SOURCE: McWilliams, Wilson Carey. “When Everyone Was a Liberal.” Commonweal 119, no. 3 (14 February 1992): 24-5.

In the following review of Poverty and Compassion, McWilliams observes that the strength of Himmelfarb's work lies in highlighting the ways in which history serves as a lesson for current societal problems.

For centuries, the poor were always with us, a normal and expected feature of the political landscape, until late nineteenth-century reformers redefined poverty as a problem to be ameliorated or solved. We are still at it, fitfully, and the controversies of the late Victorians are family arguments for us, very much at issue in our political life.

Gertrude Himmelfarb has her own ideas, heaven knows, about the proper approach to poverty, and—a good fighter—she brings a special zest to her criticism of various Marxists and partisans of “value free” social science. The grace of Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion, however, proceeds from...