony before the advent of private property and civilization. Babbitt wrote that a “new dualism” underlay Rousseau’s mythology: “The old dualism put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau, this conflict is transferred from the individual to society.” In other words, evil is the result of corrupt institutions constraining our inherently good nature from fully manifesting itself.
Babbitt identified this “new dualism” as a major stumbling block to moderns. When evil is understood as being “somewhere out there” rather than within us, we find it easy to excuse ourselves from the obligations of self-discipline and self-improvement. We fall prey to indulging in utopian thinking and to looking for scapegoats whose elimination will allegedly restore harmony to society. This sort of thinking is common on both the political left and right today. The left’s identity politics marinates in it, whereas those on the right fall into it when they make the mistake of thinking everything will be fixed if, say, we got rid of all the illegal immigrants.
Society Needs the Aristocratic Principle: Babbitt endorsed the Founding Fathers’ strategy of incorporating both democratic and aristocratic principles into the U.S. Constitution. As you may remember from your high-school civics class, the aristocratic principle was located in the Senate, the members of which were selected by each state’s legislature. Babbitt wrote Democracy and Leadership about a decade after the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which undermined this arrangement and provided for direct election of senators.
Babbitt accurately diagnosed this development as part of a society-wide rejection of the aristocratic principle. This rejection was the result of a corrupted understanding of work derived from Rousseau, who essentially reduced the concept to manual labor. By contrast, Babbitt argued for recognition of both intellectual and ethical work, the exercise of the will upon the lower self in order to discipline it and direct it towards good ends. For Babbitt, the necessity of intellectual and ethical work is the best defense of property: “From the point of view of civilization, it is of the highest moment that certain individuals should in every community be relieved from the necessity of working with their hands in order that they may engage in the higher forms of working and so qualify for leadership. If the civilization is to be genuine, it must have men of leisure in the full Aristotelian sense.”
It took time to work out all the implications of the early 20th-century Progressive assault on the aristocratic principle, but Babbitt’s warning that it would erode the country’s caliber of leadership was prescient. Over time, the leadership class lost its exemplary character. The old WASP establishment managed to keep things going into the 1960s, but the meritocrats and opportunists who replaced it lacked its sense of noblesse oblige. In its place they affected instead a faux sense of social equality; Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan “The Man from Hope” comes to mind. Paradoxically, the upper class also lost its sense of solidarity with the other classes during the same period. By the 1990s, authors like Christopher Lasch and Charles Murray were writing of the “revolt of the elites” and the upper class’s abandoning of its traditional responsibilities. It took decades longer for popular dissatisfaction with elites to decide a presidential election, but we have reached that point in 2024.
Where to go from here? Babbitt understood that elites are inevitable; the only question is whether they will be good or bad. We need leaders who display excellence, but pure democracy does not reward excellence. To have excellent elites, our society must recover the aristocratic principle.
We Must Recover the Moral Imagination: As an alternative to Rousseau’s naïve confidence in the goodness of human nature, a system of ethics rooted in pity, and an almost absolute trust in popular sovereignty, Babbitt proposed the thought of another towering 18th-century thinker, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), who championed tradition and prescription over rationalism and merely private judgment. Unlike some modern scholars, Babbitt interprets Burke as placing the “final emphasis” on the individual. But whereas Rousseau indulged in an “idyllic imagination” that seeks some kind of return to a pre-societal nature, Burke puts forward the “moral imagination,” which is “humanistic and religious.”
For Burke, our ethical outlook is historically grounded in the experience of our people, and the basis of ethics is the wisdom that has been passed down to us from our forebears. Fraternity arises from the fulfilling of the concrete duties we owe to each other. Burke opposed what Babbitt calls the “metaphysical politics” of the Rousseauists, who, “under cover of getting rid of prejudice . . . would strip man of all the habits and concrete relationships and network of historical circumstance in which he is actually implicated and finally leave him shivering ‘in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.’”
