It is Himmelfarb's contention that the Victorian's moral absolutes were recognized throughout society:

Victorian virtues - which included work, discipline, thrift, self-help, self-discipline, cleanliness, chastity, fidelity, valor and charity - provided a continuity that unified society. Certainly there were "class distinctions, social prejudices, abuses of authority, [and] constraints on personal liberty" in England during the 19th century. But Victorians from royal dukes to stevedores and scullery maids were confident that being English and Christian was superior to being anything else.

To the contrary, she argues, in the current de-moralised society, morality - as understood by the Victorians - is now a problem for all society:

One can think of other reasons why today morality is a problem: the affluence of the young, stimulating the demand for material goods and for the immediate gratification of that demand; technology (TV, transistor radios) making the popular culture, including the most degrading forms of that culture, widely accessible; the birth control pill, facilitating the sexual revolution; the expansion of higher education, bringing the "adversary culture," or counterculture (once confined to Bloomsbury or Greenwich village), to every college campus ...

Thus Himmelfarb deplores - rightly in my view - the current hedonist culture, but it is a culture promoted by that epitome of anti-Victoriana Mr Rupert Murdoch.

Writing these lines on the eve of the latest addition to the year-round list of corporate spend-fests - Halloween - with the shops full of goods which will be redundant on 1st November, one wonders what the Victorians would have thought of a culture so self-absorbed in the transience, the evanescence, of hedonism.

The conundrum is this: a Prime Minister with a Scottish puritanical background, who is an ardent supporter of the free market - the laissez faire market - is unable to see that this society cannot have grafted onto it the virtues of a society which was based on deferred gratification, or as the Victorians called it "improvement".

The current economic order would collapse if all started to behave as though the only way to get to a better tomorrow would be via self-denial, and the serious application to obtaining the skills necessary for that better tomorrow.

It would also be self-evident that the interpersonal skills demonstrated by a raft of reality TV shows are quite inimical to any kind of social morality, and are the very reason why government is able to degrade care for deprived children, the frail elderly, and the mentally ill, to name but three groups of victims of the current dystopia.

Himmelfarb's writings are of value in reminding us that there was a moral order, exemplified by crime statistics:

In England between 1857 and 1901, the rate of indictable offenses (serious offenses, not including simple assault, drunkenness, or vagrancy) declined by almost 50 percent.

The absolute numbers are even more graphic: while the population grew from 19 million to 33 million, the number of serious crimes fell from 92,000 to 81,000.

1857, by the way, was not the peak year; it is simply the year when the most reliable series of statistics starts. The decline (earlier statistics suggest) actually started in the mid or late 1840s, about the same time as the decline in illegitimacy.

The low crime rate persisted until the mid 1920s, when it started to rise and continued to do so through the war years, levelling off or declining slightly in the early 1950s.

A dramatic rise started in the mid fifties, increasing more than fivefold by 1981 and almost doubling in the following decade. By 1991 the rate was ten times that of 1955 and forty times that of 1901.

Nostalgia is peculiarly the fate of the elderly, but, as Himmelfarb herself makes clear, there was another Victorian England to which we would not wish to return.

And there's the conundrum: we cannot graft onto the current society the bits of a previous, and wholly different 'model of reality', in order to mend current problems.

Brown's search for solutions - if that is his reason for reading Himmelfarb - is a blind ally; the past offers warnings, but not solutions to problems it did not have to encounter.

The Victorian virtues ... were deemed essential, not only for the good life of individuals but for the well-being of society.

And they were "virtues," not "values" that the Victorians cherished.

It was not until the present century that morality became so thoroughly relativized and subjectified that virtues ceased to be "virtues" and became "values." ...

"Values" brings with it the assumptions that all moral ideas are subjective and relative, that they are mere customs and conventions, that they have a purely instrumental, utilitarian purpose, and that they adhere to particular peoples--or, as we now say, they are race-, class-, and gender-specific. So long as morality was couched in the language of "virtue," it had a firm, resolute character ... the word "virtue" carried with it a sense of gravity and authority, as "values" does not.

Values, as we now understand that word, do not have to be virtues; they can be beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, preferences--whatever any individual, group, or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason. One cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone's virtues are as good as anyone else's, or that everyone has a right to his own virtues. Only values can lay that claim to moral equality and neutrality. This impartial, "non-judgmental" as we now say, sense of values--values as "value-free"--is now so firmly entrenched in our vocabulary and sensibility that one can hardly imagine a time without it.

To speak of Victorian values (as I sometimes do, out of deference to common usage) is not merely a semantical anachronism; it is a distortion of the Victorian ethos. For the Victorians understood them as "virtues," not "values." Most Victorians even believed them to be, as Margaret Thatcher once said, "perennial virtues" ...

