Gertrude Himmelfarb_ Brown's Guru

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29/7/2014 Gertrude Himmelfarb: Brown's guru

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Gertrude Himmelfarb: Brown's guruIt is the unashamed moralism of the doyenne of US necons that appeals

By Paul Vallely

Saturday, 3 November 2007

Tony Blair, you will recall, was the chap with the Big Tent. Nothing so crass as that forGordon Brown. But consider the speech he gave on liberty and the need for a new Bill of Rights earlier this month. And look at the list of sources he cited: the Magna Carta, Milton,Locke, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, de Tocqueville, Orwell, Churchill, Green, Hobson

and Tawney, Jonathan Sacks, Gertrude Himmelfarb...

Hang on a minute. Gertrude Himmelfarb? Isn't she the extraordinarily right-wing historian whohas been described as "Queen Bee of US conservative intellectuals and cheerleader for theBush administration"?

Er, yes, that's the one. And the Labour leader is not just quoting her. He's written theintroduction to the British edition of her new book The Roads to Modernity: the British,French and American Enlightenments. More than that, he invited her to lead a seminar at No11 Downing Street when he was Chancellor. And if the doyenne of American neocons feelswell enough – she's 85 now – he's promised her she can have the launch party for the newvolume in No 10.

Gordon has long been keen on American intellectuals. A few years back he did the intro to abook called God's Politics, by a US leftist evangelical, Jim Wallis. But then Wallis is big onfighting poverty, and though he is anti-abortion he's pro-gay rights.

Himmelfarb, by contrast, is a fully signed-up reactionary who thinks that, since the"liberated" Sixties, the West has descended into "grievous moral disorder". She has called fora return to Victorian values and a re-establishment of the distinction between the deservingand the undeserving poor.

She did start out a bit of a leftie, like Gordon. But though the Labour leader abandoned hisyouthful admiration for Gramsci, he has confined his rightward trend to a shift from a socialdemocratic position on the economy to that of a market liberal. And he's still fiercelyconcerned about how to bring social justice to the global economy. Gertrude Himmelfarb'spolitical trajectory, it has to be said, is longer.

She started out far further to the left. Born in 1922 in New York, into what she describes asa respectable but poor Jewish family who had emigrated from Russia just before the FirstWorld War, she was by her teenage years a Trotskyite. So was the young man she met atBrooklyn College, Irving Kristol. Their revolutionary Fourth International group, she later saidwith the talent for mockery which has characterised her vivid writing style, was so small that"it could have been comfortably contained in a telephone booth".

The year she graduated, 1942, she married Kristol. By the late 1940s the couple were liberalDemocrats. By the 1960s, as the counterculture gained sway, they became conservatives.They moved steadily rightwards thereafter.

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As an undergraduate, Himmelfarb was outstanding in three disciplines: history, economicsand philosophy, a breadth of learning she was to maintain. "What I was really interested in,"she has said, "although I didn't know it at the time ... was what we now call the history of ideas." She moved to the intellectual hothouse that was the University of Chicago to do amaster's on Rousseau and Robespierre.

Her husband had been drafted into the US infantry in Europe. Himmelfarb moved to the UK toa fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. She did a doctorate on the Victorian politicalthinker Lord "power corrupts" Acton. His combination of economic liberalism and piousCatholicism set her on a defining path.

She did it, unorthodoxly, outside institutional academia. For 15 years, while she brought upher children, she was an "independent scholar" producing respected works on Acton, Darwin,Malthus and Mill.

Though the Kristols never made any effort to give their children a political education, herhusband recalled, "They learned from the people who visited us, overhearing ourconversations." Their son William is now the editor of Rupert Murdoch's ultra-right magazineThe Weekly Standard and chairman of the neocon think-tank Project for the New AmericanCentury. "No family has had a greater impact on today's conservatism," The New Yorker saidrecently, "than the Kristols".

From biographies of eminent Victorians Himmelfarb widened her reach. The Idea of Poverty:

England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) concluded that the Industrial Revolution changedthe idea of what poverty was. Previously it had been a "natural, unfortunate, often tragicfact of life, but not necessarily demeaning or degrading". It became seen as "an urgent socialproblem" that threatened the fabric of society and must, at all costs, be abolished.

Two years later her Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians was published, disclosing thatthe proportion of illegitimate births to total births in England fell from 7 per cent in 1845 toless than 4 per cent by the end of the century. Victorian virtues such as hard work,discipline, thrift, self-help, self-discipline, cleanliness, chastity, fidelity and charity, sheconcluded, were key determinants. The emphasis on personal responsibility, she said, meantthere was less need for involvement by the state. Her reach widened further. The NewHistory and the Old (1987) launched a scathing attack of historians who neglected theactions of great men to focus on social and economic structures. She was particularly

withering about deconstructionist historians who "liberate the study of history from thetyranny of facts".

Increasingly she extrapolated from the past to the present, writing opinion articles in TheNew York Times, lambasting changes to the academic curriculum, affirmative action quotas,and radical feminists.

On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994) argued thatthe anti-bourgeois bohemian culture of Bloomsbury became democratised after the SecondWorld War with the huge expansion of higher education and the growth in material affluence.It spread rapidly along the line of least resistance. "Virtues are very hard. Vices are easy tocome by. Once young people had the leisure and money to indulge themselves, it was almostinevitable that they do it." The world had gone from "relativism into nihilism, amorality into

immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity".

Thus she continued. The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values(1995) considered crime and illegitimacy statistics in England and in the US. Moral changeshad created social problems, she concluded. "For Victorians, virtues were fixed and certain.When conduct fell short of those standards, it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong orevil." But today "virtues" had been replaced by "values". Modern society, fearing to be seenas judgemental, would now only condemn behaviour as "misguided", "undesirable" or, in theworst corruption of the moral vocabulary, "inappropriate".

Crime, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency and welfare dependency rose as illegitimacy waslegitimised as "an alternative mode of parenting". Teenage promiscuity was redefined as"sexually active" and encouraged by the offer of condoms. Illegitimacy rose from 5 per cent





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