SOURCE: Hoeveler Jr., J. David. “The New Humanists.” In The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940, pp. 3-27. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977.

In the following essay, Hoeveler traces the individual paths that led Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and other writers to align into the movement known as the New Humanism and comments on the social context of this intellectual trend.

Fighting a whole generation is not exactly a happy task.

—Irving Babbitt

The New Humanism sprang from a profound disaffection with the modern age. Centering its attention on the governing ideas of the contemporary world, it surveyed the triumph of relativism in philosophy and social thought, of materialism in daily living, and of romanticism and naturalism in literature, and was convinced that twentieth-century man had lost his bearings. The New Humanists sought first to expose the misconceptions that had set him adrift. Believing that...