Gertrude Himmelfarb

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Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Template:Conservatism US Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 – December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

Biography

Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background.<ref name = NYT>Template:Cite news</ref> She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. Himmelfarb later went on to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.<ref>Template:Cite book Template:Subscription required</ref>

In 1942, she married Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and had two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. She never changed her last name. Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that theirs was "the best marriage of our generation" and her husband wrote that he was “astonished how intellectually twinned” the two were “pursuing different subjects while thinking the same thoughts and reaching the same conclusions”.<ref name = NYT/>

She was long involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles.<ref>Oz Frankel, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (2006)</ref> Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She 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 was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and a member of the American Philosophical Society.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1991, she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. Himmelfarb died from heart failure at her home in Washington on December 30, 2019, at the age of 97.<ref name = NYT/><ref name = Brooks>Brooks, David. "The Historian of Moral Revolution", The Atlantic, December 31, 2019.</ref>

Historiography

Himmelfarb long nurtured the neoconservative movement in U.S. politics and intellectual life; her husband, Irving Kristol, helped found the movement.<ref>Mark Gerson, "Reflections of a Neoconservative Disciple." in Template:Cite book</ref>

Himmelfarb was 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. The "New Histories" she critiqued include: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history, but relies on partial and dubious data;Template:Sfn Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the protagonists and events of history;Template:Sfn psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence;Template:Sfn analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure;Template:Sfn social history, "history from the bottom", that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history);Template:Sfn and, later, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.Template:Sfn

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.Template:Sfn 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 such as Napoleon.Template:Sfn

Himmelfarb energetically rejected postmodern academic approaches:

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Ideas

Himmelfarb was best known as a historian of Victorian England.<ref name="YL">Template:Cite news</ref> Himmelfarb argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".<ref>Template:Citation.</ref>

In an obituary, David Brooks described Himmelfarb as "The Historian of Moral Revolution".<ref name = Brooks/>

Bibliography

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Books

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

Critical studies and reviews of Himmelfarb's work

Past and present

References

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Cited source

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