Free Republic

America has lost a voice that strongly and consistently provided the road map to steer us away from the political and cultural abyss we currently face. That voice belonged to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Dec. 30 at age 97. Gertrude spoke passionately about how our most important institutions—families, communities, churches, and private enterprise—must be “remoralized,” as it is only through a strong civil society that we can have a strong nation. In her words, people learn to function as “free, responsible, moral adults” in these institutions and apply that responsibility and morality as citizens of a nation. But she...

In his City Journal tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb — who recently died at age 97 — Myron Magnet called her "our foremost historian of ideas and one of the nation's greatest historians of any stamp." He also paid tribute to Himmelfarb as a scholar of highest distinction in an era of "wide-ranging social, political, cultural and ethical" erudition. She is considered by many to be among the most influential intellectuals of her time — including Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Barzun, Irving Kristol, Philip Rieff, and others. In addition to her "brilliant and eminent" career, Daniel Bell, a...

Irving Kristol, 89, a forceful essayist, editor and university professor who became the leading architect of neoconservatism, which he called a political and intellectual movement for disaffected ex-liberals like himself who had been "mugged by reality," died Friday at the Capital Hospice in Arlington. He spent much of his career in New York but had for the last two decades lived at the Watergate apartments in the District. He died of complications from lung cancer, said his son, William Kristol, the founder and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

The United States has displayed a remarkable and long-standing tendency not only to tolerate, but to honor and reward, those who decry the nation’s morality and predict its imminent and inevitable doom. Consider Pat Buchanan’s new bestseller, “Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed are Tearing America Apart.” This magnum opus follows his similarly cheerful (and successful) releases, “State of Emergency” and “The Death of the West.” In the opening pages of the most recent book, “Pitchfork Pat” dramatically declaims: “Truly, America faces an existential crisis… It is the belief of the author and the premise of this book...

Although it has already attracted a series of reverent reviews befitting a work by one of today’s most eminent practitioners of history, this book is still more important than it looks. Gertrude Himmelfarb has called her latest volume Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. It 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...

That American life has coarsened over the past several decades is not much argued, but the nature of the beast is still in question. Gertrude Himmelfarb sees it as a struggle between competing elites, in which the left originated a counterculture that the right failed to hold back. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has given us the phrase "defining deviancy down," to describe a process in which we change the meaning of moral to fit what we are doing anyway. I wish to add a third voice to the mix, that of the late historian Arnold Toynbee, who would find our recent...

It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that Gertrude Himmelfarb, the preeminent historian of intellectual life in Victorian England, has become one of the most influential writers on civil society in turn-of-the-millennium America. The renewed interest in alternatives to the welfare state owes much of its inspiration to professor Himmelfarb’s monumental histories of 19th-century social policy. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians described the Victorians’ moral seriousness as they developed public policies and forged private character-building institutions that lifted millions out of pauperism. If...