The Winds of Change

New Year, New Job

Happy New Year! And greetings from Montgomery, where the Christmas decorations have been put away and the campus is gearing up for the spring term. I have not done an update post in almost two months, and there’s much to share, so here we go.

What I’m Writing

My essay “Democracy and Leadership at 100: Lessons for the 21st Century” was published by the University Bookman just before the end of the year. It appeared along with three other essays on Babbitt as part of a symposium. All four essays came out of the conference panel on which I participated at the 2024 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. I posted an incomplete and very rough draft of my essay here about a month ago, but I’d like to think the completed version is much better. Here’s an excerpt:

The casual observer might be tempted to dismiss Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (1924) as irrelevant to 21st-century concerns. Much of its text deals with the vanished world of the European and American empires that circled the globe in the early 20th century. It engages at length with the ideas of many forgotten statesmen of Babbitt’s day. Its insistence on attention to the inner life of the leader can seem naïve in the age of nuclear weapons and the faceless bureaucracy of the administrative state.

Yet Russell Kirk, who in 1979 wrote the foreword to the Liberty Fund edition of Democracy and Leadership, calls it “one of the few truly important works of political thought to be written by an American in the twentieth century—or, for that matter, during the past two centuries.” He saw clearly that Babbitt’s diagnosis of the post-WWI moment was rooted in a deep understanding of timeless elements of the human condition. Moreover, because the trends Babbitt discussed in the 1920s have continued largely unabated since that time, his critique of them and prescriptions to remedy them remain salient.

Here are five lessons from Democracy and Leadership that remain relevant 100 years after its publication: . . .

We Must Recover the Moral Imagination: As an alternative to Rousseau’s naïve confidence in the goodness of human nature, a system of ethics rooted in pity, and an almost absolute trust in popular sovereignty, Babbitt proposed the thought of another towering 18th-century thinker, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), who championed tradition and prescription over rationalism and merely private judgment. Unlike some modern scholars, Babbitt interprets Burke as placing the “final emphasis” on the individual. But whereas Rousseau indulged in an “idyllic imagination” that seeks some kind of return to a pre-societal nature, Burke puts forward the “moral imagination,” which is “humanistic and religious.”

For Burke, our ethical outlook is historically grounded in the experience of our people, and the basis of ethics is the wisdom that has been passed down to us from our forebears. Fraternity arises from the fulfilling of the concrete duties we owe to each other. Burke opposed what Babbitt calls the “metaphysical politics” of the Rousseauists, who, “under cover of getting rid of prejudice . . . would strip man of all the habits and concrete relationships and network of historical circumstance in which he is actually implicated and finally leave him shivering ‘in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.’”

The moral imagination allows us to rise above our own narrow, private concerns without floating off into the clouds of abstraction. Burke identified the “spirit of religion” and the “spirit of a gentleman” as primary vehicles of moral imagination in his own day. Babbitt writes that this makes him a “frank champion of aristocracy,” but an aristocracy in which men are estimated “not by their hereditary rank, but by their personal achievement.” To a great extent, this was the vision in place at the American Founding as well. Ordered liberty, rather than the implementation of popular sovereignty, was the Founders’ goal. Babbitt doubted that a Burkean outlook would be efficacious in resisting the disciples of Rousseau in his own time, but Russell Kirk’s revival of Burke in the 1950s and the existence of an identifiably Burkean strand of conservatism in the decades since are evidence that Babbitt may have been unduly pessimistic.

Here are the links to all four essays in the symposium:

• Michael Federici’s “Irving Babbitt and Populism”

• Claes Ryn’s “The Great Intellectual Scandal: Irving Babbitt and His Traditionalist Critics”

• My “Democracy and Leadership at 100: Lessons for the 21st Century”

• Darrell Falconburg’s “Irving Babbitt’s Defense of the Humanities”

What I’m Reading

By reading seven books during the last week of 2024, I managed to meet my annual goal of reading 75 books. Along with some junk fiction, I read Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, which I found really interesting, and two Shakespeare plays—Othello and Coriolanus. I finished the final book in the late afternoon of Dec. 31. I hope I don’t need to go down to the wire to finish in 2025. There were two or three stretches in 2024 where I didn’t read a single book for several weeks, and I’d like to avoid that this time around.

Ralph Fiennes took a turn as Coriolanus in an oft-overlooked 2011 film that he also directed. It’s worth a look if you haven’t seen it. The supporting cast is excellent as well: Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox

Update

We took trips to Searcy during Thanksgiving week and the days immediately after Christmas. We enjoyed good visits with my mother and siblings and got updates on some interesting projects some friends have going on there.

For the past several years, my wife’s side of the family has rented out a Christian camp just south of Little Rock for a few days around New Year’s. We spent four nights there this time. It’s always a good time to unwind (and finish a reading binge). We returned to Montgomery on Jan. 2.

Also on Jan. 2, my friend Allen Mendenhall broke the news of my impending departure from Montgomery in his weekly op-ed for the 1819 News website. This week my family will move to Tallahassee, where I will take on a new position as Chief Academic Officer of the State University System of Florida. I had hoped to keep the news quiet a little longer while we made final arrangements for our move, but Allen’s article forced my hand, so I posted about the job on Facebook, and now everyone seems to know.

The process lasted about three months from when I applied (September) to when I was offered the position (the week before Christmas). That may seem slow, but for someone who is used to seeing academic hiring happen at a glacial pace, it didn’t look that way to me.

Florida’s system of higher education is the best in the nation. U.S. News & World Report has ranked it #1 every year since it introduced the category seven or eight years ago. And if you have been keeping up with the news in higher ed for the past couple of years, you know that the most significant reforms are also happening in Florida. Other states are looking to it for examples of how to make reforms of their own. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to be a part of that! I am eager to begin working with and learning from Chancellor Ray Rodrigues and his team.

Faulkner’s administration has been very accommodating in allowing me to leave campus in the middle of the academic year. I do plan to maintain an affiliation with Faulkner and will teach one graduate seminar this spring while I hand off my administrative duties to other faculty.

I also plan to remain on the governing board of Ivy Classical Academy. I’ll attend meetings in person when possible and remotely when I am not able to make it up to Prattville.

Unless something unexpected happens, I also plan to continue posting regularly here. I have been posting at least once a week on Substack for two years now! As always, I would appreciate it if you would recommend this site to readers who might be interested in the kinds of things I write about.

If all goes as planned, my next post will come from Tallahassee!