This volume is the best-known and most widely discussed work of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. It is also the work that best conveys the ethical and aesthetic core of his thought. Broad in scope, it examines a variety of manifestations of romanticism and presents a typology of the imaginative inclinations of that movement Rousseau is analyzed as paradigmatic of the ethical and aesthetic sensibility that is replacing the classical and Christian outlook in the Western world. For Babbitt, works of...

Character and Culture by Irving Babbitt is the latest volume in the Library of Conservative Thought. Babbitt was the leader of the twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movement called American Humanism or the New Humanism. More than half a century after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. The qualities that marked Irving Babbitt as a thinker and cultural critic of the first rank are richly represented in Character and Culture. First published togetherin 1940 (under the misleading title Spanish Character), these essays span his...