Whether you agree or not (most people won’t, fully), this book matters because it captures a now-unfashionable but structurally important counter-tradition: anti-Romantic liberal humanism; suspicious of feeling as virtue and freedom without limits.

This is early 20th-century humanist criticism aimed squarely at Romanticism as a moral and political problem. Irving Babbitt is not doing appreciation or literary history — he’s prosecuting a case.

His argument, bluntly: Rousseau’s elevation of instinct, authenticity, and emotional sincerity corrodes restraint, responsibility, and ethical form, and that this legacy runs straight through Romantic literature into modern political excess.

One for the spite shelf, or not. Read and see.