Sheehan, James J. The American Historical Review 100, no. 2. 1995.

Abstract:

This book by Gertrude Himmelfarb consists of seven essays that began as lectures and occasional pieces; all have been published before. As is common in collections of this sort, the essays vary in subject matter and weight. “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?”, which the author describes as a jeu d’esprit, laments the decline of the footnote in scholarly publications. (The footnote, I must say, is not an endangered species in most of the books I read.) “From Marx to Hegel” celebrates the belated triumph of Hegel over Marx, which Himmelfarb illustrates with Vaclav Havel’s statement to the U.S. Congress that “Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.” (I hope those members of Congress who so enthusiastically applauded Havel are prepared to help prevent Eastern Europe’s material realities from returning to overwhelm its spirit.) In “The Dark and Bloody Crossroads Where Nationalism and Religion Meet,” she argues that “not all nationalities are worthy of respect and recognition.” Good, healthy nationalisms are those “tempered by religion as well as the other resources of civilization” (pp. 119, 121). “Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets” provides some fragmentary reflections on the role of the individual in history and on the danger of reducing history to the study of long-term structural change. “Liberty: ‘One Very Simple Principle’?” re- hearses Himmelfarb’s claim that there are two John Stuart Mills: the radical, irresponsible author of “On Liberty” and the more moderate, prudent ally of Alexis de Tocqueville and other sensible liberals. In this essay, the “bad” Mill is held partly accountable for the philosophical position that Himmelfarb most dislikes, the postmodern denial that there is any such thing as truth. Her critique of postmodernism is the central subject of the first and last essays, “On Look- ing into the Abyss” and “Postmodernist History,” but in a sense it pervades the entire volume, which is, as the author tells us in her brief introduction, “dedicated to the proposition that there are such things as truth and reality and that there is a connection between them, as there is also a connection between the aesthetic sensibility and the moral imagination, between culture and society” (p. xii). Her enemies are those who seem to deny these fundamental values.

Read online on Jstor: Review: On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb