Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
Faith-Based History
By Alan Ryan
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf, 284 pp., $25.00
Gertrude Himmelfarb is astonishing. Born in 1922, she is in her early eighties, but she continues to write on her favorite topics with undiminished vigor and with the determination to écraser l'infâme that has been her trademark since the 1960s. Like other members of her generation of neoconservatives, she began on the far left; like others, she has ended, at least in the intellectual traditions she favors, not on the far right, but on the middle ground occupied by Lord Acton, Walter Bagehot, and a host of anxious Victorian liberals. Lionel Trilling was an admirer of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. It is no more surprising that a Jewish New York intellectual who was educated at Brooklyn College and taught there for many years should feel at home with English Catholics, Anglicans, and agnostics.
Review, 3880 words
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