Although no professed Christian, Harvard professor Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (1924), together with the writings of his intensely Christian colleague Paul Elmer More, favored the aristocratic tendencies of American humanism against the leveling program of John Dewey’s pragmatism. In short, they both feared mob rule. Babbitt’s work provides an instructive mirror to several concerns of his Agrarian contemporaries in the South. But there was a difference. “Genuine humanism,” according to native Michigander Russell Kirk, “is the belief that man is a distinct being, governed by laws particular to his nature: there is a law for man, and there is a law for thing.” Arguing against immediate gratification and a strict individualism, the American humanists considered education in the humanities as a way to instruct people how to place a check upon insatiable desires, overindulgence, and avarice. Kirk further noted, “Those checks are provided by reason-- not the private rationality of the Enlightenment, but the higher reason which grows out of respect for the wisdom of our ancestors and out of the endeavor to apprehend order in the person and order in the republic.”
Against this understanding existed the “sentimentalist” who favored the acquiescence to an impulsive gratification, the “pragmatic materialist” who cared for the end rather than the means, and the “leveling enthusiast, who would reduce human personality to a collective mediocrity-- these are the enemies of true human nature, and against them Irving Babbitt directed his books.”