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 offers a compelling critique of unchecked majoritarianism and addresses the great problem of how to discover leaders with standards. . . . one of the few truly important works of political thought . --Russell Kirk Used Book in Good Condition