SOURCE: Jacobs, Alan. “Family Virtues.” American Scholar 64, no. 4 (autumn 1995): 630.

In the following review, Jacobs comments that Himmelfarb's The De-Moralization of Society is convincingly argued and highly provocative.

Some years ago the popular historian Barbara Tuchman published A Distant Mirror, a book that claims that in the struggles of the fourteenth century we can discern the outlines of our own time's conflicts. In The De-Moralization of Society a much finer historian produces a highly provocative exercise in the same genre. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Victorians, though much closer to us than the medievals not only in time but also in the particular social problems with which they were confronted, are of special interest because they responded to those problems so differently—and with so much more success.

Himmelfarb's forte has always been intellectual history, and each of her books on Victorian thought and culture has been notable for its...