Paul Elmer More’s New Humanism for Our Times
Paul Elmer More is one of the greatest American men of letters you have probably never heard of. Though he was a friend of and an influence on such greats as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis in his own time, as well as a prolific writer, he is little-remembered today. Most of his books are out of print. It is a pity, because More’s humanism is a pillar of the imaginative conservatism that could do much to enlighten our darkening culture.
More will be better remembered now, though, thanks to the University of Missouri Press’s publication of The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More: The Ethical Basis of Life and Letters by Swedish scholar Folke Leander. The book was completed in the 1970s, but Leander was unable to find a publisher before his death in 1981. Fortunately, his student Claes G. Ryn has worked with leading More scholar Eric Adler to bring it to print for the first time in 2026. One hopes that the valuable and even touching introductions to this important book will rescue Leander and More from the relative obscurity in which they languish.
Insofar as More is remembered today, it is as the co-founder with fellow Midwesterner Irving Babbitt of a school of literary and social criticism called the “New Humanism.” Both men were born at the tail end of the Civil War and lived until the brink of World War II and became fierce if sometimes lonely critics of the arid wasteland that was the intellectual life of that era. Together, Babbitt and More defended the old verities of Western civilization—and even occasionally the spirituality of the East—against the positivism, scientism, and misguided humanitarianism that dominated in the early 20th century.
More did not, however, begin his career in literature as a New Humanist. Adler recounts in his introduction how the native Missourian rejected the Christianity of his youth and began dabbling in the pragmatism popular at the time as he pursued a Ph.D. at Harvard University. Dissatisfied with the dreary philology that dominated the American academy, he soon met Babbitt and fell under the influence of his much more imaginative scholarship. Eventually, he dropped out of graduate school because he thought it “drained literature of its humane significance” and was “uninterested in this scientized and trivializing approach to literary study.” After a relatively unsuccessful stint teaching, he went on to serve as an editor at a number of publications, most notably as editor-in-chief of The Nation from 1908 to 1914.
Read more in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Daily.
