SOURCE: Bowman, James. “The Great Divorce.” National Review 43, no. 19 (21 October 1991): 37-8.

In the following review, Bowman asserts that Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion is a brilliant, lucidly written, exhaustively researched, and important book.

The trouble with socialism, T. S. Eliot said, is that it's an attempt “to design a system so perfect that no one will have to be good.” Whatever may be the strictly economic and practical shortcomings of the various systems designed with that end in view, Eliot points us in the direction of their common conceptual flaw. It is a kind of intellectual hubris (even if it were not also folly) to suppose that moral responsibility is so readily derivable from the proper material conditions.

But it is important to recognize that Eliot, the modernist, was reacting against a peculiarly modernist version of socialism. Gertrude Himmelfarb's lucidly written, exhaustively researched follow-up to The Idea of Poverty...