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The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke To Lionel TrillingStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionGertrude 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 Omoral imagination.O 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. ReviewsHimmelfarb has a signal talent for bringing the figures and issues she discusses to life.--Roger Kimball "The New Criterion " Author descriptionGertrude Himmelfarb's other books include The Roads to Modernity; One Nation, Two Cultures; The De-Moralization of Society; On Looking into the Abyss; Poverty and Compassion; Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians; Victorian Minds; Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution; and Lord Acton. In a distinguished career as an historian, she has received a great many honorary degrees and fellowships and, most recently, the 2004 presidential National Humanities Medal. She lives in Washington, D.C. |