Moral Imagination

The Moral Imagination: From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling by Gertrude Himmelfarb, 279 pages

The Moral Imagination collects a series of biographical sketches by Gertrude Himmelfarb - some old, some new - exploring the humanist disposition as it expressed itself in the lives of her subjects.  In her telling, each celebrated the reality of truth, goodness, and beauty, while condemning the dictatorial ideologies of a narrow rationalism.

Whether by accident or design, Himmelfarb's choice of subjects begins with the moral disaster of the Enlightenment and ends with the moral disaster of the '60s.  It therefore begins with the quest for values in the wake of the revolutionary overthrow of tradition, and ends with the ascendancy of anti-intellectual technocratic nihilism.  As befits her theme, her subjects are amazingly varied - the philosophers Mill and Burke, the clergymen Wilfred and Ronald Knox, the economists Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, the statesmen Disraeli and Churchill, the novelists George Eliot, Austen, Dickens, and Buchan.  They include skeptics and believers, conservatives and liberals.  They are all the more diverse because they are themselves so multifaceted - Ronald Knox, Disraeli, and Churchill were all literary men in addition to their primary vocations, while Smith was a philosopher as well as an economist and Burke a politician as well as a philosopher.  In each case Himmelfarb exhibits (without explaining) how this breadth of activity and thought enhanced rather than detracted from the quality of their work.