Democracy and Leadership
By Irving Babbitt.
Liberty Fund, 1979 (1924).
Paperback, 392 pages, $14.50.
Reviewed by Claes G. Ryn.
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.
Had America’s intellectual elite in the early twentieth century given Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) a real hearing, the America of today would look very different. Going to the bottom of the human condition, Babbitt identified tendencies in Western modernity that were eroding the very foundations of civilization, including those of American constitutionalism. He also showed how in the circumstances of the modern world they might be reinforced. He explained, in particular, how a transformation of the imagination was causing disastrous moral-spiritual and cultural change and what countermeasures were needed. His ideas and those of his close ally, the classicist and cultural critic Paul Elmer More, stirred up an enormous controversy that extended far beyond the academic world. But it involved more misrepresentation and gratuitous polemics than genuine, in-depth consideration of his ideas.
It is not hard to explain why the progressives and other cultural radicals who were setting the tone in American academia treated Babbitt with hostility. They were stung by his viewing their new, purportedly fine moral sensibility and their ambitious reformism as being rooted in insidious, romantic self-flattery. Some traditionalists were quite friendly to his thought, but others were suspicious or even dismissive. They had great difficulty grasping Babbitt’s view that ancient beliefs should be restated and extended in ways intelligible and plausible to honest modern agnostics and skeptics. Trying to reach such people, Babbitt took an ecumenical approach to the ultimate questions. He did not couch his defense of old moral and religious beliefs in specifically Christian terms, and he spoke respectfully of aspects of Buddhism. Sharply critical of “modernity,” many traditionalists were mystified and bothered by his not assuming a blanket rejection of the same. Some of them commented on him in sweeping, careless, and caustic ways, barely bothering to read him.
The controversy that enveloped Babbitt, the leader of what became known as the New Humanism, is one of the most curious episodes in American intellectual history. Scholars who have closely studied this fracas, Eric Adler prominent among them, have found an astounding amount of distortion and vituperation. The effect was to replace Babbitt with a poor caricature, which postponed indefinitely the absorption of his ideas.
The treatment of Babbitt can be seen as a prime example in America of the deterioration of the Western world of which Babbitt was warning. Progressive-leftist cultural radicals would not give a hearing to one whom they scorned as a reactionary and an elitist. As for traditionalists, their disinclination or inability really to explore Babbitt’s ideas illustrated well his view that existing forms of traditionalism were not up to defending ancient moral and religious beliefs against the challenge of modernity.
Among the weaknesses of the traditionalists was their not understanding what Babbitt stressed, the role played in the destruction of the Western world by perverted imagination that altered the moral-spiritual life, specifically, character, from within. Equally disabling was that the traditionalists had been unable to adapt to modern intellectuals being unwilling to accept moral and religious claims based on traditional authority and dogma. Simply repeating old creedal formulations would leave traditionalists on the defensive. Babbitt had no quarrel with people who were personally content with a traditional creedal stance, but in the intellectual circumstances of the modern world, those who wanted to defend old moral-spiritual insight had to marshal the experiential moral-spiritual evidence for their beliefs—the facts of lived experience. Short of special revelation and dogmatic claims, Babbitt argued, humanity has available to it a rich body of experientially grounded moral-spiritual wisdom to which honest skeptics and agnostics should be directed. It was to signal to skeptics that he did not assume the superiority of a certain existing creed that he adopted an ecumenical terminology of his own. Nothing has caused more confusion and unintelligent commentary than Babbitt’s notion of “the inner check,” one of his terms for the transcendent moral-spiritual power that orders human existence towards its completion.
Christianity had everything to gain from Babbitt’s insights, especially his belief that at the core of a sound moral-spiritual life is moral character and what he called “the moral imagination.” This emphasis was a corrective to the old traditionalist inclination to overintellectualize the spiritual life and to the more recent inclination to sentimentalize love and virtue. What he advocated was a creative reconstitution of central traditions. He offered a deepened, discriminating understanding of modernity and tools for guarding against pseudo-religion and pseudo-morality.
