Neo‐Humanism

Abstract

Variously known as neo‐humanism, new humanism, and American humanism, this conservative movement in American literary and cultural criticism came to prominence in the first decade of the twentieth century and largely faded from view by the late 1930s. Neo‐humanism was fiercely antimodernist and attacked what it saw as symptoms of materialism, socialism, and relativism in American culture. Neo‐humanism opposed itself to virtually every intellectual and artistic development that had occurred in the wake of the European enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although its animus was directed particularly against the emancipatory political energies associated with the French Revolution and against nineteenth‐century romanticism more broadly, symbolized in the person of the French philosopher Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. The neo‐humanists also deplored much of the progress made in the natural sciences from the time of Francis Bacon to that of Albert Einstein, in philosophyfrom RenEe Descartes and Baruch Spinoza to Henri Bergson and William James, and in literature from Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare to Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser. The Anglo‐American poet and critic T. S. Eliot was neo‐humanism's chief exponent outside the United States and, although he showed at best a qualified enthusiasm for the movement, Eliot's conservative cultural and critical attitudes were nevertheless closely akin to those of key neo‐humanists. When Eliot famously described himself as “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo‐Catholic in religion” (1929: vii), he gave perhaps the most concise expression to the central tenets of neo‐humanism.