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.