The Moral Imagination
From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling
-
- 44,99 €
-
- 44,99 €
Publisher Description
In The Moral Imagination, Gertrude Himmelfarb, 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. In their distinctive ways, she argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the “moral imagination.” Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, and writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. It is this passion that makes their reflections—on politics and literature, religion and society, marriage and sex—sometimes unpredictable, often controversial, always exciting, and as illuminating and pertinent today as they were then.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The intellectuals celebrated in this pleasing collection of essays are not your father's conservatives but your great-great-grandfather's, provided he was a well-to-do English gentleman. Neocon historian Himmelfarb (One Nation, Two Cultures) specializes in Victorian Britain and profiles some of its leading writers and statesmen, along with philosophical forerunners and descendants, to probe the complexities of two centuries of conservative thought. In her subtly revisionist accounts, novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens become conservative-minded moralists; liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill emerges as a closet conservative, when not swayed by his father or wife; and "Tory Democrats" Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, both supporters of early social welfare programs, demonstrate the latent progressivism of conservative politics. Far removed from American-style free market fundamentalism, the strand of conservatism Himmelfarb traces is respectful of tradition, accepting of an organic class system softened and humanized by personal ties and manners, and suspicious of schemes to rationalize society. Despite her brief for this outlook's continued relevance, it seems less a coherent belief system than a reaction to the liberal and radical ideologies driving modernity. Still, Himmelfarb's stylish blend of literary criticism and intellectual history yields a stimulating reappraisal of a multifaceted and influential worldview.
