Gertrude Himmelfarb: Historian and essayist who brought Victorian-era ideas to neoconservatism

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who has died aged 97, used her understanding of the morals and values of Victorian Britain to help create an intellectual framework for the neoconservative movement championed by her husband, the political commentator Irving Kristol.

Her writings on political and cultural figures became guideposts for the growing conservative backlash against liberal values of the 1960s. Yet her ideas on morality were also an influence on Gordon Brown, who prior to becoming Labour prime minister wrote the introduction to the UK edition of her book The Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American Enlightenments (2004).

She, her husband and their son, William, a co-founder and editor of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, made up what became known as the first family of neoconservatism, a school of thought that sought a more assertive US foreign policy and realignment of American social values.

Irving Kristol, who died in 2009, was an essayist and an editor of several influential journals, including Commentary, Encounter and the Public Interest, to which Himmelfarb often contributed elegant, forceful essays. Her husband delivered the famous thumbnail definition of a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality”. Where Irving Kristol was a polemicist with a gift for aphorism, his wife was a more deliberate thinker, pondering issues of history, ethics and personal responsibility.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Himmelfarb published a series of well-regarded books about 19th-century British intellectual history and political and cultural figures. She advanced the notion that the Victorians, with their rigorous standards of morality, hard work, self-reliance and public rectitude – and the British empire’s muscular economic and military presence – should be a model for modern American life and public policy.

Himmelfarb and her husband fashioned their ideas in spirited response to the liberal social norms that emerged in the 1960s, seeing their mission as an ideological war. In books such as The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1994), she explored the Victorians’ “moral imagination” – the title of her 2006 book and a term she borrowed from Edmund Burke, the 18th-century political philosopher who was a key influence on conservative thought. Himmelfarb’s ideas were woven into modern conservative views on work, welfare, poverty, economics, religion, education, crime, military engagement and race relations.

Neoconservative ideas advocated by Himmelfarb and her husband gained perhaps their widest influence after the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, through advisers such as William Bennett, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

The philosophy was developed in the 1960s, when Irving Kristol was editor of the Public Interest, and took its name from a 1973 article in Dissent magazine by sociologist Michael Harrington. It differed from earlier forms of conservatism by being a self-consciously intellectual movement that emphasised a robust form of American triumphalism and leadership, rather than focusing on isolationism and the threat of communism.

She and other neocon thinkers were largely defined by what they opposed: the “grievous moral disorder”, as she called it, wrought by campus radicals and the Great Society federal aid programmes of the 1960s. In her essays, Himmelfarb grew more strident in her antipathy towards postmodern academic trends, affirmative action, feminism and liberalism in general.

“Virtues are very hard,” she said in 1995. “Vices are easy to come by. Once young people had the leisure and money to indulge themselves, it was almost inevitable that they do it.”

Although she was Jewish, Himmelfarb became a proponent of evangelical Christian values, condemning abortion, adultery and premarital sex.

As a leading ideologue of neoconservatism, Himmelfarb became an intellectual hero of former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove, a leading adviser to President George W Bush. The reception accorded her books seemed increasingly, even reflexively, dictated by the political predilections of her readers. Conservative publications gushed over her work, while others saw her as increasingly rigid and mean-spirited.

Gertrude Himmelfarb was in 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a glass manufacturer, her mother a homemaker. An older brother, Milton, was an essayist and director of research for the American Jewish Committee.

Like many other young New Yorkers raised in the crucible of the Depression, Himmelfarb had communist leanings in her youth. She and Kristol were part of the New York Intellectuals, a group clustered around the Partisan Review and other small magazines known for intense disputes over politics and literature.

She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1942 and married Kristol the same year. She then studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a master’s degree in history in 1944 and a doctorate in 1950. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she and her husband lived in England, where she carried out research at the University of Cambridge and he became an editor of Encounter magazine, a cultural journal secretly funded by the CIA.

Himmelfarb gave hints of an intellectual shift as early as 1950, with an article in Commentary magazine, “Prophets of the New Conservatism”. Her first book, about the 19th-century British political figure Lord Acton, appeared in 1952, followed by studies of other scientific and social theorists, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith.

She was an independent scholar until 1965, when she joined the faculty of New York’s City College and later taught at City University of New York’s graduate school. She and her husband moved to Washington in 1987.

In addition to several essay collections, she published The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009), about the 19th-century author’s novel Daniel Deronda, and The People of the Book (2011), about British acceptance of Jewish ideas and people.

Himmelfarb continued to write into her nineties, never losing her sharp edge or the trenchant quality of her prose, as she sought to use history to illuminate the current age. “Great minds are great for all time, not only for their own time,” she wrote in her 2017 book Past and Present. “Truth does not change; only beliefs do.”

She is survived by two children.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian, born 8 August 1922, died 30 December 2019

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