Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) and Paul Elmer More were the two chief proponents of the New Humanist movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

Babbitt and the New Humanists perceived that Western culture had been negatively impacted by the naturalism of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which was, in turn, perpetuated by the reliance on intuition and emotion in the works of the nineteenth-century Romantic era. Instead, Babbitt prescribed a thorough background in the literature that he believed instilled classical ethics, morality, and disciplined reason divorced from contemporaneous political and materialistic ideology and focused on universal conservative values. This conservatism in an era increasingly concerned with modernism made Babbitt and the New Humanists lightning rods for derision from the prevailing cultural critics, including Sinclair Lewis, who allegedly named the repressed title character of his 1922 novel Babbitt after him, and openly denounced the New Humanists in his Nobel...