SOURCE: “Philosophers vs. Philosophes.” Wilson Quarterly 26, no. 1 (winter 2002): 97.

In the following essay, the author provides a brief summary of Himmelfarb's essay “The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment,” published in The Public Interest, fall 2001.

We're too quick to associate the 18th-century Enlightenment with the French philosophes. There was a British Enlightenment as well, and for Himmelfarb, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of One Nation, Two Cultures (1999), it was the more admirable of the two.

The third Earl of Shaftesbury was the father of the British Enlightenment. In 1711, he introduced the concepts that would be key to British philosophical and moral discourse for the rest of the century, including “social virtues,” “natural affections,” “moral sense,” “moral sentiments,” “benevolence,” “sympathy,” and “compassion.” That last concept played a far larger part than either...