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23+ Works 1,754 Members 13 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Gertrude Himmelfarb was born in New York City and studied at Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago. A distinguished historian, she has received numerous honorary degrees, fellowships, and awards, including the 2004 National Humanities Medal. She is a fellow of the British Academy, the show more Royal Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians. She has written extensively on Victorian England and more generally on intellectual and cultural history. show less
Image credit: Barbara Ries

Works by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Essays on Politics and Culture by John Stuart Mill (1962) — Editor; Introduction — 33 copies

Associated Works

On Liberty (1859) — Editor, some editions — 5,514 copies
Essays on freedom and power (1948) — Editor, some editions — 95 copies
Victorian England (1733) — Contributor — 94 copies
Memoir on Pauperism (1997) — Introduction, some editions — 84 copies
The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005 (2005) — Contributor — 47 copies
The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources (2008) — Contributor — 37 copies
Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America (1998) — Contributor — 29 copies
The Degradation of the Academic Dogma (Foundations of Higher Education) (1971) — Introduction, some editions — 19 copies
Jews and Gentiles (2007) 11 copies

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Reviews

These are essays about individuals who were, in some sense, Victorians. Himmelfarb starts early, with Burke, and ends late with Buchan. I read the entire Buchan essay, and then I wanted to read a book by Buchan, for the first time in a very long time.
 
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themulhern | 2 other reviews | Sep 1, 2023 |
A collection of witty, elegant and precisely-written essays on history, liberty, nationalism and footnotes. Cannot be recommended highly enough.
½
 
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Lirmac | Apr 21, 2020 |
Reprints articles purblished elsewhere earlier.
 
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ME_Dictionary | 2 other reviews | Mar 19, 2020 |
I read only the chapters on Buchan, whose work I know very well, and Bentham, who I know hardly at all.

The Bentham chapter was the better of the two. Bentham's lifelong obsession with the Panopticon provides a strong narrative drive. Also, as Bentham's plans are, to quote Wayland Smithers "unconscionably fiendish" -- at one point extending to include a national archipelago of panopticon-style poorhouses where the indigent and their children would be worked and subject to the governance of the super-intendant. A person Himmelfarb plausibly argues Bentham meant from the beginning to be none other than himself. With that as background it is hard not to read comments from Bentham in the voice of a cartoon villain: "But for him [King George] all the paupers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been in my hands."

The Buchan chapter is a very good essay. Sympathetic to Buchan, but to my admittedly partisan eye, not sympathetic enough. It also contains a material error of interpretation (the same one, interestingly, noted here by a critic of Nancy Goldstone: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buchan-wasnt-any-kind-of-bigot-1441045584).

Her final paragraph is I think thoughtful, stimulating, and not fully correct:

Buchan - Calvinist in religion, Tory in politics, and romantic in sensibility - is obviously the antithesis of the liberal. It is no accident that he was addicted to a genre, the romantic tale of adventure, which is itself alien to the liberal temper. For what kind of romance would it be that feared to characterize or categorize, to indulge the sense of evil, violence, and apocalypse? It is no accident, either, that the predominance of liberal values has meant the degeneration of a literary form so congenial to the Tory imagination.
… (more)
 
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ben_a | 2 other reviews | Mar 12, 2020 |

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