Liberty Fund Books
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Democracy and Leadership
By Irving Babbitt
Foreword by Russell Kirk
Pub Date |
Jul 1979 |
Notes |
Foreword, appendixes, bibliography, index. |
| Format | Size Pages | ISBN-10 ISBN-13 | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloth | 6 x 9 | 0-913966-54-1 978-0-913966-54-9 | $24.00 | |
| Paperback | 6 x 9 | 0-913966-55-X 978-0-913966-55-6 | $14.50 |
Description
. . . one of the few truly important works of political thought.
—Russell Kirk
Irving Babbitt was a leader of the intellectual movement called American Humanism, or the New Humanism, and a distinguished professor of French literature at Harvard. Democracy and Leadership, first published in 1924, is his only directly political book, and in it he applies the principles of humanism to the civil social order.
Babbitt rejects all deterministic philosophies of history, whether they be the older type found in Saint Augustine or Bossuet, which tends to make of man the puppet of God, or the new type, which tends in all its varieties to make of man the puppet of nature. He offers a compelling critique of unchecked majoritarianism and addresses the great problem of how to discover leaders with standards.
Reviews
. . . one of the few truly important works of political thought.—Russell Kirk
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Russell Kirk 11 Prefatory Note 21 Introduction 23 1. The Types of Political Thinking 492. Rousseau and the Idyllic Imagination 93
3. Burke and the Moral Imagination 121
4. Democracy and Imperialism 141
5. Europe and Asia 183
6. True and False Liberals 211
7. Democracy and Standards 265 Appendix A: Theories of the Will 345 Appendix B: Absolute Sovereignty 361 Bibliography 367 Index 377
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