It complicated the absorption of Babbitt’s ideas that his intellectual range and depth far exceeded those of the typical professor. The opposite of the pedantic specialist, he addressed all topics in relation to the large ultimate questions, most importantly the goal of human existence. His explanation for the deterioration of Western civilization and how to address it required much of the reader. Also, though a man of ideas widely read in philosophy, Babbitt was not a “technical” philosopher for whom conceptual precision in the strictest sense was the most pressing task. He developed his ideas by circling around them, as it were, and clarifying them by returning to them from different points of view. His readers had to be patient and view particular formulations from the perspective of his larger work. Another source of difficulty for some readers was his habit of dwelling almost exclusively on ideas from major thinkers that appeared to him harmful, which made him seem more one-sided and censorious than he was.
Yet—other than the sheer hostility of the trend-setting cultural radicals and the inattentiveness of traditionalists—the main reason why so many struggled to grasp his central ideas seems to have been not his flaws but that he was a synthetic, original thinker of cosmopolitan breadth and deep insight—in a league of his own. Chinese students of his at Harvard considered him a great sage. His work comes perhaps closer than any competing body of ideas to having discerned and isolated the main causes of the sharp decline of America and the West. As is always the case with truly creative, pioneering thinkers, Babbitt did not fit existing categories and challenged or irritated every group in some way.
What generated the most hostility among progressives was Babbitt’s in-depth critique of two assumptions that were replacing the classical and Christian view of human nature and society. He called them sentimental humanitarianism and scientific naturalism. He associated the one with the idyllic, romantic imagination of Rousseau and the other with the rationalism and desire to control nature of Francis Bacon. The two were superficially quite different but were similar in that they wholly neglected the central problem of human existence, the need to foster moral character. In sometimes close alliance, the two were destroying the pursuit of inner discipline, without which civilization eventually disappears. Babbitt first defined these orientations and his alternative to them, a form of humanism, in Literature and the American College (1908).
Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) explained in great depth what Babbitt saw as destroying Western civilization. It was not “materialism,” as traditionalists liked to think. No human beings live by materialistic theories. They live by appealing visions of the future that capture their imagination. Babbitt regarded Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the great pioneer of a new way of envisioning human existence. Rousseau flatly rejected the old classical and Christian view that man is imperfect and fallen and in need of self-scrutiny and self-reform. He announced the natural goodness of man. His dreamy, romantic imagination conjured up the vision of a new world that would set man free from pain and drudgery and did not presuppose difficult personal moral effort. What was needed was to abolish old oppressive beliefs together with inherited social groups and institutions, such as the family and the Church, so that natural goodness could remake human existence. Rousseau’s vision inspired the French Revolution of 1789. Many others would push some version of the same imaginative impulse. As this impulse widened its assault on the older Western view of human nature and society, it transformed Christianity itself.
What drove this change, to repeat, was not “materialism” but what Babbitt called “sham spirituality.” It was a new moral sensibility and imagination, a self-flattering benevolence that turned virtue into a diffuse, merely sentimental caring for humanity or other distant collectives. This sham spirituality transformed the old idea of moral self-reform as the ultimate source of civilized life into a pleasant feeling of moral superiority that entitled the bearer to power sufficient radically to remake society.
Babbitt was correct to associate this sensibility with romanticism, but he should have realized that the creative and directive role of the imagination—a discovery central to Romanticism—could assume a form radically different from that of Rousseau. It did so, for example, in Rousseau’s sharp contemporary critic Edmund Burke, whose imagination and social thought Babbitt admired.
Socialists and other progressives were right to see Babbitt’s view of their “brotherhood of man” as an attack on basic assumptions dear to them. Traditionalists feared the progressive/revolutionary urge as a part of the “modernity” they opposed, yet they never quite understood what made it so potent. Attached as they were to moral rationalism and certain creedal formulations, they did not recognize how the sham spirituality of Rousseauism subverted moral-spiritual health and redirected human action. Most of them missed the deeper significance of Babbitt’s unmasking of sentimental humanitarianism and his attaching such importance to a reorientation and revivification of the imagination as essential to restoring a realistic view of human existence. Sound, morally disciplined imagination is, he argued, indispensable to articulating and supporting man’s transcendent higher purpose, the sense of higher direction that the ancient Greeks called the Agathon and Christians called, among other things, the Holy Spirit. Babbitt referred to this highest authority in his own ecumenical terminology, using terms like “the higher will,” “the inner check,” and “the higher immediacy.”
