Democracy and Leadership

Democracy and Leadership PDF Author: Irving Babbitt
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Democracy and Leadership

Democracy and Leadership PDF Author: Irving Babbitt
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description


Rousseau and Romanticism

Rousseau and Romanticism PDF Author: Irving Babbitt
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465612475
Category : Romanticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The words classic and romantic, we are often told, cannot be defined at all, and even if they could be defined, some would add, we should not be much profited. But this inability or unwillingness to define may itself turn out to be only one aspect of a movement that from Rousseau to Bergson has sought to discredit the analytical intellect—what Wordsworth calls “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” However, those who are with Socrates rather than with Rousseau or Wordsworth in this matter, will insist on the importance of definition, especially in a chaotic era like the present; for nothing is more characteristic of such an era than its irresponsible use of general terms. Now to measure up to the Socratic standard, a definition must not be abstract and metaphysical, but experimental; it must not, that is, reflect our opinion of what a word should mean, but what it actually has meant. Mathematicians may be free at times to frame their own definitions, but in the case of words like classic and romantic, that have been used innumerable times, and used not in one but in many countries, such a method is inadmissible. One must keep one’s eye on actual usage. One should indeed allow for a certain amount of freakishness in this usage. Beaumarchais, for example, makes classic synonymous with barbaric. One may disregard an occasional aberration of this kind, but if one can find only confusion and inconsistency in all the main uses of words like classic and romantic, the only procedure for those who speak or write in order to be understood is to banish the words from their vocabulary. Now to define in a Socratic way two things are necessary: one must learn to see a common element in things that are apparently different and also to discriminate between things that are apparently similar. A Newton, to take the familiar instance of the former process, saw a common element in the fall of an apple and the motion of a planet; and one may perhaps without being a literary Newton discover a common element in all the main uses of the word romantic as well as in all the main uses of the word classic; though some of the things to which the word romantic in particular has been applied seem, it must be admitted, at least as far apart as the fall of an apple and the motion of a planet. The first step is to perceive the something that connects two or more of these things apparently so diverse, and then it may be found necessary to refer this unifying trait itself back to something still more general, and so on until we arrive, not indeed at anything absolute—the absolute will always elude us—but at what Goethe calls the original or underlying phenomenon (Urphänomen). A fruitful source of false definition is to take as primary in a more or less closely allied group of facts what is actually secondary—for example, to fix upon the return to the Middle Ages as the central fact in romanticism, whereas this return is only symptomatic; it is very far from being the original phenomenon. Confused and incomplete definitions of romanticism have indeed just that origin—they seek to put at the centre something that though romantic is not central but peripheral, and so the whole subject is thrown out of perspective.

Literature and the American College

Literature and the American College PDF Author: Irving Babbitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Democracy and Imperialism

Democracy and Imperialism PDF Author: William S Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472125931
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Following costly U.S. engagement in two wars in the Middle East, questions about the appropriateness of American military interventions dominate foreign policy debates. Is an interventionist foreign policy compatible with the American constitutional tradition? This book examines critic Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) unique contribution to understanding the quality of foreign policy leadership in a democracy. Babbitt explored how a democratic nation’s foreign policy is a product of the moral and cultural tendencies of the nation’s leaders, arguing that the substitution of expansive, sentimental Romanticism for the religious and ethical traditions of the West would lead to imperialism. The United States’ move away from the restraint and order of sound constitutionalism to involve itself in the affairs of other nations will inevitably cause a clash with the “civilizational” regions that have emerged in recent decades. Democracy and Imperialism uses the question of soul types to address issues of foreign policy leadership, and discusses the leadership qualities that are necessary for sound foreign policy.

Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture

Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture PDF Author: Milton Hindus
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412826679
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Foreword / Russell Kirk -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Achievement of Irving Babbitt -- 3. Babbitt's Masters of Modern French Criticism -- 4. Babbitt's Version of the Buddha's The Dhammapada -- 5. Rousseau and Romanticism -- 6. The Future of Democracy in the United States -- 7. Literature and the Democratic Culture -- 8. Autobiographies of Van Buren, Reagan, and Bush -- 9. Malthus, Mendel, and the American Dream.

