Himmelfarb, Gertrude 1922-

views updated

Himmelfarb, Gertrude 1922-

PERSONAL:

Born August 8, 1922, in New York, NY; daughter of Max (a manufacturer) and Bertha Himmelfarb; married Irving Kristol (a professor and editor), January 18, 1942; children: William, Elizabeth. Education: Attended Jewish Theological Seminary, 1939-42; Brooklyn College (now Brooklyn College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1942; University of Chicago, M.A., 1944, Ph.D., 1950; attended Girton College, Cambridge, 1946-47.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, City University of New York, 524 Whitehead Hall, Brooklyn, NY 11210.

CAREER:

Independent scholar, 1950-65; City University of New York, professor of history at Brooklyn College, 1965-78, distinguished professor of history at Graduate School, 1978-88, professor emerita of history, 1988—. National Humanities Center, member of board of trustees, 1976—; National Endowment for the Humanities, council member, 1982—; Library of Congress, council of scholars, 1984—; Woodrow Wilson Center, member of board of trustees, 1985-96; British Institute of the United States, member of board of directors, 1985—; Institute for Contemporary Studies, member of board of directors, 1986—; Ethics and Public Policy Center, associate scholar, 1986—; American Enterprise Institute, council of academic advisers member, 1987—; National Endowment for the Humanities, Jefferson lecturer, 1991; Library of America, board of advisors, 1992—; American Council of Trustees and Alumni, council of scholars, 1995—; member of Presidential Advisory Commission on Economic Role of Women. Member of editorial boards of Albion, American Historical Review, American Scholar, Journal of British Studies, Jewish Social Studies, Reviews in European History, and This World.

MEMBER:

British Academy (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society of American Historians, American Historical Association, Royal Historical Society (fellow), American Philosophical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Association of University Women fellowship, 1951-52; American Philosophical Society fellowship, 1953-54; Guggenheim fellowships, 1955-56, 1957-58; Rockefeller Foundation grants, 1962-63, 1963-64; National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellowship, 1968-69; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1972-73; Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholarship, 1972-73; Woodrow Wilson Center fellowship, 1976-77; Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, 1980-81; National Humanities Medal, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1952, reprinted, ICS Press (San Francisco, CA), 1993.

Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1959, revised edition, P. Smith (Gloucester, MA), 1967, reprinted, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Victorian Minds: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Intellectuals, Knopf (New York, NY), 1968, reprinted, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1995.

On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill, Knopf (New York, NY), 1974, reprinted, ICS Press (San Francisco, CA), 1990.

The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, Knopf (New York, NY), 1984.

Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, and Other Essays, Knopf (New York, NY), 1986, reprinted as Marriage and Morals among Victorians: Essays, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2001.

The New History and the Old, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987, revised edition, Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.

On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.

One Nation, Two Cultures: A Moral Divide, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

The Past and the Present: Episodes in Intellectual and Cultural History, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2005.

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2006.

EDITOR

Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, Free Press (New York, NY), 1948.

Thomas R. Malthus, On Population, Modern Library (New York, NY), 1960.

John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1962.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Penguin (Baltimore, MD), 1975.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1997.

OTHER

Contributor to books, including Art, Politics, and the Will, edited by Quentin Anderson and others, Basic (New York, NY), 1977; Points of Light: New Approaches to Ending Welfare Dependency, edited by Tamar Ann Mehuron, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1990; and Work and Welfare, by Robert M. Solow, edited by Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998. Contributor to journals and periodicals including Journal of Contemporary History, Victorian Studies, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Modern History, American Historical Review, Commentary, Encounter, American Scholar, New Republic, New York Times, Wilson Quarterly, and Harper's.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gertrude Himmelfarb is well known as an authority on Victorian England and as a cultural historian whose interests in the past translate into sug- gestions for the present. She has "occupied a unique place in the historical profession and among American scholars," stated a writer in the Encyclopedia of World Biography, noting that the conservative scholar's "political views and her work [have often been] controversial and subjected to harsh criticism." "Universally recognized and respected for the depth of her scholarship, her gift of analysis, and the incisiveness of her argument, she was justly described by another eminent American historian of Victorian Britain as ‘the most eminent American scholar to have written acutely on the history of Victorian ideas.’"

As a writer, Himmelfarb "is almost as much a critic of historiography as a historian—a critic, too, with a strong revisionist impulse, an urge to correct (with some asperity) the errors of her predecessors," according to John Gross in the London Observer. Many of her books focus upon the history of thought in Victorian England, a period which she defines as extending from the late eighteenth century (and the life of Edmund Burke) to the early twentieth century (ending roughly around the time of John Buchan). In these texts she covers a variety of noteworthy figures, including Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Macauley, Walter Bagehot, and Jeremy Bentham, while also discussing such historical issues as the Reform Act of 1867 and Social Darwinism.