In Democracy and Leadership (1924), Babbitt applied his central ideas to politics. He saw the American political tradition as containing diverging moral-spiritual and intellectual strains, only one of which was compatible with American constitutionalism. The latter was rooted in the classical and Christian traditions, for which the discipline of moral character is the sine qua non of a good, satisfying life. The ultimate buttress of the outer restraint of law and constitutionalism was the inner ethical restraint of society’s members, Babbitt argued. A certain cultural emphasis, specifically, a certain quality of the imagination, had helped maintain this indispensable disposition of character. President Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement embodied a marked change in the understanding of morality and politics. They shifted the emphasis from self-control and inner striving to a desire to control others, for their supposed benefit. This was the American version of the transformation taking place throughout Europe under the influence of a Rousseauistic notion of virtue. Babbitt warned of a devolution of American civilization that would produce an imperial quest and might trigger a military disaster for mankind. Americans had to choose between incompatible views of life, one represented by Edmund Burke, whose “moral imagination” Babbitt lauded, and one represented by Rousseau, whose sentimental humanitarianism would destroy American constitutionalism from within.
Democracy and Leadership was a profound, groundbreaking study of politics. It explained why politics forms part of a moral-religious and cultural context and is shaped by a society’s prevalent quality of imagination. Babbitt showed that American constitutionalism places high moral demands on Americans and cannot survive without the moral-religious magnet above partisan interests that pull Americans toward a common center. Babbitt’s diagnosis of America’s predicament was simultaneously a prescription for addressing the problem.
One may, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Democracy and Leadership, ask whether the time has finally come when American traditionalists have shed the inadequacies that made most of their commentary on Babbitt during his lifetime careless and superficial. Will traditionalists now exhibit the intellectual rigor and depth that the subject requires but that was missing in the past?
During Babbitt’s life, most of the Christian commentary concerned his notion of humanism and how it relates to religion. Several prominent Roman Catholic intellectuals discerned the overlap between his thinking and that of Aristotle and the natural law tradition and gave him a very friendly reception. Other Christians were, even when attracted to parts of his thought, mystified or irritated by it. Spotty, flimsy reading was typical. Some traditionalists even criticized Babbitt for views that he emphatically rejected.
T.S. Eliot has recorded his deep and life-long indebtedness to Babbitt. Yet his criticism of Babbitt’s humanism and his idea of “the inner check” was oddly blinkered and unperceptive. It may have been the strained attempt by a Christian convert to show independence from a powerful mentor. Babbitt unequivocally rejected the notion that humanism, as he understood it, might take the place of religion. He wrote that “one must insist that religion is in its purity the very height of man.” He took great pains to defend the spirit of genuine religion against “sham spirituality.” But he also insisted that there is a humanistic level of life that has its own intrinsic standard, namely, the same higher will manifesting itself as a “will to civilization.” His idea is reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s belief that there is a “worldly” aspect of the eternal law that is accessible without special revelation. But Eliot, a convert to Anglicanism, insisted that humanism without “dogmatic religion” had to be “sterile.” In support of this view, he cited tenets of typical secular humanism. He did not tell his readers that Babbitt’s humanism was altogether different.
Perhaps the most slipshod of the ostensibly traditionalist criticisms of Babbitt was Allen Tate’s 1930 essay “The Fallacy of Humanism.” No well-informed scholar can take it seriously. Tate even criticized Babbitt for views that he explicitly rejected. For example, he said of Babbitt and humanists of his kind that “they steadily repudiate all religious and philosophical support.” Interpreting Babbitt’s idea that the ethical will is a restraint on our lower nature, Tate even attributed to him the absurdity that the good man “need do nothing positive.” Of Babbitt’s “morality,” he wrote that it is “an arbitrarily individualistic check upon itself.” It is hard to tell what this formulation might mean, but it is proof positive that Tate had no idea what Babbitt means by the higher will. Tate’s many flat and garbled assertions and his supercilious, dismissive tone indicated intellectual insecurity and brittleness rather than self-confidence.
It was early in the twentieth century that Babbitt had started warning that sentimental humanitarianism was replacing Christianity as the dominant moral ethos in the Western world. It was changing social and political life. It was transforming religion itself. Christian intellectuals had not succeeded in holding back the advance of Modernity, and they had everything to gain from Babbitt’s unmasking of the sham spirituality of sentimental humanitarianism. It was this kind of spirituality that inspired the Protestant Social Gospel, and Catholic intellectuals had soon adopted their own version of it. But certain intellectual conventions, including moral rationalism, made it difficult for traditionalists to grasp the far-reaching significance of Babbitt’s critique of pseudo-religion. Had it not been for the persistent influence of sentimental humanitarianism, the Catholic Church would never have selected a pope like the present one.
