Free Republic

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...

The sickos over at Kos never cease to amaze me. Irving Kristol died today. He was a great writer and thinker and admired on both sides of the aisle--even my own liberal father loved his columns and books. Yet here I see a thread on DailyKos tonight where they are reveling in his death, and even hoping his wife (and Bill Kristol's Mom) Gertrude Himmelfarb would die soon too. Here are the lovely comments... Paging Bill O'Reilly. He's been silent on them for a while.

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.

Remembering Milton Himmelfarb Milton Himmelfarb died earlier this month at age 87, and chances are you never heard of him if, like most Americans, you tend not to be a devotee of intellectual and political journals. But Milton Himmelfarb — Mendy, as he was known to his family — was, by virtue of temperament, history and family, a seminal figure in the development of neoconservatism as one of the country’s most influential political forces. Serving in various capacities at the American Jewish Committee for better than 40 years, Himmelfarb was the longtime editor of the AJC’s American Jewish Yearbook and...

...Her book is thus animated by dismay and perplexity over the way the French Enlightenment is seen as the main intellectual event of the 18th century, whereas a parallel and in many respects more successful movement in Britain is routinely relegated to an inferior status. Her heroes, therefore, are not Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau as much as Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke. In a similar spirit, she invokes and concurs with Hannah Arendt's notion that the American revolution, rather than the revolution in France, was the great political watershed of modern times. For Himmelfarb, the contrast between the...

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...

THE AESTHETICS OF RACE VERSUS THE BEAUTY OF HUMANITY Race is an inherently divisive—and recent—idea. There is no cultural issue more explosive today than race. It is a matter that continually evades any attempt at rational analysis and instead distorts our politics and inflames the passions. A sad consequence is the debasement of our cultural life. Rather than being united by objects of love, by shared and commonly embraced ideals, we are increasingly divided along racial lines by competing objects of desire, all presumed to be of equal value, each demanding its due. Such competing desires, because they make...