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Few men in America's intellectual history have sought as much as Irving Babbitt to be a crucible for the cultural values that America, expecially in its "progressive" epoch, had no inclination to receive. Over sixty years after his death, Babbitt remains a figure of controversy. He retains his reputation as a reactionary defender of genteel morality and taste, yet, as Thomas Nevin reminds us, he continues to be a scholar of importance and an erudite, forceful teacher who influenced -- among others -- T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Austin Warren, and David Riesman. Nevin argues that the tradition Babbit represented did not so much uphold class mores as it urged that literature...
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Foreword / Russell Kirk -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Achievement of Irving Babbitt -- 3. Babbitt's Masters of Modern French Criticism -- 4. Babbitt's Version of the Buddha's The Dhammapada -- 5. Rousseau and Romanticism -- 6. The Future of Democracy in the United States -- 7. Literature and the Democratic Culture -- 8. Autobiographies of Van Buren, Reagan, and Bush -- 9. Malthus, Mendel, and the American Dream.
Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) and Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) were the leading lights of the New Humanism, a consequential movement of literary and social criticism in America. Through their writings on literary, educational, cultural, religious, and political topics, they influenced countless important thinkers, such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, Benedetto Croce, Werner Jaeger, and George Will. Their work became the source of heated public debates in the 1920s and early 1930s. The belligerent criticisms of Babbitt and More—composed by such famous intellectuals as Ernest Hemmingway and H.L. Mencken—have ensured that the New Humanism has seldom been properly appreciated. Humanistic Letters helps remedy this problem, by providing for the first time the extant correspondence of Babbitt and More, which gets to the heart of their intellectual project.
Will, Imagination, and Reason sets forth a new understanding of reality and knowledge with far-reaching implications for the study of man and society. Employing a systematic approach, Claes Ryn goes to the philosophical depths to rethink and reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences. He shows that will and imagination, together, constitute our basic outlook on life and that reason derives its material and general orientation from the interaction between them. The imaginative master-minds--novelists, poets, composers, painters, and others--powerfully affect the sensibility and direction of society. Sometimes a distorting, self-serving willfulness at the base of their...
This is a sustained inquiry into the thought of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. Milton Hindus considers the subjects that most interested Babbitt: ethics, literature, education, and social and political conservatism in the United States. In their most general sense, his concerns were man and his nature as the root of all social order. For Babbitt, efforts to improve social conditions must begin and end with the individual human being.In rejecting notions that society is primarily responsible for moral deficiencies in the individual, or that the individual is bom good only to be corrupted by society,...
Irving Babbitt was a giant of American criticism. His writings from the 1890s to the 1930s helped advance American criticism and scholarship to international esteem. More than seventy years after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. On Literature, Culture, and Religion is an ideal introduction to this seminal American thinker.Babbitt's opinions were uncompromising, and his vocal allies and opponents included almost every name in American literature and scholarship: T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Paul Elmer More, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis. A founder of New Humanism, Babbitt was best known for his indictment of Romanticism and his insistence that the modern age h...
Character and Culture by Irving Babbitt is the latest volume in the Library of Conservative Thought. Babbitt was the leader of the twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movement called American Humanism or the New Humanism. More than half a century after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. The qualities that marked Irving Babbitt as a thinker and cultural critic of the first rank are richly represented in Character and Culture. First published togetherin 1940 (under the misleading title Spanish Character), these essays span his scholarly career and cover a wide range of subjects. The diverse topics discussed here-aesthetics, ethics, religion, politics, litera...