After Babbitt’s death, a number of highly gifted intellectuals accorded his thought very appreciative treatment and put it to work in their own writing. The historian and poet Peter Viereck started doing so already in the early 1940s. Another prominent admirer was Russell Kirk, whose Conservative Mind (1953) showed Babbitt’s strong influence. Many years later, Kirk stated explicitly that Irving Babbitt was the thinker in the twentieth century who had most influenced him. Babbitt had led him to Edmund Burke, and Babbitt, Kirk wrote, “animates” The Conservative Mind. In the next few decades, other scholar-thinkers refuted long-circulating misunderstandings and distortions of Babbitt, and they developed and supplemented his ideas. Half a century after his death, the intellectual circumstances seemed propitious for a new departure in American intellectual life.
But the old lack of scholarly care and intellectual seriousness reasserted itself. In 1987, the 30th anniversary issue of Modern Age contained an astonishing essay called “T.S. Eliot and the Crisis of the Modern” by Professor James Tuttleton. It prominently discussed Babbitt’s supposed view of humanism and religion, but it was not based on any rereading of Babbitt. It simply assumed that Eliot had been right and that the scholarly “state of the question” had not changed in the preceding half-century. The essay took no account of the greatly expanded secondary literature. The possibility that Babbitt’s writing or new scholarship might necessitate questioning Eliot’s treatment of Babbitt’s humanism had not occurred to the professor. Tuttleton just repeated traditionalist misunderstandings from the 1920s and 30s. In fact, he distorted Babbitt further.
In the decades since the Tuttleton debacle, Babbitt scholarship has taken another large step forward. Yet even today, it seems inevitable that in any discussion of Babbitt, the bad penny of shoddy commentary will reappear. In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Leadership, Law & Liberty, recognizing the book’s importance, published no less than four essays on it. Two of these were excellent statements by scholarly experts, which showed how Babbitt’s ideas can deepen today’s intellectual debate. The other two contained some praise, in one case awkwardly reluctant, but, strange to say, revived the old habit of commenting on Babbitt without doing scholarly due diligence. The essays made sweeping assertions that are flatly contradicted by Babbitt’s writing, as well as by the secondary literature, with which the two professors were evidently unfamiliar. The one wrote favorably of Babbitt’s defense of American constitutionalism but, oddly, ignored the book’s central argument about the moral-spiritual foundation of this constitutionalism. The essay even hinted that Babbitt had a view of religion that is the very opposite of what it is. The second essay feigned authoritative knowledge but showed embarrassing unfamiliarity with Babbitt as a thinker and a person and with the secondary literature. Babbitt stresses that a sound moral-spiritual life involves an inner “working” on self. The essay’s interpretation of this idea was not only simplistic but wholly misleading. The essay’s ambivalent, piqued commentary indicated annoyance with what the writer assumed to be Babbitt’s view of religion. Paradoxically, this assumed view is contradicted by what Babbitt actually wrote on the subject. The writer’s “expertise” resembled that of Tate and Tuttleton.
One might pass over such scholarly malpractice in silence, but traditionalists need to recognize that, if this kind of shoddiness is at all indicative of the intellectual standards of traditionalism, it helps explain why American conservatism has made so little progress against dreaded Modernity. Too many traditionalists with academic titles have shown themselves as poor, even dishonest scholars, lacking philosophical and religious versatility and depth. Feelings of religious piety may have given them an automatic sense of intellectual superiority, but one has to wonder about the quality of that piety. It is not far-fetched to wonder if the carelessness, provincialism, and lack of intellectual curiosity that have characterized their treatment of Babbitt have not also influenced their religiosity, threatening to make it stale and cramped. Be that as it may, the pattern of intellectual avoidance and laxness illustrated here have undermined important, truly creative efforts to revive central Western traditions. That traditionalist intellectuals unqualified to assess Babbitt’s work have for so long been able to affect his reputation has revealed a persistent and widespread lack of deeper intellectual seriousness.
Claes G. Ryn is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America (CUA) and Distinguished Senior Fellow and Founding Director at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the same university.
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