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A Imaginação Moral: Jane Austen e George Eliot, Burke e Stuart Mill, Disraeli e Churchill, Oakeshott e Trilling e Outros Grandes Nomes da Política e da Literatura
A história de Gertrude Himmelfarb se confunde com a história do conservadorismo norte-americano. Uma acadêmica prestigiada, ela está entre os eruditos responsáveis por revisitar a tradição conservadora britânica e, ao comentá-la, renovar o próprio pensamento conservador – numa galeria que deve incluir também seu falecido marido, Irving Kristol, além de Russell Kirk, Lionel Trilling, entre outros. Até seu contemporâneo e amigo Trilling, e desde o político do século XVIII Edmund Burke, Himmelfarb identifica uma miríade de artistas e pensadores que, com suas vidas e com suas obras, manifestaram a atitude a que esses dois eruditos chamaram “imaginação moral”: a tendência de enxergar as ações humanas como portadoras de significado, e os indivíduos como responsáveis por cultivar a ordem na vida comunitária.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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184 people want to read
About the author
Gertrude Himmelfarb
57 books44 followersGertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader and conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.
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May 1, 2013
This bundle of essays has the broad theme of morality. Each deals with a specific writer, all but one of whom inhabitanted the British Isles. The exception is the final essay on Lionel Trilling, an American, whose book The Liberal Imagination provided Himmelfarb with the skeleton of her own title. Some of these essays seemed to me little more than padding – for example, those on Austen, George Eliot and the Knox brothers - adding not very much to the book or its themes. Echoing around the others, however, is the desire by the essayist and her subjects to tame an over-simple rational liberalism through an encounter with the more mysterious and complex aspects of humanity.
She starts with Burke’s Reflections. Burke (she actually neglects to mention) was a member of Fox’s Whig Party. He was therefore a child of the English Revolution, and a supporter of the American one, breaking with Fox, however, over the French Revolution. Burke had a distinctive view of tradition as the foundation for society and morality. “Whereas the French sought to create a society de novo, based upon principles dictated by reason . . . the English Revolutionaries . . . wanted nothing more than to preserve our ancient constitution of government which is our only security of law and liberty.” To make of the revolution itself “an inheritance from our forefathers”, the English sought precedence in “our histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament and journals of parliament,” going back to that “ancient charter” the Magna Carta, and beyond that to “the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom”. “The French revolutionaries, on the other hand, in destroying whatever of the past they could, also tried to destroy that most venerable of institutions, the church, thus denying the most basic of human impulses religion.” Notoriously, Burke embraced words like “prejudice” and “superstition” as the only true basis for both religion and society. He therefore turned his back on the “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who were already a major feature of his age.
Dickens equally disliked the “sophisters, economists and calculators”, preferring (in his case) an informal raw humanity whose foundation is fellow-feeling, joy, spontaneity and simple goodness. His Sam Weller, for example, is not be confined by social status. Weller is “independent to the point of impertinence” and his master more of a friend than an employer. Dickens nevertheless knows that a potential for joy can be crushed by inequality, cruelty and power, not least when it is dressed up as crass, utilitarian philosophy. In Hard Times, a contrast is drawn between the “factory” and the “circus”. Himmelfarb finds it ironical that “pleasure” is a key word in the utilitarianism that informs the drab world of Bounderby and Gradgrind. Yet both these men fear and disdain the circus where people find pleasure through self-selected activities in keeping with their own instincts and skills.
Her account of Disraeli considers his peculiarly “Tory Democratic” perspective. The idea that there are “two nations”, rich and poor”, found in Disraeli’s novel Sybil, is still beloved of British politicians. The book resolves the opposition by means of a marriage between the female and male protagonists, the Radical Sybil herself and the Tory Egremont. This marriage found a real-life parallel in Disraeli’s political idea that a Tory elite might become the natural leaders of the working class. In his early career, Disraeli showed some sympathy for the Chartists (he did not, of course, walk behind banners), and he eventually “dished the Whigs” by passing the 1867 Reform Act that gave near-democratic representation to many working men.
