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Title: One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution by Gertrude Himmelfarb ISBN: 0-375-70410-8 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 30 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Cogent, but Disappointing
Comment: In this book, Ms. Himmelfarb shows that she is a political theorist. She makes cogent arguments about civil society and political institutions. However, I found the book very disappointing in its coverage of the more recent etiology of the two cultures: she says nothing of the legions of ultra-leftists now dominating academic, literary, and journalistic circles. She also neglects the rightward shift in American politics and the rise of the religious right since the Carter era. I also found her arguments long-winded and tiresome. This is a book written to impress academics, not to inform the general reader.
If you want political theory from de Tocqueville and since, this could prove worthwile. If you want to understand what really divides us as a people, read something else.
Rating: 4
Summary: Liberals Will love This Book
Comment: As conservative Judge Richard Posner pointed out in the New York Times Book Review (Dec 19, 1999), Ms. Himmelfarb unwittingly makes quite the opposite case from the one she intended to make, describing an American society that could easily impress an observer as being on its "moral uppers". This book should be read alongside Alan Wolfe's "One Nation After All" published a year earlier. Wolfe's book, based on hundreds of interviews conducted for the Middle Class Morality Project of the centrist Russell Sage Foundation, found that most Americans, both liberal and conservative, have developed a complex moral and theological style that holds fast to traditional values while embracing religious and cultural diversity. A better informed population is now more likely to substitute individual conscience and personal responsibility for blind acceptance of authority. The book concluded that the "culture war" theory of America was largely a fiction cooked up by right wing intellectuals and the news media --- which habitually portray the country in terms of stereotyped divisions over moral, racial, and social issues. Ms. Himmelfarb's thesis --- that we must all respect authority simply because it is Authority, is an example of this mode of "thinking."
Rating: 3
Summary: Himmelfarb's Democratic Cures
Comment: "One Nation, Two Cultures" is the best work of cultural criticism and political philosophy by a social conservative in recent years. Himmelfarb argues that pathologies which resulted from the cultural revolutions of the 1960's may be cured by reinvigorated democratic institutions; civil society, the family, and religion. The thesis is not original, but the cogency of Himmelfarb's analysis, her historical insight, and her thoughtful meditation on the two cultures which now exist in the country make her book worthwhile. Those cultures are an elite, permisive and non-judgemental culture and a dissident, moral culture composed almost wholly of people who are religious.
Himmelfarb's analysis of the democratic institutions which might remedy the moral disorder she describes is cogent. She develops a typology of civil society proponents and prefers hard advocates to soft; she echoes Schumpeter's analysis of the decline of the family, and she analyzes religion's positive effects on citizen's morality thoroughly.
Himmelfarb is a historian. Her book consequently has a depth which is lacking in the policy writings of conservative scholars. Civil society, liberals and conservatives agree, needs strenghtening. But did you now that, as she points out, civil society was not in our political vocabulary until the 1980's?
Himmelfarb's meditation on the two cultures which have developed because of the cultural revolutions is similarly thoughtful. For instance, she notes that the gap between elites who are non-judgemental, permissive, and post-modern and a dissident, moral, culture which cuts across class and racial lines is not static. "Elites may provoke a reaction on the part of many who otherwise acquiesce in the values of a domination culture, (but) pushing the envelope may also have the contrary effect of inuring people to such excesses."
Criticisms of Himmelfarb may focus on her writings' ideology or its persuasiveness. Judging whether she comes out on the correct side, politically, on issues like single mother-hood is not simply a matter of comparing your beliefs with hers, but it is mostly that.
I take her least persuasive argument to be that we should legislate morality because we are constantly doing just that. First, the scope of her argument is greater than the evidence she provides--the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, the welfare system's subsidies for out-of-wedlock births, and no-fault divorce laws. Many laws outside the field of civil rights and family laws or can be neutral on questions of morality.
Second, only in the first case is there any real proof that morality has been legislated. Out-of-wedlock births are practical now, as a result of subsidies, but not regularly condoned by communites. No-fault divorce laws have not legitimated divorce, women who are divorcees have come to constitute a sizeable group with its own morality.
Finally, Himmelfarb's argument is most flawed in that it contradicts the unstated premise of Himmelfarb's book, which is that social disorders can be cured by democratic institutions and, without the state's involvement. Civil society can be a hard authoritaive collection of individiuals, families can be rebuilty without the state's intervention, and religion can be a guardian of mores, all without the use of the state by social conservatives.
Moreover, social conservatives will not succeed in creating allies in the culture war if legislating morality becomes their primary tactic. While there is no explict reason that they create allies, Himmelfarb's title seems to suggest that conservatives are not pleased with their dissident status.
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Title: The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values by Gertrude Himmelfarb ISBN: 0679764909 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other by Alan Wolfe ISBN: 014027572X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb ISBN: 0679759239 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 February, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter ISBN: 0465015344 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition by Gertrude Himmelfarb ISBN: 1566630770 Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.90 |
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