Irving Babbitt Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Humanism of Irving Babbitt Revisited

By Claes G. Ryn|2026-08-02T14:36:19-05:00August 1st, 2026|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Civilization, Claes Ryn, Irving Babbitt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nature of Man, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1MA|

There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with Irving Babbitt’s work as with that of any serious thinker. The proper question for scholars to ask would appear to be: Do Babbitt’s various concepts faithfully account for the facts of human experience? In other words: Is he providing a scientific analysis of [...]

An Emblematic American: The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt

By Jan Olof Bengtsson|2026-07-14T20:16:33-05:00July 14th, 2026|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Conservatism, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Timeless Essays|

Irving Babbitt was in no way a dogmatic, ossified traditionalist. He was a creative traditionalist: He encouraged renewed expressions of imaginative vision, and he was open to the possibility of a deepening and an expansion of humane knowledge. The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt by George A. Panichas (235 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999) I [...]

Irving Babbitt: An Act of Reparation

By George Panichas|2025-07-14T16:10:53-05:00July 14th, 2025|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Leadership, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1MA|

Irving Babbitt wrestled with those fundamental life questions that relate to the fate of man in the modern world. What he chose to say about this world of increasing material organization continues to make Babbitt’s work and thought disturbing and unpalatable. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) never wavered in what he viewed as being his commanding office [...]

The Colonel Blimp of the Old Right

By Michael J. Connolly|2025-04-13T19:54:19-05:00April 13th, 2025|Categories: American Republic, Aristocracy, Conservatism, Democracy, Hilaire Belloc, History, Irving Babbitt, World War I|

Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older [...]

Irving Babbitt: Moral Imagination & Progressive Education

By Glenn Davis|2024-08-01T15:38:46-05:00August 1st, 2024|Categories: Education, Featured, Glenn Davis, Imagination, Irving Babbitt, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|Tags: Glenn Davis|

Throughout his works, Irving Babbitt addressed the continuing decline of the humanistic imagination, humanism constituting a tradition that had produced a leadership class of ladies and gentlemen. His educational theory was aimed at producing an elite, humanistic aristocracy that would lead responsibly and ethically. When Literature and the American College, Irving Babbitt’s critique of the [...]

Irving Babbitt & Richard Weaver: Conservative Sages

By George Panichas|2023-08-16T18:07:14-05:00August 16th, 2023|Categories: Character, Conservatism, Culture, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Order, Richard Weaver, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1MA|

Moral indolence and apathy, both Babbitt and Weaver stress, must be surpassed if one is to fly beyond the nets of naturalism and temperamental excesses. Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard [...]

What Happened to Excellence?

By George Panichas|2023-08-02T08:20:20-05:00September 18th, 2022|Categories: Character, Culture, Eric Voegelin, Essential, Featured, George A. Panichas, Great Books, Irving Babbitt, Modernity, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Excellence predicates aspiration and transcendence, a quest for a higher quality of attainment and, in effect, going beyond the moment. Excellence, which can be defined as the state of excelling and of surpassing merit, is now increasingly one of the lost words of the English language. And increasingly the special qualities that this word denotes [...]

Irving Babbitt Against the Decaying Republic

By Bradley J. Birzer|2022-08-02T09:43:37-05:00August 1st, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Culture, Featured, History, Irving Babbitt, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Seeing himself and his allies on the losing side of the war against the modern spirit, Irving Babbitt made a fierce call to arms, advocating the need for a “remnant” to preserve all that is good, true, and beautiful. Irving Babbitt In his own day and age, Irving Babbitt’s (1865-1933) many opponents—from Ernest [...]

Irving Babbitt: The Man and His Thought

By Bradley J. Birzer|2023-08-02T08:21:39-05:00July 14th, 2022|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Ideology, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Irving Babbitt was an eccentric, armed with both a brilliant mind and personality. While we ought to remember his thought, we should also remember the man. As the leader of the American humanists, Irving Babbitt (1864-1933) stood solidly and forthrightly in the American conservative tradition of John Adams and Nathaniel Hawthorne and drew upon the [...]

Reflections on Leadership

By George Panichas|2022-03-17T21:52:14-05:00March 13th, 2022|Categories: Democracy, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Leadership, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1MA, Democracy and Leadership|

We need to restore moral value to leadership. In whom do we now recognize and salute leaderly qualities? Who are representative of great leadership? What accounts for the growing diminution of standards of leadership? “In the long run democracy will be judged,” writes Irving Babbitt in Democracy and Leadership (1924), “no less than other forms [...]

Irving Babbitt and the Crisis of Nationalism, 1915

By Bradley J. Birzer|2022-01-17T09:22:42-06:00January 17th, 2022|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors|

For Irving Babbitt, a saving remnant of those who possess a humane understanding of the West and its great men and great ideas existed—one that could counter the nationalists and internationalists and those promoting either leviathan or the superman. In the 1910s, one of America’s greatest humanists, Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), surprisingly decided to dive into [...]

A Philosophy for Our Age: Historicist Humanism

By Jay Schalin|2020-06-30T17:01:00-05:00June 29th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Books, Irving Babbitt, Philosophy, Politics|

Historicist humanism has been largely ignored in the American intellectual consciousness. But for those individuals who realize the depth of our national crisis, who sense the emptiness of mainstream culture, and who lament that society is fracturing for lack of common identity and purpose, historicist humanism has much to offer. The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal [...]

Humanism as Realism

By Pawel Armada|2020-01-17T15:33:35-06:00January 17th, 2020|Categories: Christian Humanism, Conservatism, Irving Babbitt, Modernity, Paul Elmer More, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Religion|

We live in a world completely mastered and permeated by economic ideals, yet expecting better government within societies brought up on humanitarian thinking strikes us as yet another fantasy. Much has changed since the solutions posited by humanist thinkers of the last century, so what can we do in this world? What can we bet [...]

Remembering Irving Babbitt

By Bradley J. Birzer|2020-07-14T19:04:15-05:00June 18th, 2019|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, History, Humanism and Conservatism, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors|

Irving Babbitt’s humanism was not radically intricate or convoluted: It was a reflection of nature and, at least to the wise, of common sense. No one could—in his wildest dreams—dismiss the humanism of Babbitt as a mere fad or a marginal movement; all thinking people engaged the ideas, whether they found them palatable or not. [...]