Politics & Power Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt’s sentence has the cool sting of a diagnosis delivered after the fever has already broken. The papacy, in his framing, isn’t merely a church office; it’s a civilizational technology, a centuries-old institution that once offered Europe a shared vocabulary of authority, morality, and belonging. Calling it the “traditional unity of European civilization” is strategic: he’s invoking a supranational referee that could, at least in theory, subordinate local passions to a higher order.

Then comes the turn: “has also shown itself unable.” The subtext is disappointment without surprise. Babbitt is writing in the long shadow of the 19th century’s nation-state boom and the early 20th century’s political combustions, when ethnic identity and mass politics started outmuscling older, slower institutions. Even the papacy, built to think in centuries, can’t “limit effectively” nationalism’s push - a phrase that treats nationalism less as an ideology than as a force of pressure, crowd movement, and historical momentum.

The intent isn’t to score points against Catholicism so much as to argue that Europe’s inherited sources of restraint have lost leverage. Nationalism, for Babbitt, isn’t just pride of place; it’s a solvent that dissolves shared standards and replaces them with competitive mythmaking. The sentence quietly questions what, if anything, can now play the integrative role Rome once did. If the strongest symbol of unity can’t contain the centrifugal energies of modern politics, the real warning is about what fills the vacuum: louder loyalties, thinner moral limits, and a continent increasingly organized around rivalry rather than common civilization.