ABSTRACT
This was the main point of Eliot’s argument against Irving Babbitt’s social criticism. Babbitt’s humanism was inadequate to the task of social reform because it placed too much emphasis on the individual’s ability to improve him or herself. Without an external framework, such as religion, ‘there is nothing left for the individual to check himself by but his own private notions and his judgment, which is pretty precarious’ and, furthermore, nothing to bring individuals together into a unified group (1980: 476). Extending the argument of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot argued that social reform could not be achieved by individual responses to the contemporary situation, it must draw on the social traditions individuals already shared:
For Eliot, like Hulme, classicism led logically to religion. Without
and aesthetic ideas; in fact, the reverse was true. Eliot’s philosophy and aesthetics led to and shaped his Christianity.
