Highlights
& Quotes
Gertrude Himmelfarb, the wife of neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol and mother of William Kristol, is a scholar whose work has focused on issues of virtue, morality, Victorian society, and modern values.
In a 1995 Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute on the virtues of Victorian morality, Himmelfarb said: “It is this reluctance to speak the language of morality, and to apply moral ideas to social policies, that separates us from the Victorians. In Victorian England, moral principles were as much a part of public discourse as of private discourse, and as much a part of social policy as of personal life. Every measure of poor relief, for example, had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor -- and not only of the pauper receiving relief but of the independent laboring poor as well. In recent times we have so completely rejected any kind of moral principle that we have deliberately, systematically divorced poor relief from moral sanctions and incentives. We are now confronting the consequences of this policy. Having made the most valiant attempt to see the problem of poverty as the product of impersonal economic and social forces, we are now discovering that the economic and social aspects are inseparable from the moral and personal ones. And having made the most determined effort to devise policies that are ‘value free,’ that do not stigmatize the recipients of relief or the ‘style of life,’ we find that these policies imperil both the moral and the material well-being of their intended beneficiaries.” (4)
In a review of Himmelfarb’s 1999 book One Nation, Two Cultures, Salon.com’s Charles Taylor wrote, “The intellect on display here is about the caliber of the village biddy who sticks her blue nose into everyone else's business, offering opinions nobody asked for about how everybody else should live. Like ‘99 Bottles of Beer,’ the tune Himmelfarb sings throughout One Nation, Two Cultures is repetitive and seemingly endless, and you always know exactly what's coming next. It's that golden oldie, top of the pops on the conservative hit parade for the umpteenth era in a row, baby! – ‘America Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket (And It's All the Fault of the '60s).’ What did conservatives do before they had the '60s to blame? It's been such a boon to them that, secretly at least, they must be grateful for it (the way liberals have always been grateful for Nixon). When Himmelfarb writes, ‘Whatever cultural revolution America experienced in the 1920s or before, it was a faint foreshadow of what was to follow,’ she's using a Saturday-afternoon serial technique, keeping us hooked before unveiling the dastardly scheme that Ming the Merciless has in store. She doesn't take long to get to the wicked plot: the destruction of the Victorian virtues of ‘work, thrift, temperance, fidelity, self-reliance, self-discipline, cleanliness, godliness’ (in her view, America's traditional strengths) by the Kryptonite of the '60s.” (5)
Himmelfarb has written dozens of books, including Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Victorian Minds; Poverty and Compassion, The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, and The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age.
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Institutional Affiliations
American Enterprise Institute: Member of Council of Academic Advisers
Graduate Center, CUNY: Emeritus Faculty Member
Education
University
of Chicago: Ph.D.
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