SOURCE: Porter, Roy. “Charitable Contributions.” New Republic 205, no. 4010 (25 November 1991): 34-7.

In the following review, Porter asserts that Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion lacks a cohesive, unifying argument, and that it fails to live up to the high standard of scholarship established in The Idea of Poverty.

Since the 1950s Gertrude Himmelfarb has built a formidable reputation as an explorer of the nineteenth-century mind. A ruthless debunker of shoddy reasoning and double-speak, past and present, Himmelfarb has made it her mission to lay bare the prejudices of the founding fathers of modernity; her forte is exploding their pretensions with deadly elegance. The shallow, rationalist materialism of Jeremy Bentham and his haunted house of Utility; the vaunted liberalism of John Stuart Mill, which turns out to be exceedingly illiberal; the soulless scientism of Darwinian evolution, a creed that, for all its emancipatory boasts, left its author emotionally desiccated and mankind adrift...