“Socratic Remnant” versus “Creative Democracy”: Irving Babbitt’s Anti-Deweyan Vision of Leadership

Abstract

This article reimagines the role of universities in American public life today by examining two early twentieth-century critics of the research university. Both worried that the new educational system could fracture democratic society, but they drew opposite conclusions about the positive role of universities. Irving Babbitt led a New Humanist school that made the case for liberal learning as a good in itself, but one also capable of cultivating an ethic of self-restraint through the study of classical texts. This would serve to train leaders who could question democracy’s impulse for self-gratification. He fiercely criticized John Dewey, who argued that learning must be practical and experimental because truths are not received as a canon but created through living together. This article demonstrates that Babbitt’s corpus develops a unified educational and political theory for elite formation by linking Socratic psychology and the constitutional order of the United States.