Books about Himmelfarb from Amazon.com

One of America's most distinguished intellectual historians explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times: Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and John Buchan, Walter Bagehot and the Knox brothers, Michael Oakeshott and Lionel Trilling. In their distinctive ways, Ms. Himmelfarb argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the moral imagination..
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'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign'. To this 'one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's essay "On Liberty" is dedicated While many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who organized the idea into a philosophy, and put it into the form in which it is generally known today. The editor of this essay, Gertrude Himmelfarb records responses to Mill's books and comments on his fear of 'the tyranny of the majority'. Dr. Himmelfarb concludes that the same inconsistencies which underlie "On Liberty" continue to complicate the moral and political stance of liberals today..
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In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America.

Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe.

The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas..
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From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines.

One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures.".
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Contrasting the Victorian system of virtues--respectability, self-help, discipline, cleanliness, obedience, orderliness--with the opportunistic, superficial morality of modern society, an intellectual historian calls for a deeper commitment to moral responsibility 12,500 first printing..
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In these provocative essays, one of our most distinguished historians looks into the abyss of the present Himmelfarb exposes the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of some of our most fashionable current ideas--and shows how the vogue for historical structuralism has made it possible to trivialize the tragedy of the Holocaust..
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A biographical, historical, and philosophical study of the impact of Darwinism on the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, challenging the conventional view of Darwin's greatness. A thorough and masterly book. --Times Literary Supplement.
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According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests?

Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers, the Book of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel--a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.

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