Gertrude Himmelfarb: The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling.(Book review)

Gertrude Himmelfarb The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling. Ivan R. Dee, 259 pages, $26

Readers of Gertrude Himmelfarb's brilliant exercises in historical recuperation know that she is an historian and social commentator of rare perspicacity, learning, and humanity. Her works on the Victorian period--on J. S. Mill, Darwin, Lord Acton, as well as thematic collections of essays dealing with many other figures and issues from the period--are unparalleled in their deployment of the once prized, now neglected faculty that provides the title for her latest collection. It was Edmund Burke, Himmelfarb notes in her introduction, who gave currency to the phrase "moral imagination." The dozen essays, that make up this book--earlier versions of some have appeared in previous collections--provide a kind of theater for the exhibition of its agency. Himmelfarb has given us a book of enthusiasms--"appreciations" is her word--for writers and thinkers who in all their complexity, idiosyncrasy, and amplitude nevertheless stand as worthy objects of our admiration. Himmelfarb has a signal talent for bringing the figures and issues she discusses to life, which is to say that she has a signal talent for inhabiting history with the permanent passions of mankind. Burke's writings on the French Revolution or the philosopher Michael Oakeshott's urbane deflations of rationalism; the ...