An Emblematic American.

• Author: Bengtsson, Jan Olof
• Position: Review

The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt, by George A. Panichas. Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999. 235 pp. $24.95.

I have seen only three portraits of Irving Babbitt. The first was the photograph reproduced in the 1979 Liberty Press edition of Democracy and Leadership, which I first saw in a Swedish Encyclopaedia. This, I imagined, was of Babbitt the vigorous scholar in mid-career. The second portrait was the one on the cover of Irving Babbitt in Our Time, edited by George Panichas and Claes G. Ryn in 1986. Here was the senior scholar, with the authority, dignity and elegance of an urbane patrician. The third portrait, one which I had never seen before, is the photograph in this new book by Panichas. It shows the tired, although in no way broken, old fighter, probably in ill health.

Babbitt always had to fight. The course which he embraced as a young man, and to which he stuck with an impressive and uncompromising tenacity, quickly brought him into conflict with representatives of most of the major trends of his age.

Although formulated within a broadly modern context and by no means in total opposition to it, Babbitt's humanism is of a conservative and classicist variety, turning sharply against some of the basic philosophic and cultural presuppositions of modernity. But Babbitt is no reactionary; he does not urge a return to premodern society. He invokes and mobilizes the Greek and Roman classics, as well as Buddha and Confucius, within modernity, as a necessary corrective and counterbalance in the face of potentially disastrous developments. It is to the philosophical and humanistic classics of antiquity rather than to the medieval Christian authorities that he turns, although he opposes classical rationalism, although he places Jesus Christ among the ethical voluntarists whom he praises, and although, while not himself emphasizing it in his scholarship, he accepts a theological and transcendent horizon beyond ethics.

Babbitt's defense of modernity is qualified: he accepts only a certain kind of humanism, only a certain kind of liberalism, only a certain kind of democracy. He respects modernity's confidence in the ability of humanity to reach insight into ethical universality and the concrete ethical life without recourse to a specific, institutional religious authority. But the substantively most indispensable sources are still the greater and older historical traditions of mankind. The political, legal, scientific and technical innovations of modernity are acceptable only within the framework of those ethical and cultural traditions. The central humanistic orientation and ethical substance are not themselves products of modernity. That which is specific to modernity and also valid is compatible with the older insights into the ethical nature and predicament of man, i.e., it consists of partial and, in some cases, even peripheral truth. Most of Babbitt's writing concerns the problematic nature of modernity, not its highe r possibilities, which he nevertheless clearly recognizes.

A humanist and a Harvard professor, Babbitt turned against major features of modern society and the modern university. The positivistic idea of research, as inspired by the natural sciences, was, according to Babbitt, foreign to the study of humanistic culture and insight. Neither was the truth about man and society for him something that lies ahead of us largely undiscovered, waiting to be explored by new generations of researchers technically trained in the methods of empiricism. Yet Babbitt was in no way a dogmatic, ossified traditionalist. He was a creative traditionalist: he encouraged renewed expressions of imaginative vision, and he was, I believe, open, in principle at least, to the possibility of a deepening and an expansion of humane knowledge. But in its basic outlines, humanistic and political truth was for him already available, behind us so to speak, as timeless insights waiting to be rediscovered and rearticulated.

In his writing about the American college, Babbitt advocated the patient and protracted study of the classics, of the great moral and literary traditions of mankind. He also argued that they should be concretely assimilated in the life and person of the humanist through strenuous inner effort. Opposing what he called false liberal democracy and its kind of university, Babbitt advocated classically based humanism and concrete moral example. Lowering us into some of the darkest reaches of the cave, our century has richly confirmed Babbitt's analyses and fears: it has spawned the liberal anti-order, now dissolving further into the anarchy of postmodern relativism, and the burgeoning new tyranny of political correctness, forces held together only by technological capitalism, and the brutal counter-order of communism and fascism, systematically killing not only the philosophers, but, by the millions, those with dissenting and only slightly more adequate interpretations of the shadows on the wall.

George Panichas's new book summarizes and documents his contribution to the rediscovery and reappraisal of Babbitt that has been going on over the last decades. It also acknowledges and discusses the contributions of others, reprinting, as it does, Panichas's review essays on Claes G. Ryn's Will...