Irving Babbitt was exhausted at the end of his life. “Fighting a whole generation,” he remarked to his friend, G. R. Elliott, ”is not exactly a happy task.” He added somberly, “I have had to live at a time when all the ideas which I know to be most vital for man have more and more declined.”

Babbitt was raised in a spiritualist household (his father was a sort of new-age charlatan who sold crystals to pregnant women, claiming that the proper crystal could determine the sex of the baby). Likewise, he found little comfort in Christianity. His closest friend, Paul Elmer More, remembered an outburst while passing a church in Boston.

The dogma of Grace, the notion of help and strength poured into the soul from a superhuman source, was in itself repugnant to him, and the church as an institution he held personally in deep distaste, however he may have seemed to make an exception of the disciplinary authority of Romanism. … I can remember him in the early days stopping before a church in North Avenue, and, with a gesture of bitter contempt, exclaiming: “There is the enemy! There is the thing I hate. … Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

Yet, this seems to be a younger, impatient Babbitt.

On his death bed, he softened his stance. According to G. R. Elliott, Babbitt said:

”Oh, god is very great and a man is a worm.”

After a silence, I said, “But the God whom men worship is not just a Will, as in your writings, but a Being, a complete Being, who—”

“Yes, yes,” he broke in with humorous impatience, “but that is beyond my province as a writer. Why do you keep wishing me to be a theologian? I am merely a critic.”

And, yet, what a critic. Allen Mendenhall has done a brilliant job of reminding us just why we should never have forgotten Irving Babbitt. He was, to be certain, not only an excellent professor and scholar, but he was also one of the most important founders of modern conservatism. His book, Democracy and Leadership, served as an unofficial prequel to Russell Kirk’s 1953 The Conservative Mind. Even much of the language Kirk employs is similar, especially in a passage such as this from Babbit:

When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.

In ideas, as well as in construction of language, this could easily have been a passage from The Conservative Mind.

In his day and age, Babbitt was widely known, widely commented upon, and widely attacked. Truly, he was always in the arena fighting for the ideas he thought were good, true, and beautiful. No wonder he was exhausted at the end.

Babbitt, however, was much more than a scholar and professor; he was a powerful personality. A fitness nut long before such things became mainstays of Western civilization, Babbitt hiked, walked, and ran everywhere. He would even hold office hours with students following him on his daily walks. Famously, Paris police once chased him through the city, believing him a robber. As it was, Babbitt had just wanted some exercise.

As noted above, Babbitt was raised in a strange household—one that took seances, automatic writing, and ghosts seriously. W. F. Giese writes:

He had been immersed in childhood in an atmosphere of spiritualism, and had absolutely none of the common inhibitions as to believe in what transcends ordinary experience. He would talk in the most matter-of-fact manner of having seen tables, nay, even pianos, float in the air, and used to laugh away my doubts. … He professed himself so inured to the idea of supernatural apparitions as to be quite prepared to see, any night, without the slightest tremor of surprise, a ghost standing at his bedside.

But it should also be remembered that Babbitt, as a young man, worked on a ranch in Wyoming and hunted rattlesnakes.

When he came to teach at Harvard, he was disappointed not to receive a position in the classics department. Instead, he was hired by the Modern Language department. Giese wrote, “I once heard him, when an instructor in French, say to the chairman of his department that French was only a cheap and nasty substitute for Latin.”

It’s not clear that Babbitt ever actually taught much French literature or thought, however. One student remembered:

At that time he had very small classes—meeting around a table. He came in with a bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he arranged around him.—Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon one of them and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or some line of poetry,—”to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly show”—Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, Milton, etc.—etc.

He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a reconstruction of your entire intellectual system.

It must also be noted that Harvard, at the time, was one of the greatest universities in the world, and Babbitt’s most famous student—who became a lifelong friend—was T. S. Eliot.

Though Mendenhall has already done a tremendous job walkin­g us through Democracy and Leadership, it’s worth summarizing Babbitt’s overall views. As such, I’ve followed Russell Kirk’s six tenets or canons of conservative thought. These might be regarded as six tenets of Babbittian humanist thought.

First, Babbitt believed, man was defined more by his duties than his rights. The true man restrained his passions and willed his way toward reason. In this way, Babbitt very much expands upon Cicero’s notion that the true purpose of every real philosopher is to define and uphold duty. Man could certainly cling to his rights, Babbitt thought, but they in no way shaped man toward excellence. Again, only duty could do such a thing.

Second, all things and all of reality is a whole. We might very well live in a part—with our subdivision in society or in our temporal space—but we exist as a part of something complete. While neither a Christian nor a Stoic, Babbitt had been influenced rather strongly by Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Still, this has a Ciceronian and Stoic feel to it, especially in terms of a love of the Logos as holding all things together.

Third, a man finds himself best through his work. Here, Babbitt seems to be embracing the Roman virtue of labor. This point is related to point number one. Man lives out his duties, and he labors towards what is good, true, and beautiful.

Fourth, the great break in Western civilization—the one that led to modernity—came from Nicolo Machiavelli and his reworking of St. Augustine’s ideas from The City of God. Such errors continued through Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As such, man began to lose his grasp upon permanent things, customs, and mores. Instead, he became self-centered and inwardly directed.

Fifth, without question, Babbitt labeled Rousseau as the great demon of the modern world. Rousseau had, through his social contract, brought together the Leviathan of Hobbes with the libertarianism of Locke, thus creating an unholy alliance. If Rousseau represented all that was evil, though, Edmund Burke represented all that was good. Burke, especially through his Reflections on the Revolution in France, called us back to the highest things and returned us to our proper Western heritage.

Sixth, democracy at home almost always results in imperialism abroad. This is a complicated argument on Babbitt’s part, but he has history—especially the case of Athens and the case of the United States—to back up his claims. Democracy, for Babbitt, represented a kind of misguided arrogance and pride that could only find fulfillment in tyrannizing others.

None of this should suggest that Babbitt’s thought was easy or even easily reducible to just six tenets. Still, each one reminds us, yet again, that, as Mendenhall wisely argued, Babbitt should never have been forgotten. Babbitt was truly a man, one whose biography and, especially, his intellectual biography, has much to teach us.