The next chapter claims that there are two quite distinct John Stuart Mills. One is the Mill everybody knows, the individualist and liberal rationalist who wrote On Liberty which argues strongly for the freedom of individuals to do whatever does not impinge on the liberty of others. The other, found in his very early work but also later in his Principles of Political Economy and Utilitarianism, criticises Bentham and advocates the importance of intellectual elites and specifically social feelings. These social sentiments, he thought, arose naturally in individuals but they could also be inculcated by education and even by means of (an albeit Comptean and secular) religion.
Walter Baghot is characterized as torn between William James’s two human types, the once and the twice-born. On the one hand, Baghot was a rational political and economic thinker, a man of letters, man-of-the-world and editor, no less, of The Economist. On the other, he had a strong mystical streak, haunted by deeper and sometimes darker realities. Echoing Burke and Disraeli, he thought these more mysterious realities could be discovered in the wise prejudices of the common people. He thought it was a sound statesman who could respecte the Tory masses while thinking clearly with the mind of a Whig or a liberal.
It is surprising to find John Buchan amidst these luminaries. Buchan for many is a paradigm – a parody even – of “a species of English gentleman now very nearly extinct”, a man of the outdoors, an anti-Semite and a bit of a snob. At first glance, Buchan’s world is one of “cold baths, rousing games, and indifferent sex”, “dismissive of modernist art and literature”, and supportive of nation and Empire. Himmelfarb, however, thinks Buchan more nuanced. Not least, his conventional anti-Semitism faded away as Hitler and Mosley advanced. Moreover, Buchan was not in truth an English gent. He was rather a Scottish Tory, never truly at home in the London club or the English country house. His hero (whose biography he wrote) was Cromwell, a man who sought to found the nation in spirituality but who, nevertheless, rejected “levelling” and embraced social inequality. Buchan turns out to have been an intellectual, who kept his intelligence under control beneath his tweed hat.
Michael Oakshott somehow managed to be Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. For him, the true conservative resists unnecessary change and suffers necessary ones. He set his conservatism against what he called “Rationalism”: his was an impulse to enjoy rather than to exploit. For him, government has the role of the umpire in cricket, administering the generally agreed rules of the game. Governments are not supposed to change anything, except very cautiously. Although this approach takes him in the direction of Burke’s Reflections, he found Burke a little too rational (!) for his own taste, since Burke had a metaphysical belief in religion, natural law and an organic society held together by that “great primeval contract of eternal society”. His book, A Guide to the Classics is subtitled How to Pick the Darby Winner. It reflects his belief that human activities are properly rooted in their own terms and enjoyed for their own sakes, and not subsumed under rationalist categories and made to serve utilitarian ends.
The penultimate chapter is entitled Winston Churchill: “Quite Simply, a Great Man” but it only just manages to find a satisfactory place in the book. Himmelfarb classifies Churchill with Disraeli as a Democratic Tory, one who thinks the upper classes should lead the lower into a national unity that transcended class. It would be churlish, of course, to deny Churchill’s greatness. If he and the United Kingdom did not exactly win the war against Germany, their special acheivement in 1940 was “not to lose”. Though Churchill certainly wrote a lot and could turn a good phrase, he was not, however, a great thinker.
And so to Trilling, whose ideas bob up in most of these essays. Trilling had introduced his left-leaning followers to Mill’s discussion of Coleridge and thence to another conservative and religious thinker, TS Eliot. In much the same manner as Mill had recommended Coleridge as a corrective to Bentham, so Trilling recommended Eliot’s Christianity and conservatism as a corrective to the Jewishness and Marxism of his target New York readership. Trilling, she suggests, was ultimately subversive of liberalism and Marx. Trilling interpreted Freud as pitting the given of human biological nature against the culture that strives to overcome biology. For Trilling, the immutability of human nature provides a salvation against a human culture, which might otherwise become omnipotent. He finds a similar theme in Orwell’s 1984. Social democracy and democracy – and not just Stalinism - tend always towards tyranny unless they confront the “moral realism” based in a human nature that is far from rational.
These essays, then, sympathise with writers who temper abstract and liberal ideals with a peculiarly conservative encounter with social realities, human nature and the supposed traditional wisdom of the people. It’s the kind of common sense view that a caricaturist might locate in a London club or a lounge bar. The essays ultimately represent a rather sentimental conservativism, opposed to liberalism, bean counting and utilitarianism, and favouring instead Evensong, maypole dancing, the Euston Arch and warm beer.