For the Victorians, these virtues were fixed and certain, not in the sense of governing the actual behavior of all people all the time (or even, it may be, of most people most of the time) ... But all of them did believe that they were the standards against which behavior could and should be judged. The standards were firm even if the behavior of individuals did not always measure up to them. And when conduct fell short of those standards, it was deemed to be immoral--bad, wrong, evil--not, as is more often the case today, as misguided, undesirable, or (the most recent corruption of our moral vocabulary) "inappropriate." ...

Why have values become a subject of such intense discussion? And why do the Victorian values--or virtues--loom so large today? The answer to both questions lies, in part, in statistics. Thomas Carlyle once rebuked his countrymen with being obsessed with "figures of arithmetic"--about wages and prices, the cost of food and the standard of living. The more important issue, he insisted, was the "condition" and "disposition" of the people: their beliefs and feelings, their sense of right and wrong, the attitudes and habits that would dispose them either to a "wholesome composure, frugality, and prosperity," or to an "acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin."

In fact, the Victorians had "figures of arithmetic" about these matters as well--about crime, drunkenness, pauperism, vagrancy, illiteracy, illegitimacy; "moral statistics," they called them. It is instructive--and disquieting--to compare their moral statistics with ours.

In Victorian England, the illegitimacy ratio--the proportion of illegitimate births to total births--fell from 7 percent in 1845 to less than 4 percent by the end of the century. In East London, the poorest section of the city, it was less than that: 4.5 percent in midcentury and 3 percent by the end of the century. Apart from a temporary increase during both world wars, the ratio continued to hover around 5 percent until well into the middle of the twentieth century. In 1960 it began to rise, to 12 percent by 1980, and to 32 percent by the end of 1992--a two-and-a-half times increase in the last decade alone and a sixfold rise in three decades. ...

let us take another "moral statistic": crime. In England between 1857 and 1901, the rate of indictable offenses (serious offenses, not including simple assault, drunkenness, or vagrancy) declined by almost 50 percent. The absolute numbers are even more graphic: while the population grew from 19 million to 33 million, the number of serious crimes fell from 92,000 to 81,000. 1857, by the way, was not the peak year; it is simply the year when the most reliable series of statistics starts. The decline (earlier statistics suggest) actually started in the mid or late 1840s, about the same time as the decline in illegitimacy.

The low crime rate persisted until the mid 1920s, when it started to rise and continued to do so through the war years, levelling off or declining slightly in the early 1950s. A dramatic rise started in the mid fifties, increasing more than fivefold by 1981 and almost doubling in the following decade. By 1991 the rate was ten times that of 1955 and forty times that of 1901. ...

More than any specific values or virtues, it is this reluctance to speak the language of morality, and to apply moral ideas to social policies, that separates us from the Victorians. In Victorian England, moral principles were as much a part of public discourse as of private discourse, and as much a part of social policy as of personal life.

They were not only deeply ingrained in tradition; they were also imbedded in two powerful strains of Victorian thought: Utilitarianism on the one hand, Evangelicalism and Methodism on the other. These may not have been compatible philosophically, but in practice they complemented and reenforced each other, the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain, rewards and punishments, being the secular equivalent of the religious gospel of virtues and vices.

It was this alliance of a secular ethos and a religious one that provided the practical basis for social policy, so that every measure of poor relief, for example, had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor ...

In recent times we have so completely rejected any kind of moral principle that we have deliberately, systematically divorced poor relief from moral sanctions and incentives. This reflects in part the theory that society is responsible for all social problems and should therefore assume the task of solving them; and in part the prevailing spirit of relativism, which makes it difficult to pass any moral judgments or impose any moral conditions upon the recipients of relief.

We are now confronting the consequences of this policy of moral neutrality. Having made the most valiant attempt to "objectify" the problem of poverty, to see it as the product of impersonal economic and social forces, we are discovering that the economic and social aspects of that problem are inseparable from the moral and personal ones. And having made the most determined effort to devise policies that are "value-free," that do not stigmatize the recipients of relief or their "style of life," we find that these policies imperil both the moral and the material well-being of their intended beneficiaries.

