Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died last week in Washington, D.C., at 97, was everywhere described as a “historian of ideas,” which is certainly true. But she was also a philosopher, essayist, and scholar who wrote about the past with one eye fixed resolutely on the present. She believed, as philosophers do, that ideas matter in life as well as in scholarship.
Scholars of ideas tend to be the great rehabilitators of history. Perry Miller of Harvard studied the Puritans during the early 20th century, when the founders of New England were in particularly bad odor among their descendants. Miller read the texts and annals of the Puritans, put his subjects in a broader perspective, and gave them new depth and relevance. A generation later, Himmelfarb did the same for the Victorians.
When, in the late 1940s, she began her studies of the intellectual life and work of Victorian England, the very term was an epithet. But she pondered the world the Victorians inhabited, grappled with the facts that shaped their ideas, and changed not only our modern perceptions but revealed that the virtues of the 19th century, including moral clarity, temperance, decency, duty, had much to teach the contemporary world.
Like the English of the mid-19th century, Himmelfarb’s 20th century Americans found themselves adrift amid political turmoil and material change. For Victorians, the political challenge was the poverty described in the novels of Charles Dickens, a glaring rebuke to the progress of industry and to progress itself. For Americans, the challenge was not dissimilar: poverty and social inequality in the midst of freedom and affluence. In The Idea of Poverty (1984) and Poverty and Compassion (1991), Himmelfarb described the ways in which Victorian reformers treated poverty not as a moral failing but social misfortune, demanding social responsibility and moral instruction. The message to America and its burgeoning welfare state was no accident.
Of course, she didn’t make Victorians of us all: As the New York Times noted, Himmelfarb’s belief that private virtues are more consequential than public programs made her “a heroine of conservatives and a bête noire of liberals.” But she was a historian, not a politician. And although her views were expressed with characteristic vigor and clarity, she aimed to educate our cynical age in what she called “the paradox of liberalism,” the costs of ignoring the moral dimensions and requirements of life in the pursuit of individual liberty.
In that sense, she resembled the subject of her first great work, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952), which grew out of her doctoral dissertation on the English Catholic historian and essayist.
Gertrude Himmelfarb was born in 1922 in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents. Her father was a glass cutter and engraver who struggled through the Depression. She was a triple major at Brooklyn College while earning another degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary. It was at a meeting of Brooklyn Trotskyites that she encountered a City College student named Irving Kristol who, decades later, described noticing “a girl … who sat quietly at the other end of the small room. Her name was Gertrude Himmelfarb, but she was called ‘Bea’ … I noticed her for some weeks before approaching her and asking her out. In truth, I was already in love with her without even knowing her … Thus began what my friend Daniel Bell later described as ‘the best marriage of our generation.'”
It was certainly one of the most consequential. In 1942, Kristol, the journalist and later “godfather of neoconservatism,” accompanied his wife to the University of Chicago, where she began graduate studies in history. Both put Trotsky firmly behind them; Kristol served in World War II, and Himmelfarb earned her doctorate. In the late 1940s, she studied at Cambridge, and Kristol began editing the series of small but influential journals, in England and America, that would alter the shape of modern conservatism and politics.
The Kristols were very much a part of the midcentury gathering of thinkers and writers known as the New York Intellectuals, centered largely around magazines such as Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, debating the character of American life and culture and, especially, the challenge of the Cold War to American liberalism. They were also the parents of two children, a daughter Elizabeth and son William, the political analyst and commentator and co-founder of The Weekly Standard.
By the 1960s, while Irving Kristol was chronicling the descent of liberalism into radicalism and the failures of the Great Society, Himmelfarb returned to writing about Victorian England as a mirror to our times.
In her groundbreaking study of Victorian Minds (1968), she reintroduced John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, Leslie Stephen, and others to modern readers, drawing on her observation that, as in our epoch, “it was an age of severe manners and morals, and of considerable latitude in behavior … described by one historian as an age of equipoise, by another as an age of reform, and by still another as an age of revolution; my own sense of it is best expressed in the phrase ‘conservative revolution.’”
Which for the next half-century, and well into her 90s, she proceeded to expound and illuminate in subjects as varied as manners and morals, Winston Churchill, the challenge of modernity, and George Eliot. And always with the scholar’s commitment and precision. When the chairman of the University of Chicago’s history department told Himmelfarb that, as a female Jewish New Yorker, she was unlikely to find a teaching job after earning her Ph.D., she was unfazed. “I was coming to the University not for professional reasons,” she later explained, “but simply to have an education, an education for its own sake.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
