The Moral Imagination

From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling

Gertrude Himmelfarb

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781442218307
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

In The Moral Imagination, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times. In their distinctive ways, she argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the "moral imagination." Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, and writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. It is this passion 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.

The second edition includes a revised introduction and three new essays on Adam Smith, Lord Acton, and Alfred Marshall.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Adam Smith Political Economist cum Moral Philosopher
• Edmund Burke Apologist for Judaism?
• George Eliot The Wisdom of Dorothea
• Jane Austen The Education of Emma
• Charles Dickens “A Low Writer”
• Benjamin Disraeli The Tory Imagination
• John Stuart Mill The Other Mill
• Walter Bagehot “A Divided Nature”
• Lord Acton The Historian as Moralist
• Alfred Marshall “The Economics of Chivalry”
• John Buchan An Untimely Appreciation
• The Knoxes A God-Haunted Family
• Michael Oakeshott The Conservative Disposition
• Winston Churchill “Quite Simply, a Great Man”
• Lionel Trilling The Moral Imagination
• Notes