Democracy and Leadership
By Irving Babbitt.
Liberty Fund, 1979 (1924).
Paperback, 392 pages, $14.50.
Reviewed by Darrell Falconburg.
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 fact that Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (1924) was published one hundred years ago and that it is still discussed today should be a cause for reflection. The time in which we live, after all, is one in which the great writers of the past are easily forgotten. An ever-growing number of new writers publish a growing number of books and articles, some emerging as authors of momentary public interest and then fading away once more. The names of great men and women, even those of high scholarly talent, often find themselves buried amid this constant flow of new books and articles. A few names live on—Flannery O’Connor, Ray Bradbury, and Russell Kirk are some of the recent greats who come to mind. But many other names risk being forgotten in our time.
Why, it may then be asked, does the name of Irving Babbitt still survive among a small yet noteworthy readership? Why have Babbitt’s books, written so long ago, not been buried and forgotten?
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1865, Irving Babbitt enrolled as a young man at Harvard University and there completed his undergraduate studies. After graduation, he spent time abroad in Europe and then returned to Harvard, earning a master’s degree. From this point onward, aside from a brief teaching position at Williams College, Babbitt remained at Harvard as a professor of comparative literature for the rest of his career. There he was a popular teacher known for his ability to quote from an incredible number of great thinkers throughout his lectures. He counted among his students Walter Lippmann, T.S. Eliot, Norman Foerster, Stuart Sherman, and others. By the time of his death at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1933, this Harvard professor had earned a reputation as a brilliant yet controversial scholar of the old school. He defended the perennial wisdom and stood athwart the dominant intellectual trends of his lifetime. And he displayed a breadth of learning and originality of thought that, even then, was uncommon in many professors.
Above all, Babbitt is remembered alongside Paul Elmer More as a leader of the New Humanists, a group of literary and cultural critics who influenced American intellectual life from the 1910s through the 1930s. Babbitt’s excellent book, Literature and the American College (1908), was especially insightful as an articulation of the ideas of this school. His book Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) was also an important text, expanding on many of the ideas first introduced in his earlier volume from 1908. Together, Babbitt’s numerous books covered the topics of literature, higher education, culture, political thought, and more. Babbitt was undoubtedly a highly original scholar, but above all, he was an old-style teacher who was weary of the growing disorder and disintegration that was beginning to dominate undergraduate studies even at that time. It is important to note, furthermore, that Babbitt himself never used the qualification “new” when referring to his humanism, not viewing himself as leading a new or original school of thought. Instead, he viewed himself as teaching and defending the broader humanist tradition, both classical and Christian, in an age of dehumanizing ideology.
There are many reasons why Irving Babbitt’s name is still remembered in our lifetime. One such reason is that he defended the humanities with great clarity at a time when they were under challenge by figures such as President Eliot at Harvard University, who developed the elective system. Humanities education was a topic that Babbitt returned to time and again throughout his life, and it is largely due to his brilliant insights on this subject that his books should still be read. Writing no less than one hundred years ago, Babbitt accurately forewarned and diagnosed what is wrong with our educational institutions and pointed the way toward possible renewal.
What, then, was Babbitt’s vision of humanism and the humanities? And why does this vision have enduring value?
For Babbitt, the humanities are those disciplines and that body of great literature that gives voice to the wisdom of the ages. The humanities include the great and classic texts of imaginative literature, history, and philosophy. These texts instruct us in what it means to be a human being and help us explore the reality of our human condition, caught in a continual struggle between a lower and higher will. The purpose of the humanities, Babbitt taught, is ethical. They are for cultivating wisdom and virtue, not for social activism or the revolutionary transformation of society. Nor, for that matter, are they for attaining specific skills or information. The purpose of the humanities, instead, is to teach human beings what Babbitt called “the law for man.” That way, the person can do the difficult work of conforming himself to this law, however difficult or painful that process may be.
Babbitt’s understanding of the humanities is still needed today, especially insofar as our time is dominated by constant change and a shallow preoccupation with current headlines and trends. Too often, modern Americans are tempted to sever themselves from the past. Caught up in the momentary and the ephemeral, we frequently fail to ground ourselves in the time-tested wisdom that the humane tradition gives us. In defiance of this modern tendency, Babbitt understood the importance of the humanities in passing down a sense of historical and cultural continuity. Without a sense of continuity passed down in families and schools, Babbitt knew modern life would lack a sense of depth and dignity. Babbitt’s understanding of the humanities is needed today because it might help us live more meaningful and rooted lives. It is needed because it might help us to rediscover, as Russell Kirk used to say, that the humanities are an intellectual means to an ethical and religious end.