I am wary of this view, however. It is certainly true that versions of liberal rationalism and utilitarianism once provided an enlightened rationale for such things as the tricoteuses and their guillotine, and for the workhouses, factories and Pentonville Gaol. But liberalism and rationalism were never all bad. Nor were these always the only ideologies in town. Only this morning, somebody on my radio longingly described a remnant of racial segregation in the American Deep South as “traditional”. Just like liberal rationality, therefore, musty pipe-and-slippers conservatism, or other kinds of conservatism, based, for example, in one-nationism or “tradition” can provide equally pernicious ideological camouflage for inequality, injustice and mere badness.
She starts with Burke’s Reflections. Burke (she actually neglects to mention) was a member of Fox’s Whig Party. He was therefore a child of the English Revolution, and a supporter of the American one, breaking with Fox, however, over the French Revolution. Burke had a distinctive view of tradition as the foundation for society and morality. “Whereas the French sought to create a society de novo, based upon principles dictated by reason . . . the English Revolutionaries . . . wanted nothing more than to preserve our ancient constitution of government which is our only security of law and liberty.” To make of the revolution itself “an inheritance from our forefathers”, the English sought precedence in “our histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament and journals of parliament,” going back to that “ancient charter” the Magna Carta, and beyond that to “the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom”. “The French revolutionaries, on the other hand, in destroying whatever of the past they could, also tried to destroy that most venerable of institutions, the church, thus denying the most basic of human impulses religion.” Notoriously, Burke embraced words like “prejudice” and “superstition” as the only true basis for both religion and society. He therefore turned his back on the “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who were already a major feature of his age.
Dickens equally disliked the “sophisters, economists and calculators”, preferring (in his case) an informal raw humanity whose foundation is fellow-feeling, joy, spontaneity and simple goodness. His Sam Weller, for example, is not be confined by social status. Weller is “independent to the point of impertinence” and his master more of a friend than an employer. Dickens nevertheless knows that a potential for joy can be crushed by inequality, cruelty and power, not least when it is dressed up as crass, utilitarian philosophy. In Hard Times, a contrast is drawn between the “factory” and the “circus”. Himmelfarb finds it ironical that “pleasure” is a key word in the utilitarianism that informs the drab world of Bounderby and Gradgrind. Yet both these men fear and disdain the circus where people find pleasure through self-selected activities in keeping with their own instincts and skills.
Her account of Disraeli considers his peculiarly “Tory Democratic” perspective. The idea that there are “two nations”, rich and poor”, found in Disraeli’s novel Sybil, is still beloved of British politicians. The book resolves the opposition by means of a marriage between the female and male protagonists, the Radical Sybil herself and the Tory Egremont. This marriage found a real-life parallel in Disraeli’s political idea that a Tory elite might become the natural leaders of the working class. In his early career, Disraeli showed some sympathy for the Chartists (he did not, of course, walk behind banners), and he eventually “dished the Whigs” by passing the 1867 Reform Act that gave near-democratic representation to many working men.
The next chapter claims that there are two quite distinct John Stuart Mills. One is the Mill everybody knows, the individualist and liberal rationalist who wrote On Liberty which argues strongly for the freedom of individuals to do whatever does not impinge on the liberty of others. The other, found in his very early work but also later in his Principles of Political Economy and Utilitarianism, criticises Bentham and advocates the importance of intellectual elites and specifically social feelings. These social sentiments, he thought, arose naturally in individuals but they could also be inculcated by education and even by means of (an albeit Comptean and secular) religion.
Walter Baghot is characterized as torn between William James’s two human types, the once and the twice-born. On the one hand, Baghot was a rational political and economic thinker, a man of letters, man-of-the-world and editor, no less, of The Economist. On the other, he had a strong mystical streak, haunted by deeper and sometimes darker realities. Echoing Burke and Disraeli, he thought these more mysterious realities could be discovered in the wise prejudices of the common people. He thought it was a sound statesman who could respecte the Tory masses while thinking clearly with the mind of a Whig or a liberal.