With an emphasis on the many ambiguities in philosophy which were present in the Victorian Age, Himmelfarb nevertheless manages to unify the whole with what she calls the "moral imagination" of the Victorians (a phrase that Burke first coined). This is a general term which Gross defined as "a set of characteristic Victorian convictions—a belief in human dignity, a respect for human complexity, a sense of common responsibility based on sympathetic insight rather than textbook rules." Himmelfarb feels that modern critics tend to form a consensus on how history is to be treated based upon whatever school of criticism is popular at the time, and that this seriously clouds their ability to analyze facts properly. New Statesman contributor A.S. Byatt phrased the historian's attitude this way: "She deprecates current intellectual fashions of simplicity and commitment, pointing out that subtleties, complications, and ambiguities—once the mark of serious thought—are now taken to signify a failure of nerve." This attitude has drawn both positive and negative reactions from her colleagues and critics.

For example, in a review of Himmelfarb's Victorian Minds: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Intellectuals, Carleton Miscellany contributor Robert E. Bonner wrote: "The problem is that the intelligent historian here changes garb rapidly and often becomes a scourge of ideologues past and, by implication, present. The result is at best misconceived or misdirected history or criticism, and at worst is history in the service of a particular modern American ‘liberal’ orthodoxy." On the other hand, Robert A. Nisbet, in Commentary, observed that Himmelfarb's "knowledge of the century is vast, but it rarely if ever swamps her judgment … which remains … precise and discriminating."

Continuing to break down the walls of pat historical interpretation, the historian brings to our attention in The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age not only the subject of England's nineteenth-century Poor Laws, but also how the very concept of poverty changed over time to include an ever narrower segment of the population. She shows us, according to Times Literary Supplement reviewer Harold Perkin, how the awareness of the poverty problem and its relation to ideas about poverty changed over time. Perkin asserted that the scholar "cuts through the mouldy rags of interpretation which have been piled upon the poor and their interpreters for generations."

Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, and Other Essays also offers an analysis of the Victorian Age, this time with an emphasis on the sense of morality of the period. New York Times Book Review contributor Neil McKendrick felt that Himmelfarb "offers a more sympathetic response than is usual to late Victorian morality." This book has drawn some negative criticism from reviewers like Rosemary Ashton of the Times Literary Supplement, who noted: "If one has a complaint, it is that [the idea of a ‘precarious’ late Victorian morality] is less argued than assumed, that Himmelfarb spends more time disapproving than approving."

Himmelfarb's criticism of modern historians has unfolded in two volumes of essays, The New History and the Old and On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society. In both books she attacks the prevalent acceptance of social history (a science that studies the history of ordinary people and ignores politics), as well as the recent trends of postmodernist historiography. Her fear here, Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Paul Johnson summarized, is that "when traditional history is completely displaced, what takes over is often not history at all but forms of covert left-wing propaganda." It is not, as Him- melfarb herself proclaims, that she objects "to social history as such," but she does dispute "its claims of dominance, superiority, even ‘totality.’"

On Looking into the Abyss crystallizes the author's argument for a return to "the Enlightenment principles [of] reason, truth, justice, morality, reality." Emphasizing the traditional concepts of morality and virtue, Himmelfarb takes to task post-modernist and deconstructionist historians, whose work she deplores as not only inaccurate but potentially harmful to the future of the discipline. "Himmelfarb rejects the postmodernists and their claim to being taken seriously," declared David Kirkwood in Society. "She rejects them not only because of their obscurantism, their propensity for dealing with dissent by McCarthy-ite tactics, but mainly for their denial of moral reality and, hence, moral responsibility…. Historians have the moral obligation not to impose their values upon their subjects—reading history backwards. But the past must be judged, and historians must make moral judgments, if the present generation is to learn from history."

As controversial as its predecessor, On Looking into the Abyss drew most of its praise from conservative essayists, who have consistently applauded Himmelfarb's viewpoint. "Fortunate he who, peering apprehensively into the dread Abyss, finds beside him, peering too and holding his hand, the intrepid, benign, and reassuring figure of Professor Himmelfarb," wrote Colin Welch in the National Review. "Reviewing these present splendid essays, I could start by testifying to their formidable erudition and wide range; to the prodigious mastery of areas of dark knowledge which many of us don't have or wish we didn't; to their polemic power and capacity to make clear what is obscure or complex; and so on. But when all is said and done, it is [Himmelfarb's] own character that, like the emperor's head on the Thaler, gives these essays much of their value."

Perhaps one of Himmelfarb's most influential books is The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. First published in 1995, the book demonstrates that by use of the Poor Law and other methods to shame the indigent, Victorian England controlled not only the number of persons applying for government relief, but also saw reductions in crime and illegitimate births. She further argues that the absence of morality today—and the substitution of a non-judgmental set of individual "values"—has led to a demoralization and its attendant ills of crime, welfare dependency, and single-parent families. Again the critical response to the book depended upon the reviewer's political leanings.