In de-moralizing social policy--divorcing it from any moral criteria, requirements, even expectations--we have demoralized, in the more familiar sense, both the individuals receiving relief and society as a whole. We are, in fact, operating on something like a principle of "more-eligibility." People on welfare often receive more, by way of allowances, food stamps, housing subsidies, and medical benefits, than workers earning a minimum or modest wage, thus providing incentives to go on relief rather than seek work. Or we give unmarried mothers (including teenagers) benefits and services that married mothers do not have, thus penalizing marriage and rewarding illegitimacy. Or we define drug addiction and alcoholism as "disabilities," thus making chronic addicts and alcoholics eligible for relief, while the addict or alcoholic who makes a serious effort to be cured is removed from the relief rolls. And in a myriad other ways, our policies have the unwitting effect of favoring (making "more eligible") what the Victorians called the "undeserving" poor over the "deserving." ...

American Enterprise Institute 13 February 1995

“It is this reluctance to speak the language of morality, and to apply moral ideas to social policies, that separates us from the Victorians. In Victorian England, moral principles were as much a part of public discourse as of private discourse, and as much a part of social policy as of personal life.

Every measure of poor relief, for example, had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor -- and not only of the pauper receiving relief but of the independent laboring poor as well.

In recent times we have so completely rejected any kind of moral principle that we have deliberately, systematically divorced poor relief from moral sanctions and incentives. We are now confronting the consequences of this policy.

Having made the most valiant attempt to see the problem of poverty as the product of impersonal economic and social forces, we are now discovering that the economic and social aspects are inseparable from the moral and personal ones.

And having made the most determined effort to devise policies that are ‘value free,’ that do not stigmatize the recipients of relief or the ‘style of life,’ we find that these policies imperil both the moral and the material well-being of their intended beneficiaries.”

rightweb.irc-online.org

"The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values" (1995) follows "On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society", with further speculations on the effects on present-day society of the abandonment of Victorian standards of moral behavior.

[Gertrude Himmelfarb] devotes a chapter to crime statistics in England and in America and to levels of illegitimacy and single parenthood. She deduces from these that moral standards have changed for the worse, and questions what new standards, if any, have replaced the old. "The Victorian virtues were neither the classical nor the Christian virtues; they were more domesticated than the former and more secular than the latter, " but were believed to be perennial. "For Victorians, virtues were fixed and certain, not in the sense of governing the actual behavior of all people all the time … [rather], they were the standards against which behavior could and should be measured. When conduct fell short of those standards, it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong or evil - not, as is more often the case today, as misguided, undesirable or (the most recent corruption of the moral vocabulary) 'inappropriate'." This is the major distinction between the Victorian age and our own, argues Himmelfarb.

In other words, Victorian virtues - which included work, discipline, thrift, self-help, self-discipline, cleanliness, chastity, fidelity, valor and charity - provided a continuity that unified society. Certainly there were "class distinctions, social prejudices, abuses of authority, [and] constraints on personal liberty" in England during the 19th century. But Victorians from royal dukes to stevedores and scullery maids were confident that being English and Christian was superior to being anything else.

Her call for a return to Victorian values coincided with a national debate about "family values" and a general national discussion regarding a rising crime rate, lower education test scores, single parenthood and so her work enjoyed more popular attention than her previous writings.

www.answers.com

Himmelfarb's critically well received 1991 volume "Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians" argues that the lives of the era's poor, while wretched by many modern standards, were not all that bad relative to the average Englishman's. They were also better than the lives of the poor in most of the European countries from which the critics came.

She writes of the Victorians' realistic approach to helping the poor and the destitute, and for their determination to frame the issue of relief in moral terms. The evil of poverty, they held, resided less in material deprivation than in character deformation.

www.answers.com

Among Gordon Brown's advisers, the PM's capacity to plough through books inspires both awe and exhaustion. "What you reading?" is a common Brown greeting, where others might say, for instance, "hello". In some cases, he even reads forthcoming publications in proof, thus making it next to impossible for his hollow-eyed aides to keep up with him.

One such book (now available between hard covers) which exercised Mr Brown greatly earlier in the year was the philosopher A C Grayling's Towards the Light, a history of liberty in the West. The PM is a fan of Grayling, a don at Birkbeck College, London, but the two men disagree on this fundamental issue. Grayling believes that the curtailment of liberties in response to terrorism has been "draconian" and disproportionate, and that key rights "are being subjected to persistent and mounting threat under the guise, partly spurious and partly self-deceiving, that their erosion is a price worth paying for security".

In one sense, Mr Brown's impressive lecture on liberty at the University of Westminster on Thursday was an extended book review (which did not mention the book). The PM agrees that liberty is at the heart of the British inheritance. But, whereas Grayling argues that the "highest duty [of government] is the protection of individual liberties", Mr Brown believes the reality is more complex. "Precious as it is," he said on Thursday, "liberty is not the only value we prize and not the only priority for government."

