Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 – December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

• The desire to transcend the human condition is, in most religious traditions, an invitation to heresy. In politics it is an invitation to tyranny, as we seek a perfection that inevitably eludes us and as we redouble our efforts to attain the unattainable.
  • Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986), p. 162

• Such values as thrift, prudence, diligence, temperance, and self-reliance were indeed bourgeois ones. But they were also classical ones; they were hardly unfamiliar to the Greeks. And they were also religious ones; it was, after all, from the Jews and Christians that the Puritans derived them.
  • 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), p. 96

• These values, moreover, were consciously shared by the most radical British workers. The memoirs of those involved in Chartism, a working-class reform movement, provide poignant testimony to their efforts to remain hard-working, sober, frugal, clean, in short, respectable, despite all temptations to the contrary. There were groups within the movement—the Temperance Chartists and Education Chartists—who made this their main concern. Indeed the central tenet of Chartism, universal suffrage, was based on just this claim to respectability. The argument for political equality depended on the argument for natural equality, a common human nature—common values, aspirations, and capacities.
  • 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), p. 98

• To the degree Victorians succeeded in "bourgeoisifying" the ethos, they also democratized it. That ethos was not, to be sure, an exalted or heroic one. Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight—these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace—or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people. They were, so to speak, democratic virtues.
  • 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 98-99

• They were also liberal virtues. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the ethos located responsibility within each individual. It was no longer only the exceptional, the heroic individual who was the master of his fate; every individual could be his own master. So far from promoting social control, the ethos had the effect of promoting self-control. This was at the heart of Victorian morality: self-control, self-help, self-reliance, self-discipline. A liberal society, the Victorians believed, depended upon a moral citizenry. The stronger the voluntary exercise of morality on the part of each individual—the more internalized that morality—the weaker need be the external, coercive instruments of the state. For the Victorians, morality served as a substitute for law, just as law was a substitute for force.
  • 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), p. 99

• Then there is the nuclear option: Gertrude Himmelfarb... this great doyenne of reactionary history has somehow inveigled the Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] under her spell. Her specialism is Victorian attitudes to poverty and she herself has long adopted the lofty mien of a lady bountiful: for Professor Himmelfarb, the problems of the poor are always questions of morality and character, not class or condition. No doubt this appeals to Mr Brown's Puritan ethos just as her championing of the British enlightenment above the continental version tickles his Euroscepticism.
  • Tristram Hunt, 'Will Brown coming knock-knocking on Evans' door?', The Times (15 January 2008), p. 19

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Gertrude Himmelfarb