The Poverty of Theory

Gertrude Himmelfarb is a remarkable woman. Remarkable, first, because in some respects she is a pioneer. Born in 1922, she has always retained her own name, and has combined raising a family on both sides of the Atlantic with writing and editing (thus far) seventeen books. And while the direction of her intellectual life journey--from the far left to the activist right--is scarcely an unusual one, few women of her generation have adopted this route with anything like as much conviction, success and aplomb. She met her husband, Irving Kristol, at a Trotskyist political meeting in Brooklyn in the 1930s and wrote her master's thesis on the French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. Since then, however, she has gone on to earn praise from Newt Gingrich, lecture in front of Margaret Thatcher and collaborate with Lynne Cheney.

As this suggests, Himmelfarb is not simply a historian. Since the 1980s, especially, she has been a conspicuous and sometimes pugnacious cultural critic and commentator on public affairs. How she views her role is suggested by a remark she once made about Lionel Trilling, a friend and an intellectual model. Trilling, she wrote in On Looking Into the Abyss (1994), "was able to resist the insidious ideological and political fashions of his time without the coarsening of mind that often comes with doing battle, and also without the timidity and equivocation that retreats from battle in an excess of fastidiousness." This latter quality is emphatically not one of her own failings, at least not in the face of perceived enemies on the left within academia and outside it.

Thus when social history was still fashionable, she attacked its more extreme exponents for having a "valet-like conception" of the past that lent itself to "denigration of greatness and heroism." When post-structural literary criticism was in vogue, she accused some of its better- known practitioners of convoluted thought and convoluted prose. And she has since taken on postmodernist historians, claiming that they deconstruct the "texts" of the past and the "texts" of previous historians so as to create a tabula rasa upon which to impose their own radical agendas: a strategy tantamount, as she sees it, to "a repudiation of the historical enterprise as it has been understood and practiced until very recently," which she does not mean as a compliment.

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