The New Laokoon

The New Laokoon PDF Author: Irving Babbitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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The Dhammapada: Buddhist philosophy

The Dhammapada: Buddhist philosophy PDF Author: G. Buddha
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221423
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
The 423 verses in the collection known as The Dhammapada (pada: "the way"; dhamma: "the teaching"; hence, "The Path of Truth") are attributed to the Buddha himself and form the essence of the ethics of Buddhist philosophy. There are a number of English translations of The Dhammapada, but this version by Irving Babbitt, for many years professor at Harvard and founder, with Paul Elmer More, of the movement known as "New Humanism," concentrates on the profound poetic quality of the verses and conveys, perhaps more than any other, much of the vitality of the original Pali text. Babbitt devoted many years to this translation––it was a labor of love. Together with his essay on "Buddha and the Occident," which is also included in this edition, The Dhammapada was one of the basic components of his view of world history, a view which has influenced leaders of thought as diverse as Newton Arvin, Walter Lippmann, David Riesman and T. S. Eliot. Eliot, indeed, once wrote that "to have been a student of Babbitt's is to remain always in that position."

Will, Imagination and Reason

Will, Imagination and Reason PDF Author:
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412841542
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Will, Imagination, and Reason sets forth a new understanding of reality and knowledge with far-reaching implications for the study of man and society. Employing a systematic approach, Claes Ryn goes to the philosophical depths to rethink and reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences. He shows that will and imagination, together, constitute our basic outlook on life and that reason derives its material and general orientation from the interaction between them. The imaginative master-minds--novelists, poets, composers, painters, and others--powerfully affect the sensibility and direction of society. Sometimes a distorting, self-serving willfulness at the base of their visions draws civilization, including reason, into dangerous illusion. More penetrating and balanced vision and rationality spring from a different quality of will. Ryn explains the kind of interplay between will, imagination, and reason that is conducive to a deepened sense of reality and to intellectual understanding. He argues that human life and self-knowledge are inescapably historical. In developing his dialectical view of intellect, he draws from Irving Babbitt, Benedetto Croce, and other philosophers to refute positivistic, formalistic, and ahistorical theories of knowledge and to develop his alternative. Advancing a systematic epistemological argument, Ryn throws much new light on the nature of reason but also on central issues of ethics and aesthetics. This trenchant and original work is indispensable to philosophers, social, political and cultural theorists, literary scholars, and historians.

The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt

The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt PDF Author: George A. Panichas
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"Babbitt's writings were uncompromising and controversial. His ideas revolved around the ultimate problems of life, literature, and thought and were rooted in and impelled by mural concerns and imperatives.

Irving Babbitt, Literature and the Democratic Culture

Irving Babbitt, Literature and the Democratic Culture PDF Author: Milton Hindus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000950999
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This is a sustained inquiry into the thought of the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. Milton Hindus considers the subjects that most interested Babbitt: ethics, literature, education, and social and political conservatism in the United States. In their most general sense, his concerns were man and his nature as the root of all social order. For Babbitt, efforts to improve social conditions must begin and end with the individual human being.In rejecting notions that society is primarily responsible for moral deficiencies in the individual, or that the individual is bom good only to be corrupted by society, Babbitt places responsibility squarely with the individual. As Hindus shows, Babbitt sees human beings as a mixture of good and evil impulses, shaped by what he called "the inner check." Virtue is thus a result of self-discipline, reinforced and confirmed by habit.Babbitt's thinking, emphasizing as it does proven values and accepted wisdom, calls upon us to advance ourselves by rediscovery of the lessons of the past. Hindus demonstrates that Babbitt has much to offer us as we consider contemporary social and political issues. In contrast to those who emphasize avant-garde postures and fashionable ideologies, as well as those conservative followers of outdated theories and dead-end formulas, Babbitt's reinvigorating spirit inspires new insights.Although there have been a number of studies of Irving Babbitt and the New Humanism, Hindus is singular in his combination of detailed consideration of a number of Babbitt's books with his own essays on contemporary issues, approached in what Hindus calls a Babbitian spirit. Like Babbitt's own writings, this book is addressed to the general reader. It will be of particular importance to teachers of comparative literature and those interested in the connections between literature and social thought and philosophy.