Gertrude Himmelfarb

From Philosopedia

Himmelfarb, Gertrude (8 August 1922 - )

Known for her studies of the intellectual history of the Victorian era, Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York. She was educated at New Utrecht High School, studied at Brooklyn College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and in 1950 earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago.

She has been the recipient of many honorary degrees and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the American Association of University Women.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Humanities. In 1991, she delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A member of the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, she also sits on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute and the Board of Advisers of the Library of America. Until recently she served on the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, the American Scholar and other journals. Now retired from the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is the author of over a dozen books ranging from Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952) to The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006).

"The Enlightenment bequeathed many splendid achievements to mankind," wrote Himmelfarb (The Wall Street Journal, 5 May 1999), adding that science and technology can be morally equivocal. The Enlightenment, in light of this century’s Holocaust, also bequeathed us some dangerous illusions, which she named:

• In our post-Enlightenment world, we have had to relearn what ancient philosophy and religion had taught us and what recent history has brought home to us: that material progress can have an inverse relationship to moral progress, that the most benign social policies can have unintended and unfortunate effects, that national passions can be exacerbated in an ostensibly global world and religious passions in a supposedly secular one, and that our most cherished principles (liberty, equality, fraternity, even peace) can be perverted and degraded - that, in short, progress in all spheres, not only in science and technology, is unpredictable and undependable. This may be the lesson of the millennium. Progress, yes, but a modest, cautious, amelioratory progress, chastened by the experiences of history and guided by a sense of human limits as well as possibilities.