This pointed remark was made in the context of a long discourse on the need for "a new British constitutional settlement for our generation". Perhaps I am an old-fashioned humanist, but I think there is something heartening in a serving Prime Minister quoting such authorities as Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Milton, Locke and Macaulay, and revealing a breadth of reference from Orwell to the Chief Rabbi and the legendary US conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb. Those who say Mr Brown has no "vision" do him an injustice. One may not agree with his vision, but he is the most intellectually formidable and deep-thinking Prime Minister since Gladstone (imagine those two sharing an office).

On constitutional matters, Mr Brown's preoccupation stretches back many years. In March 1992, days before the general election, he delivered the Charter 88 Sovereignty Lecture, which shows how many of these themes were on his mind even then. At that point, his discussion of liberty was mainly aimed at the allegedly "Hobbesian" state – the Thatcherite Leviathan. Much has changed since then – we have an SNP government in Edinburgh, for instance – but the sheer scale of Mr Brown's ambitions on constitutional matters remains the same and has yet to be properly absorbed. This is much more than highfalutin bookishness.

As Jack Straw reiterated last week, the Government wants a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (as do the Tories). A statement of British values will be published in January as the basis for debate on future definitions of allegiance, citizenship and civic education. The Crown prerogative is to be surrendered to Parliament or limited in certain key areas. And a written constitution is, for the first time in the modern era, perfectly conceivable, if still a long way off. ... ...

Telegraph.co.uk 28 October 2007

To be part of the audience for Gordon Brown's speech on liberty this week was simultaneously an impressive and a disconcerting experience. "On Liberty" was how Downing Street had billed the speech. With that bold echo of John Stuart Mill, the prime minister set the bar high for himself. For much of the speech, he cleared it pretty comfortably too.

His words were often terrific. The analysis was even better. Too often our politics have undervalued liberty, he said. We need to rediscover the British tradition of liberty and to enhance it. There is an implied anti-Blair dig there, of course. But the argument is also a bigger one. Liberty and toleration were the most important threads that run through our history, Brown even claimed. That is a powerful thing to say, as well as true. Its implications are immense. ...

As Brown spoke, though, less flattering questions also began to form. The immediately obvious ones are about policy. How can he make such a powerful case for liberty and then press ahead recklessly with such a sweeping challenge to liberty as the ID card system? Or with trying to double the already very extensive 28-day detention without charge for terror suspects? And why is he so neuralgically averse to celebrating Labour's record in introducing the liberty-expanding Human Rights Act?

Some will answer that it is all a trick, that the fine words are nothing but a rhetorical show designed to beguile credulous commentators. My own view is different.

I think Brown simply finds it hard to follow through on the logic of his own insights. But that poses a broader question about the state of British public life. Why is a man who reads so thoughtfully, who understands about the importance of freedom, and who accords the subject such prominence, simultaneously so cautious about embracing the tradition that best embodies these principles and which has had such an influence on the movement he leads.

In other words, why is Brown so reluctant to be a liberal? ...

Ours is, in the end and in spite of all, the liberal country Brown identifies. It requires liberal solutions to its problems. If Brown steps forward across the threshold and offers the solutions implied in his implicitly liberal analysis, he may become master of the future. If he doesn't he may freeze on the doorstep. And in that case the rebuilding of liberal Britain will fall not to Labour but to its rival parties, who currently seem more comfortable and better equipped for what lies ahead if Labour falters.

The Guardian 27 October 2007

On 15 January 2005 The Times discussed the reading habits of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown:

WHEN Gordon Brown went on holiday last summer, depressed after his bruising leadership battles with Tony Blair, he sought comfort in a little light reading.

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, by the neoconservative American intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb, who argued that the British Enlightenment, with its emphasis on social virtue and compassion, was more admirable than the French and an inspiration to the American.

Brown considered this a brilliant book.

Even in London, Brown devours books as voraciously as Charles Clarke eats pizzas. Almost all are works of political or economic philosophy, and most are American.

While other politicians’ views tend to be influenced by the writers who inspired them in their youth, Brown’s are constantly evolving in line with new thinking. In his field, he is a rare and genuine intellectual.

The Times 15 January 2007

Gertrude Himmelfarb (born August 8, 1922) is an American historian known for her studies of the intellectual history of the Victorian era, particularly of Social Darwinism; and as a conservative cultural critic. She is also known as an outspoken commentator of university education. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

She was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and was educated at New Utrecht High School and Brooklyn College. Her doctoral work was at the University of Chicago.

She is now Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She married Irving Kristol in 1942, but has always written as an academic under her maiden name.

Their son, William Kristol, is the editor of the Weekly Standard and chairman of the American neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. She is also sister to the late Milton Himmelfarb of the American Jewish Committee.

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