|
|
 |
| |
Gertrude Himmelfarb |
The gate to political wisdom
Christopher Price explores the Victorian values of an American author on Gordon Brown’s reading list
The Moral Imagination.
By Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Souvenir Press £12
GERTRUDE Himmelfarb is an 87-year-old American ex- Trotskyite who is steeped in English literature and writes with an uncommon perception – especially about Victorian politics.
Alongside her husband, Irving Kristol, she is credited with being the intellectual force behind the US neo-conservatism. Her most recent political conquests – if her publishers are to be believed – now include David Cameron and Gordon Brown.
If both have read all her books, I admire their industry. Her output is impressive – editions of the works of Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus and Alexis de Tocqueville and more than a dozen volumes on the culture and history of England and America.
Her latest book, The Moral Imagination, is a collection of 12 essays on British novelists, politicians, historians and critics written over her lifetime. We move from Edmund Burke to Mill, from Disraeli through Bagehot to Churchill and from the tender moral niceties of George Eliot, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to the anti-semitic banalities of John Buchan.
In the 21st century, this is a novel approach to some stunningly impressive politico-ethical philosophy. While insisting that she has no religion or ideology of her own, she concedes occasionally that religion can be a useful political constraint on surfeits of ideological enthusiasm, no doubt conscious of the stark Marxist deviation which pervaded her youth.
The enduring theme of the book is that the moral is preferable to the rational when these two forces collide; and that contrary philosophies permeating the same individual or the same political project are a strength rather than a weakness. Complexity and inconsistency win over political correctness every time.
Her approach – of using a mix of “delicate” fiction and political philosophy as the gate to political wisdom – is an intriguing one. At its root is the very plausible instinct that, in politics, principles rationally arrived at need moderating with large doses of emotional intelligence.
In the Victorian age, before real democracy arrived, many of the men who ran the system had the leisure to read; today most of the men and women involved in politics do not have that leisure – and when they do have it, lack any contemporary fiction and political philosophy which can match that of their Victorian forebears.
Our politicians need academics like Himmelfarb to tell them hard truths.
She is also a very good read and sees good in all her authors – though more in some than others. Bagehot and Disraeli have firmly enlisted her in their fan clubs.
Both sought solutions to the problem of two nations in a democracy – the one in the need to maintain a dual constitution (“dignified” for the many, “efficient” for the few) and the other in the need to mitigate both privilege and poverty simultaneously.
She is particularly entranced with Bagehot. One can imagine “Gertrude ♥ Walter” graffiti appearing on the walls of the City University of New York after her lectures.
With Disraeli, she admires his habit of silencing anti-semitic taunts with wit. He agreed on one such occasion that his ancestors had almost certainly been “on intimate terms with the Queen of Sheba”.
What is difficult to discern is any convincing connection between the book and American neo-conservatism – an ideology not only reliant on the votes of religious simpletons but also redolent of classical Greek hubris.
In coming to the conclusion that 21st-century politics have become bereft of emotional backbone, she has a point.
But nostalgia for the glories of the English Victorian Age does not seem to be a suitable remedy for the shortcomings of today’s politics, especially in the turbulence of a globalising world.
Perhaps she herself is the victim of her final verdict on Disraeli: “No good deed goes unpunished.” Disraeli’s successes in social reform and the expansion of the electorate always lost him each subsequent election, just as Churchill’s wartime victory did in 1945.
My analysis of Himmelfarb’s enchanting political speculations is that she is just one more victim of that Damascene road trodden by so many once-youthful Trotskyites. When one God dies, there is an uncontrollable urge to create another, even more unlikely one. I loved her erudition and prose but I am not nearly so keen on her reincarnate neo-conservative God.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
