SOURCE: Woolfolk, Alan. “Two Cultures after All?” Society 39, no. 2 (January-February 2002): 83-8.

In the following review of One Nation, Two Cultures, Woolfolk asserts that Himmelfarb tends to oversimplify the issues she discusses, and enumerates various flaws in her arguments.

The first chapter of Gertrude Himmelfarb's One Nation, Two Cultures opens with a revealing quotation from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations describing the “two different schemes or systems of morality” that Smith contended prevail in all civilized societies: “In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people; the latter is commonly more...