Irving Babbitt
From Philosopedia
Irving Babbitt (2 August 1865 - 15 July 1933)
Babbitt, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, and who moved often with his family, grew up from the age of eleven in Madisonville, Ohio.
In 1885 he entered Harvard College and, upon graduation in 1889, taught at the Sorbonne, studying Pali literature and Buddhism for a year. At Harvard, he earned a master's degree that included studies in Sanskrit.
A classical scholar, he taught romance languages at Williams College and French at Harvard.
In the 1890s he and Paul Elmer More developed the movement of New Humanism. In 1895 he lectured on What is Humanism?, attacking Jean-Jacque Rousseau's romanticism. He also was critical of Francis Bacon's naturalism and utilitarianism.
Opponents of the New Humanists
Opponents of Babbitt's and More's views included R. P. Blackmur, Oscar Cargill, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Laski, Sinclair Lewis, Joel Elias Spingarn, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson.
H. L. Mencken was particularly critical of Babbitt, who was equally critical, describing his writing as "intellectual vaudeville."
New Humanists
Babbitt and More were joined by others, including G. R. Elliott (1883-1963), Norman Foerster (1887-1972), Frank Jewett Mather (1868-1953), Robert Shafer (1889-1958), and Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926).
Sherman and Foerster later became critical and became known for their New Criticism.
Death
Upon his death in 1933, New Humanism lost its influence and by 1940 was considered literary material for footnotes. Babbitt, however, was a key figure in what was called "The Great Word War" and is known as a cultural conservative. The National Humanities Institute runs an Irving Babbitt Project.
(See entries for Walter Lippmann, Louis Mercier, and T. S. Eliot.)
