Background

Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background. She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. She also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and at Girton College, Cambridge University. In 1942, she married Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and has two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. She has long been involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles.

Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She has served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1991 she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal awarded by the President.

Historiography

Himmelfarb has long nurtured the neoconservative movement in American politics and intellectual life; her husband Irving Kristol helped found the movement.

Himmelfarb is a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004) is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history but relies on partial and dubious data; Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the actual protagonists and events of history; psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence; analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure; social history, "history from the bottom," that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history); and, most recently, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.

Himmelfarb criticized A.J.P. Taylor for seeking to "demoralize" history in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, and for refusing to recognize "moral facts" about interwar Europe. Himmelfarb maintained that Taylor was wrong to treat Adolf Hitler as a "normal" German leader playing by the traditional rules of diplomacy in The Origins of the Second World War instead of being a "world-historical" figure like Napoleon.

Himmelfarb has energetically rejected postmodern academic approaches:

is a denial of the objectivity of the historian, of the factuality or reality of the past, and thus of the possibility of arriving at any truths about the past. For all disciplines it induces a radical skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism that denies not this or that truth about any subject but the very idea of truth - that denies even the ideal of truth, truth is something to aspire to even if it can never be fully attained.

Ideas

Himmelfarb is best known as a historian of Victorian England. But she puts that period in a larger context. The Idea of Poverty opens with an extended analysis of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who helped shape the debates and policies throughout the 19th century and beyond. Victorian Minds features such eighteenth-century "proto-Victorians" as Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, concluding with the "last Victorian," John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, whose novels depict a 20th-century imbued with Victorian values. The Moral Imagination ranges from Burke to Winston Churchill and Lionel Trilling, with assorted Victorians and non-Victorians in between. On Looking into the Abyss has modern culture and society in the forefront and the Victorians in the background, while One Nation, Two Cultures is entirely about American culture and society. The Roads to Modernity enlarges the perspective of the Age of Enlightenment, both chronologically and nationally, placing the British Enlightenment in opposition to the French and in accord with the American. Most recently, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot and The People of the Book focus on attitudes to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism in England from their readmission in the 17th century to the present.

And so with scores of essays demonstrating that Victorian "values" - "virtues," she calls them - were not unique to that time and place. "The Victorian Ethos: Before and after Victoria," is the title of one essay; "Victorianism before Victoria" are the opening words of another. The word "Victorian" today has a disagreeable and crabbed connotation, conjuring up repressive sexual and social mores. Himmelfarb humanizes and democratizes that concept. In an interview after receiving the National Humanities Medal, she explained that the Victorian virtues - prudence, temperance, industriousness, decency, responsibility - were thoroughly pedestrian. "They depended on no special breeding, talent, sensibility, or even money. They were common, everyday virtues, within the capacity of ordinary people. They were the virtues of citizens, not of heroes or saints - and of citizens of democratic countries, not aristocratic ones." Himmelfarb has argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values (she prefers the term 'virtues'), such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".

While she is identified in America as a conservative, in Britain leftists admire her work. One of her most outspoken admirers is Gordon Brown, the former Labour Party Prime Minister. His introduction to the British edition of Roads to Modernity opens: "I have long admired Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical work, in particular her love of the history of ideas, and her work has stayed with me ever since I was a history student at Edinburgh University."

Books

• Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952) OCLC 3011425
• Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) OCLC 676436
• Victorian Minds (1968) OCLC 400777
• On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974) OCLC 805020
• The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) OCLC 9646430
• Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986) OCLC 12343389
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude (2004), The New History and the Old, Harvard University Press, OCLC 15107685 .
• Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991) OCLC 22488559
• On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994) OCLC 28213630
• The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995) OCLC 30474640
• One Nation, Two Cultures (1999) OCLC 40830208
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude (2008), The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, OCLC 53091118
• The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006) OCLC 61109330
• The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009) OCLC 271080989
• The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill (Encounter Books, 2011) OCLC 701019524

Edited books

• Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (Free Press, 1948) OCLC 1052339
• Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles (Encounter Books, 2007) OCLC 70883212
• Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion (Basic Books, 2011) OCLC 663459838
• Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on Population (Modern Library, 1960) OCLC 4901335
• John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture (Doubleday, 1962) OCLC 193217
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Penguin, 1974) OCLC 1941475
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism (Ivan Dee, 1997) OCLC 36719602
• The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale University Press, 2007) OCLC 171111099

[ Source: Wikipedia ]