SOURCE: Congdon, Lee. “History and the Moral Imagination.” World & I 9, no. 7 (July 1994): 306.

In the following essay, Congdon discusses the concepts of liberty and morality in historical scholarship, with particular focus on Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion and On Looking into the Abyss.

In The Liberal Imagination, a masterly collection of essays he published in 1950, Lionel Trilling warned his fellow liberals not to be so mesmerized by clear and simple principles that they lose all feeling for the “imagination”—those sentiments, attitudes, and implicit beliefs that temper pure reason and take the social form of manners. To exhibit a lofty contempt for habit and tradition by subordinating them to abstract moral principles invites misadventure. For some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our...