"It is a delicate matter how a tract for the times gets read," maintained David Bromwich in the New Republic. "So often, its reception will depend on the partialities of the spirit in which it is read. A hardening of antipathy toward the poor, and toward every effort of social amelioration: these are traits of American life in the 1990s that many sharers of the mood would like to sweeten with the name of virtue. And, less from its explicit argument than from a certain shading of style and the ease of the past-and-present structure, I cannot help wondering whether the effect of this pleasant and informative book will not be to act as a great simplifier." Conversely, National Review contributor Christie Davies called The De-Moralization of Society "an excellent, detailed, and insightful account of the creation, maintenance, and (in our time) decline of the Victorian virtues of work, thrift, self-reliance, self-respect, neighborliness, and patriotism." Davies added: "Gertrude Himmelfarb's latest study of the Victorians is, like all her work in this field, a delight to read—clear, erudite, sensible, logical, and creative…. Professor Himmelfarb's is also a moral text, for it not only dissects and praises the morality of Victorian Britain, but also shows in great statistical detail how far present-day Britain and America fall short of the Victorian ideal. It points the way to a possible renewal of society to cure our current demoralization."

In her One Nation, Two Cultures: A Moral Divide, Himmelfarb elaborates on her assessment of the moral state of modern American society. One Nation, Two Cultures "exhibits the same felicity of expression, sobriety, and intelligence as her previous works," applauded Edward S. Shapiro, who wrote in World & I: "Himmelfarb's ultimate goal has not been merely to dissect the intellectual and moral premises underlying Anglo-American culture of the past two centuries. Rather, she has sought to refute the various historiographical theories preaching determinism, whether derived from economic, psychological, or sociological premises. For her, the motivating forces in history have been the choices made by individuals, particularly statesmen and intellectuals, and these have frequently involved moral questions regarding values and behavior."

Unlike many of her previous works, in One Nation, Two Cultures Himmelfarb does not focus on the Victorian era, "though her warm regard for Victorian civic virtue permeates it," noted a Booklist reviewer. Instead, Himmelfarb devotes her text to describing and contrasting what she sees as two distinct segments of the American population, the "dominant" group, whose values and behavior have sprung forth from the liberal trends set in the 1960s, and the minority group, which is comprised of the remaining twenty-five percent (or thereabouts) and holds more definitive, traditional attitudes. One Nation, Two Cultures is, according to Terry Teachout in National Review, "a concise, clear-eyed look at the culture war and what it really means." As Paul Johnson highlighted in Commentary, Himmelfarb addresses "the moral consequence of capitalism, the diseases of democracy, civil society, the family and its enemies, the problems of legislating morality, religion as a political institution, and, especially, America's two cultures—the one hedonistic, the other puritanical—and the ‘ethics gap’ between them."

The manners of the dominant group have, in Himmelfarb's opinion, led America into a state filled with ailments stemming from moral decline. Although not without optimism in her book, she delineates Americas woes, evidenced, as Shapiro related, by "declining educational standards and … increasing sexual promiscuity, abortions, divorce, crime, drug usage … welfare dependency …. [and] illegitimacy." A Publishers Weekly reviewer maintained that One Nation, Two Cultures is "substantive" and "well-articulated," and Himmelfarb's "arguments are forceful and sophisticated, but dovetail cleanly with contemporary rightist rhetoric." As Shapiro remarked: "She writes in the great tradition of republican moralists, who recognized that a republic was dependent on, more than anything else, the moral content of the lives of its citizens."

"Himmelfarb's pithy, provocative book celebrates the minority and its ethos as a promising remedy for the many ‘diseases’ afflicting the country," commented New Leader contributor Tamar Jacoby, who wrote: "In a way this is an appealing vision, not only because it is pleasingly schematic … but more important because it suggests an easy answer to our moral quandaries. Traditional values are all we need, it implies, and the backbone to live by them. Unfortunately, skilled as she is in marshaling both statistics and moral arguments, in the end Himmelfarb does not persuade. On the contrary, the more she makes her case, the more unduly hopeful it seems and the more dauntingly the moral challenges posed by modernists loom in contrast." Jacoby continued: "Yet, overly simple and certain as her thesis may be, she remains an unusually thoughtful guide to reviving and encouraging a moral sensibility today. It is almost as if her book were good in spite of itself, or in spite of what she perceives to be its central, saving message."