The humanities teacher’s task is to teach the classics not merely as old books or isolated phenomena but as works that relate to the present and to each other as part of a great continuity. Each time-tested book belongs to a chain of inherited literature and culture. There is no wall of separation between the ancient world and the modern. As Babbitt put it in Literature and the American College, “The works of each author, indeed, should first be considered by themselves and on their own merits, but they should also be studied as links in that unbroken chain of literary and intellectual tradition which extends from the ancient to the modern world.” Humanities education must show the student this “continuity of tradition” so that he can have a “feeling and respect for the past.” An immersion in the wisdom of the ages can help free the person from enslavement to the preoccupations of the here and now. As Babbitt remarked, “The emancipation from this servitude to the present may be reckoned as one of the chief benefits derived from classical study.”
Yet Babbitt’s contribution does not end here. In addition, Babbitt diagnosed the broader trends that were threatening the humane tradition in the modern world. In particular, he saw the modern world as split between two troubling tendencies: sentimental humanitarianism on the one hand, and scientific humanitarianism on the other. The first, whose spokesman was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that man is naturally good; therefore, each person should be free to act on their impulses. According to this view, if there is corruption in the person, then the cause is not to be found within the individual human heart. Instead, the cause is to be found in something external, especially in social and political institutions. The second tendency, embodied by Francis Bacon, held that human life and the world can be made continually better through the natural sciences and material domination over man and nature. Both forms of humanitarianism are similar in one crucial point. Both depart from the old tradition of classical and Christian humanism, which placed the struggle between good and evil within the heart of every person. Instead, they place the source of moral struggle outside the individual. The humanitarian is too often a social crusader, finding evil outside himself and engaging in ideological activism to combat it.
Indeed, Irving Babbitt’s humanism stood in sharp contrast to the humanitarianism that often distorts and permeates humanities education today. In education, humanitarians believe that overturning old pedagogical methods and curricula can help usher in some ideal vision of a perfect society. Education, for the humanitarian, is too often used to accomplish idyllic political goals. Education then becomes an instrument of power, a means to usher in a utopia. Humanitarians insist that humans are good and that evil is primarily outside rather than inside individual human beings. Therefore, transforming political and cultural institutions becomes the primary way of creating a better world. For the humanist, in contrast, the humanities are essential for developing what Babbitt called the “inner check.” The reality of evil, the humanist knows, is a personal and existential problem. It is a tension within the individual human heart rather than something primarily external in institutions. To truly fight against evil, we must first struggle against the wicked impulses in our own hearts. These conflicting visions of humanism and humanitarianism could not be more at odds. Nor could their respective influence on humanities education be more different.
The ways Babbitt can inform our understanding of the humanities are too numerous to list. Therefore, perhaps we should conclude with a final insight that is especially apparent in Democracy and Leadership, the book now in its centenary year. Here Babbitt compared and contrasted two kinds of imagination: the moral and the idyllic. The purpose of a humanities education, Babbitt knew, was to pass down the “moral imagination” embodied in Edmund Burke rather than the “idyllic imagination” embodied in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By reading the time-tested texts of imaginative literature, history, and philosophy, the person receives an inheritance of imagination that helps him to see the nature and purpose of human life. The person equipped with the moral imagination likewise has a true sense of reality—an image of the whole of things and the human being’s place in the chain of being. The person with the moral imagination is not a dreamy utopian. On the contrary, the moral imagination is disciplined to what is real; it is an imagination that can see things as they really are. To help cultivate this kind of imagination is among the highest purposes of the humanities.
For decades, Babbitt fulfilled his duties as a writer and a teacher, and in doing so, he put forward a defense of the humane tradition that speaks not only to the early twentieth century but also to our own time. The challenges to the renewal of the humanities that Babbitt identified a century ago have only grown, and his way of addressing these challenges has only increased in relevance. In his several books, he was able to break out of the confines of the present moment to speak across the ages. As a result, Babbitt’s ideas have not been lost in the sea of new books and articles that have appeared since this great teacher’s death. And for that, we should be thankful.
Darrell Falconburg is the Academic Program Officer for the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and the Humanities Editor for The University Bookman.
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