The War of the Three Humanisms: Irving Babbitt and the Recovery of Classical Learning (Critical Essay)

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) is not much remembered today, except perhaps through Sinclair Lewis's snarky naming of the eponymous villain of the satire of mid-American manners and mores, Babbitt, after the Harvard professor whose anti-Progressive views Lewis denounced in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In fact, Irving Babbitt was far from the hidebound and fearful philistine Arthur Babbitt in Lewis's novel. For forty years a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, Babbitt was the teacher and friend of T, S. Eliot and, with Paul Elmer More, the proponent of a cultural and intellectual movement, the New Humanism, that held center-stage in American intellectual life in mid-century. His first book, with the misleadingly modest title, Literature and the American (College, (1) is one of the ten most important and influential cultural critiques written by an American in the last century, comparable to Richard Weaver's Ideas have Consequences or Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. (2) In addition, Babbitt's book is the most profound reflection on the nature of higher learning written in the last one hundred years, comparable to Newman's The Idea of a University, (3) or, indeed, Quintillian's On the Education of the Orator or Isocrates' Antidosis. Babbitt's genius superimposed upon the "blooming, buzzing and blurring confusion." of cultural controversies in the early twentieth century (Literature and the American College was published in 1908) a tripartite framework of thought that is as illuminating today as it was one hundred years ago. Babbitt begins in proper Socratic fashion with a search for a definition, in this case, of the words "humanism" and "humanist." He discovers three distinct, and indeed profoundly antagonistic, types of humanism. The first, scientific humanism, is typified by Francis Bacon; the second, sentimental humanism., by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: and the third, classical humanism, by a succession of thinkers, including Plato, Cicero, Castiglione, Sidney, Goethe, Burke, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, and Babbitt himself. Babbitt recommends reserving the word "humanism" for the third tradition, preferring to use the word "humanitarianism" to refer to the first two viewpoints.