What Himmelfarb argues is "a division between two cultures," Shapiro maintained, "is an exaggeration." For Shapiro, Himmelfarb's arguments are just "the latest, and certainly not the last, chapter in the perennial struggle between indulgence and restraint that has characterized human nature as well as American history." Teachout acknowledged that what Himmelfarb asserts is not novel, but maintained that her style of presentation makes One Nation, Two Cultures stand apart from other works. Teachout lauded: "Once or twice in a generation—if that often—a very wise person writes a very pithy book that compresses everything that needs to be said about a given topic into the briefest of compasses…. One Nation, Two Cultures is such a book." Likewise, Paul Johnson commented in Commentary: "Of all those who write about the moral condition of America, Gertrude Himmelfarb is the best—partly because she is a historian, able to dip into deep reserves of knowledge to bring up parallels and precedents; partly because she has a strong taste for hard evidence and makes impressive use of statistics; partly because she is cool-headed and refuses to become hysterical about the awfulness of things and finally because she writes well and succinctly."

In The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, Himmelfarb studies the unique characteristics of each. New Criterion contributor Keith Windschuttle wrote that this volume "can be read as a provocative and persuasive revision not only of the intellectual era that made the modern world, but also of the concepts that still largely determine how we think about human affairs today. In particular, it explains the source of the fundamental division that, despite several predictions of its imminent demise, still doggedly grips Western political life: that between the left and the right. From the outset, each side had its own philosophical assumptions and its own view of the human condition."

The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling is a collection of a dozen old (with many revised) and new essays, written over more than four decades on mostly British figures, such as Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, John Buchan, the Knox family, Michael Oakeshott, Winston Churchill, and Lionel Trilling. Himmelfarb praises Dickens for his portrayal of his characters as individuals. She writes: "What other reformers tried to do with legislation, he did by a supreme act of moral imagination." Weekly Standard contributor David Gelernter wrote: "Jane Austen managed things differently in Emma, where ‘the moral lesson emerges slowly, tentatively, lightened with humor and irony.’ But Austen and Dickens both evinced ‘moral imagination’ by confronting the public with moral problems in unexpected guises, against unexpected backdrops—which made old problems seem new. The same holds for most of the others on the list."

A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in Spoon River." Gelernter wrote: "The single most important thing about The Moral Imagination is the challenge it poses to its readers. To make sense of this book, you must have your brain turned on every step of the way. Your first problem is to figure out what the title means. (Burke introduced the phrase ‘moral imagination.’) The author isn't so much interested in novel or imaginative ethical systems as in thinkers who present moral realities in original ways."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

America, April 24, 2006, Peter Heinegg, review of The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling, p. 23.

Booklist, October 1, 1999, review of One Nation, Two Cultures: A Moral Divide, p. 311; August, 2004, Brendan Driscoll, review of The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, p. 1876; February 15, 2006, Ray Olson, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 21.

Carleton Miscellany, fall, 1968, Robert E. Bonner, review of Victorian Minds: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Intellectuals.

Commentary, November, 1968, Robert A. Nisbet, review of Victorian Minds; January, 2000, Paul Johnson, review of One Nation, Two Cultures, p. 66; May, 2006, Michael J. Lewis, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 69.

First Things, March, 2006, Joseph Bottum, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 40.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2004, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 526; January 15, 2006, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 71.

Library Journal, July, 2004, Jim Doyle, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 97.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 27, 1987, Paul Johnson, review of The New History and the Old.

Nation, September 20, 2004, Linda Colley, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 37.

National Review, April 18, 1994, Colin Welch, review of On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, p. 48; April 3, 1995, Christie Davies, review of The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, p. 63; November 22, 1999, Terry Teachout, review of One Nation, Two Cultures, p. 51.

New Criterion, March, 2005, Keith Windschuttle, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 64; April, 2006, Roger Kimball, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 80.

New Leader, December 13, 1999, Tamar Jacoby, review of One Nation, Two Cultures, p. 6.

New Republic, May 15, 1995, David Bromwich, review of The De-Moralization of Society, p. 28.

New Statesman, December 6, 1968, A.S. Byatt, review of Victorian Minds.

New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1986, Neil McKendrick, review of Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, and Other Essays; October 24, 2004, Scott McLemee, review of The Roads to Modernity.

Observer (London, England), October 6, 1968, John Gross, review of Victorian Minds.

Publishers Weekly, November 1, 1999, review of One Nation, Two Cultures, p. 67; May 31, 2004, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 61; December 5, 2005, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 39.

Society, November-December, 1994, David Kirkwood, review of On Looking into the Abyss, pp. 78, 83.

Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 1984, Harold Perkin, review of The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age; July 25, 1986, Rosemary Ashton, review of Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, and Other Essays; June 16, 2006, Kathryn Sutherland, review of The Moral Imagination, p. 30.

Weekly Standard, November 29, 2004, Diana Schaub, review of The Roads to Modernity, p. 31; June 5, 2006, David Gelernter, review of The Moral Imagination.

World & I, May, 2000, Edward S. Shapiro, review of One Nation, Two Cultures, pp. 275-279.