The moral imagination allows us to rise above our own narrow, private concerns without floating off into the clouds of abstraction. Burke identified the “spirit of religion” and the “spirit of a gentleman” as primary vehicles of moral imagination in his own day. Babbitt writes that this makes him a “frank champion of aristocracy,” but an aristocracy in which men are estimated “not by their hereditary rank, but by their personal achievement.” To a great extent, this was the vision in place at the American Founding as well. Ordered liberty, rather than the implementation of popular sovereignty, was the Founders’ goal. Babbitt doubted that a Burkean outlook would be efficacious in resisting the disciples of Rousseau in his own time, but Russell Kirk’s revival of Burke in the 1950s and the existence of an identifiably Burkean strand of conservatism in the decades since are evidence that Babbitt may have been unduly pessimistic.
Bring Back Humility: Babbitt devotes a lengthy chapter of Democracy and Leadership to the need for standards, arguing that civilization depends on their maintenance. Unfortunately, democracy is in tension with them. In one memorable passage, Babbitt poses an uncomfortable question: “What must one think of a country . . . whose most popular orator is W.J. Bryan, whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most widely read novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-known evangelist is Billy Sunday, and whose representative journalist is William Randolph Hearst?” The answer follows immediately: “What one must evidently think of such a country, even after allowing liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards.”
An essential quality in a good leader is the ability to recognize standards of virtue that are external to and above himself. This recognition brings about a sense of humility in the leader, a healthy appreciation of his own imperfections. The good leader disciplines himself—Babbitt uses phrases like “the inner check” and “the critical spirit”—in an effort to rise to those standards. Through this striving, the leader becomes exemplary and inspires others to do the same. Think about Donald Trump, who is not a humble person in any conventional sense. Nevertheless, even his opponents grudgingly gave him admiration for being an exemplar of courage in the seconds following the assassination attempt in Butler, PA, in July 2024. Many commentators marked that incident as a “hinge moment” or turning point in the broader public’s view of Trump. But that moment was the exception that proves the rule; few would characterize America’s political class as “courageous” in any meaningful sense or otherwise virtuous. A revival of the spirit of humility towards ethical standards among our leaders would go a long way to repairing trust in our institutions.
“Leadership Training” Needs an Overhaul: Our colleges and universities have all sorts of certificates and degree programs in “leadership” these days. They are filled with wonky material derived from the social sciences: psychology, sociology, and economics are standard fare in addition to courses on risk management and the legal environment. They normally include a component on ethics, but one is more likely to find platitudes about power structures, social justice, and inclusivity than any serious study of virtues and standards. I am told by colleagues at state universities that leadership classes are often full of second- and third-tier students looking for easy A’s.
Although this specific curriculum was unknown in the 1920s, Babbitt, who wrote extensively on education in general, anticipated and warned against it. He decried “the inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to undermine the moral responsibility of the individual and at the same time to obscure the need of standards and leadership.” Critics of today’s administrative state often invoke the maxim that “personnel is policy.” Babbitt understood this principle and insisted on the importance of preparing leaders to act virtuously: “Whether the power [of government] is to be ethical or unethical, whether in other words it is subordinated to true justice, must depend finally on the quality of will displayed by the men who administer it. For what counts practically is not justice in the abstract, but the just man.” Babbitt would likely have endorsed Johnny Burtka’s recent and commendable anthology on statesmanship, which has revived the “mirror for princes” genre and provided a stark contrast to the curriculum on offer in most contemporary leadership programs.
A century after the publication of Democracy and Leadership, it is time for a reconsideration and serious engagement with Irving Babbitt’s critique of American democracy, education, and leadership training. Levels of trust in our political class and institutions are at historic lows. Babbitt’s prescriptions for a recovery of the aristocratic principle, the moral imagination, humility, and exemplary leadership could provide the way to begin repairing what has been damaged. Whether these leaders are to be found in the rising “counter-elite” heralded by Chris Rufo and others is uncertain. Perhaps a more likely source is the coming generation of young people educated in classical schools. The time to begin their moral formation for leadership is now.
Jason Jewell is a professor of humanities at Faulkner University, where he directs the Center for Great Books and Human Flourishing, and a fellow of the American Studies Institute at Harding University. He was a Wilbur Scholar at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2019.
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