Past and Present - Encounter Books

Free shipping on all orders over $40

Currently Viewing Past and Present $23.99
Add To Cart
Back to Browse

Past and Present

The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Post-Modernists

By Gertrude Himmelfarb
$23.99
Add to Cart

Also Purchase as e-Book

Publication Details

Hardcover/ 256 pages
ISBN: 9781594039256
AVAILABLE: 4/25/2017

Past and Present
The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Post-Modernists
By Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. In Past and Present, an eminent American historian and cultural critic shows the truth of that statement. The common theme of the twenty essays gathered here is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past continues to illuminate the present.

Gertrude Himmelfarb helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues through a trenchant analysis of debates and thinkers from earlier times.

The topics of the essays vary widely, from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers examined range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures who appear here are also diverse, from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II.

Running through all the essays as a first premise is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomfiting, matters immensely in the “practical life,” to use Trilling’s terms, as it does in the “moral life.” Past and Present is a notable contribution to this endeavor—to understanding where we have been, where we are today, and where we may be (or should be) going.

About the Author

Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor emeritus at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, has written extensively on intellectual and cultural history with a focus on Victorian England.

Read More

Praise

Praise
“
“Gertrude Himmelfarb describes herself as an ‘old-timer’ in this profound and thought-provoking book, but in fact the themes she addresses are timeless, as one would expect from the greatest conservative thinker writing today. She sees today’s issues totally clearly, dispensing with the cant, and places them all in their correct historical context. From Churchill to Lionel Trilling, Thucydides to Einstein, Thomas Carlyle to Caitlyn Jenner, she always has something new, important and interesting to say.”
Professor Andrew Roberts
Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New York Historical Society
Praise
“
“Gertrude Himmelfarb’s terrific new volume of essays spans an intellectual life sustained over some seventy years. Her crisp prose, luminous intelligence and common sense are manifest throughout. This is a one-woman arsenal of civilization, mobilizing the best of past culture to come to the aid of a present beset by anarchy.”
Daniel Johnson
Founding editor of Standpoint
Praise
“
“Gertrude Himmelfarb’s latest collection of essays is a lively and up-to-date discussion of a range of important subjects, which I heartily recommend to all readers who love history and political ideas.”
Paul Johnson
Writer and historian
Praise
“
“Gertude Himmelfarb writes about issues that are at the center of the present crisis—nationalism, constitutional perils, the deterioration of civil society, culture wars—with wisdom that could come only with her profound grasp of the intellectual history of the West. As I read it, I kept thinking, ‘This is a one-volume liberal education.’ Professor Himmelfarb would be the first to point out that’s not possible. But Past and Present comes awfully close.”
Charles Murray
Praise
“
“The best from the best! These elegant essays, from our finest intellectual historian, illuminate contemporary versions of enduring cultural and political questions by revisiting their earlier manifestations and the best that was thought and said about them. Each essay is a luminous gem, carved out of Ms. Himmelfarb’s impeccable scholarship, and polished by her singularly wise intelligence and keen moral sense.”
Leon R. Kass
Professor Emeritus, Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago

Excerpt

A wise historian and a good friend, the late J.H.Hexter, recalling the impassioned political views of some of his colleagues, told me that he did not share their concerns only because he did not have the time or mind for them.

Apart from family and friends, he explained, he spent most of his waking hours teaching, reading, and writing about Tudor and Stuart England. He knew more about the relations of the royalty and nobility than about Congress and the president, was more familiar with the Elizabethan Poor Laws than with the American system of social security, was more involved in the debate over the rise and decline of the gentry than the rise and decline of the proletariat. Immersed in the past, he did not have to be cautioned against the “Whig fallacy”: interpreting the past in terms of the present, imposing the values of an enlightened, progressive present upon a benighted, retrograde past. Had he ever been tempted to write about the present, he might have been inclined to reverse that order, imposing the values and perhaps virtues of the past upon the present.

That, indeed, is my temptation. More mindful of the present than my friend, I am sufficiently stimulated by the past to relate it to the present. Most of these essays were written a decade or two ago, but the earliest of them, dating back more than half a century, sets the theme for the others. The quarrel between “ancients and moderns,” memorialized by Leo Strauss, can be applied to history as well as philosophy. Just as a philosopher today may look to the classics for the enduring truths of humanity, so a historian may find that his past, the period in which he is professionally engrossed, resonates in his own present, the period in which he happens to live. In the same spirit, William James’s “once-born / twice-born” adage may be given a larger latitude. Normally confined to the realm of religion, it may be extended to history – to the historian who finds in his study of the past something like a rebirth, a new perspective on the present.

In one way or another, to one degree or another, the essays have the same effect, setting past and present in an active, sometimes adversary relationship to each other. The American “War on Terror” provoked by the 9/11 attack recalls Edmund Burke’s war against the “Reign of Terror” launched by the French Revolution. The contrast between those wars, the one pursued resolutely by Burke and the other irresolutely by America, may be seen as an object lesson in history, pitting past against present – in this instance, to the credit of the past.