It is surprising to find John Buchan amidst these luminaries. Buchan for many is a paradigm – a parody even – of “a species of English gentleman now very nearly extinct”, a man of the outdoors, an anti-Semite and a bit of a snob. At first glance, Buchan’s world is one of “cold baths, rousing games, and indifferent sex”, “dismissive of modernist art and literature”, and supportive of nation and Empire. Himmelfarb, however, thinks Buchan more nuanced. Not least, his conventional anti-Semitism faded away as Hitler and Mosley advanced. Moreover, Buchan was not in truth an English gent. He was rather a Scottish Tory, never truly at home in the London club or the English country house. His hero (whose biography he wrote) was Cromwell, a man who sought to found the nation in spirituality but who, nevertheless, rejected “levelling” and embraced social inequality. Buchan turns out to have been an intellectual, who kept his intelligence under control beneath his tweed hat.
Michael Oakshott somehow managed to be Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. For him, the true conservative resists unnecessary change and suffers necessary ones. He set his conservatism against what he called “Rationalism”: his was an impulse to enjoy rather than to exploit. For him, government has the role of the umpire in cricket, administering the generally agreed rules of the game. Governments are not supposed to change anything, except very cautiously. Although this approach takes him in the direction of Burke’s Reflections, he found Burke a little too rational (!) for his own taste, since Burke had a metaphysical belief in religion, natural law and an organic society held together by that “great primeval contract of eternal society”. His book, A Guide to the Classics is subtitled How to Pick the Darby Winner. It reflects his belief that human activities are properly rooted in their own terms and enjoyed for their own sakes, and not subsumed under rationalist categories and made to serve utilitarian ends.
The penultimate chapter is entitled Winston Churchill: “Quite Simply, a Great Man” but it only just manages to find a satisfactory place in the book. Himmelfarb classifies Churchill with Disraeli as a Democratic Tory, one who thinks the upper classes should lead the lower into a national unity that transcended class. It would be churlish, of course, to deny Churchill’s greatness. If he and the United Kingdom did not exactly win the war against Germany, their special acheivement in 1940 was “not to lose”. Though Churchill certainly wrote a lot and could turn a good phrase, he was not, however, a great thinker.
And so to Trilling, whose ideas bob up in most of these essays. Trilling had introduced his left-leaning followers to Mill’s discussion of Coleridge and thence to another conservative and religious thinker, TS Eliot. In much the same manner as Mill had recommended Coleridge as a corrective to Bentham, so Trilling recommended Eliot’s Christianity and conservatism as a corrective to the Jewishness and Marxism of his target New York readership. Trilling, she suggests, was ultimately subversive of liberalism and Marx. Trilling interpreted Freud as pitting the given of human biological nature against the culture that strives to overcome biology. For Trilling, the immutability of human nature provides a salvation against a human culture, which might otherwise become omnipotent. He finds a similar theme in Orwell’s 1984. Social democracy and democracy – and not just Stalinism - tend always towards tyranny unless they confront the “moral realism” based in a human nature that is far from rational.
These essays, then, sympathise with writers who temper abstract and liberal ideals with a peculiarly conservative encounter with social realities, human nature and the supposed traditional wisdom of the people. It’s the kind of common sense view that a caricaturist might locate in a London club or a lounge bar. The essays ultimately represent a rather sentimental conservativism, opposed to liberalism, bean counting and utilitarianism, and favouring instead Evensong, maypole dancing, the Euston Arch and warm beer.
I am wary of this view, however. It is certainly true that versions of liberal rationalism and utilitarianism once provided an enlightened rationale for such things as the tricoteuses and their guillotine, and for the workhouses, factories and Pentonville Gaol. But liberalism and rationalism were never all bad. Nor were these always the only ideologies in town. Only this morning, somebody on my radio longingly described a remnant of racial segregation in the American Deep South as “traditional”. Just like liberal rationality, therefore, musty pipe-and-slippers conservatism, or other kinds of conservatism, based, for example, in one-nationism or “tradition” can provide equally pernicious ideological camouflage for inequality, injustice and mere badness.
March 12, 2011
I think it is sometimes a good thing to leave your native environment and encounter strange and different cultures. With that in mind, I've been reading Gertrude Himmelfarb.
