Moral Imagination From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling

Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, here explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times: Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and John Buchan, Walter Bagehot and the Knox brothers, Michael Oakeshott and Lionel Trilling. In their distinctive ways, Ms. Himmelfarb argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the moral imagination. Behind the drama of ideas that played itself out in the lives and writings of these individuals was the free play of the moral imagination. From her own long engagement with these subjects, Ms. Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. And it is the liveliness of their imaginations that makes their reflections on politics and literature, religion and society, marriage and sex sometimes unpredictable, often controversial, always exciting, and as illuminating and pertinent today as they were then. In this eminently readable book, Gertrude Himmelfarb captures the wit and wisdom and foibles and frailties of a dozen memorable writers and thinkers, statesmen among them. The Moral Imagination possesses the clarity and persuasion of Ms. Himmelfarb's best work.

These essays reflect upon the interplay of past and present--the ideas and ideologies that have shaped our recent history, and those that are now transforming our culture and society.

One of America's most distinguished intellectual historians here explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times, from Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling. Reminds us why Gertrude Himmelfarb is our foremost historian of morality.Andrew Roberts.