After a discussion of John Buchan and anti-Semitism, she writes fondly:
“His speech acknowledging the honor paid him took as its theme the racial similarities of Scotsmen and Jews, with particular reference to their high regard for learning. A participant in the ceremony, sharing the platform with Buchan, observed him, during the address following his, leaning forward and watching, with unconcealed delight and fascination, the ample gestures and bodily movements of the Yiddish-speaking rabbi.” 146
And I thought to myself, that is exactly how I feel. Clearly I am not an anti-conservative since I too watched with "unconcealed delight and fascination, the ample gestures...of the" conservative-speaking historian. I kept thinking, what a strange and unusual culture. When she writes of Oakeshott:
"The popular conception of the conservative is of a person who idolizes the past; for Oakeshott, the conservative is one who esteems the present and therefore values whatever the past has bequeathed to the present. He esteems the present not because it is more admirable than any conceivable alternative but because it is familiar and for that reason enjoyable…Oakeshott admits that if the present were arid, if there were little or nothing in it to enjoy, the conservative disposition would be inappropriate. But the present is rarely, he finds, intolerable, except to those who are ignorant of the resources of their world and of the opportunities for enjoyment, or to those who are so captivated by the Rationalist impulse, the desire to make the world conform to their ideal, that they see the present only as a ‘residue of inopportunities.’” 184
I thought, how lovely that she lives in a culture in which "the present is rarely...intolerable"--she must live some place really nice with no poverty and with universal health insurance. I should write to her and find out where that is...
After a discussion of John Buchan and anti-Semitism, she writes fondly:
“His speech acknowledging the honor paid him took as its theme the racial similarities of Scotsmen and Jews, with particular reference to their high regard for learning. A participant in the ceremony, sharing the platform with Buchan, observed him, during the address following his, leaning forward and watching, with unconcealed delight and fascination, the ample gestures and bodily movements of the Yiddish-speaking rabbi.” 146
And I thought to myself, that is exactly how I feel. Clearly I am not an anti-conservative since I too watched with "unconcealed delight and fascination, the ample gestures...of the" conservative-speaking historian. I kept thinking, what a strange and unusual culture. When she writes of Oakeshott:
"The popular conception of the conservative is of a person who idolizes the past; for Oakeshott, the conservative is one who esteems the present and therefore values whatever the past has bequeathed to the present. He esteems the present not because it is more admirable than any conceivable alternative but because it is familiar and for that reason enjoyable…Oakeshott admits that if the present were arid, if there were little or nothing in it to enjoy, the conservative disposition would be inappropriate. But the present is rarely, he finds, intolerable, except to those who are ignorant of the resources of their world and of the opportunities for enjoyment, or to those who are so captivated by the Rationalist impulse, the desire to make the world conform to their ideal, that they see the present only as a ‘residue of inopportunities.’” 184
I thought, how lovely that she lives in a culture in which "the present is rarely...intolerable"--she must live some place really nice with no poverty and with universal health insurance. I should write to her and find out where that is...
November 10, 2020
O livro é uma série de painéis que retratam grandes pensadores que em comum possuem uma extraordinária capacidade para a imaginação moral. Estes pensadores são justamente aqueles que mais influenciaram Himmelfarb em sua vocação de historiadora de idéias.
July 28, 2012
hum, I acquired this on sale but had no idea who she was.
on the authors whom I do know she strikes me as a bit odd. Dorothea as moral paradigm? gotta be kidding me. Think she's completely wrong about Austen too.
but on the plus side, her readings of the philosophers are more interesting -- even if I disagree with some of them.
on the authors whom I do know she strikes me as a bit odd. Dorothea as moral paradigm? gotta be kidding me. Think she's completely wrong about Austen too.
but on the plus side, her readings of the philosophers are more interesting -- even if I disagree with some of them.
February 21, 2012
Again, will try to write more later. Suffice it to say she writes beautifully -- and offers interesting and informative introductions to a number of great Victorians -- and a few men from the last century as well. And there's even an essay on Edmund Burke.
December 7, 2016
Everything that Mrs Himmelfarb writes, must be read. There are essays here on Churchill, Austen, Dickens, Burke and many others.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews