The first time I heard about Mrs. Himmelfarb was a few years ago in an essay ("The Cost of Rights. Why liberty depends on Taxes" by S.Holmes and C.S. Sunstein, 1999) illustrating the debate about rights, duties and social responsibility. At that time the recurrent adage was "communitarism" and the slogan, somewhat odd, was "Less Rights, More Duties". Mrs. Himmelfarb was cited - rather coldly - as a political thinker and academic historian, who had forewarned about the decline of those Victorian values, responsible at her eyes for the success of the Anglo-Saxon societies in the XIX and XX centuries.

I'm not fond of conservative ideas, but must admit that in these last years some interesting historical analysis has come from conservative viewpoints, specially for modern history: I'm thinking of historians like Simon Schama (his excellent "Citizens. A Chronicle of the French revolution" on top) and - more recently - of the sometimes highly controversial theses of Niall Ferguson (his "Cash Nexus", but also "The Pity of War"). These historians have been able to reconsider historical periods from fresh viewpoints, attaining challenging new and lively pictures: not the classic Marxist historiography, not the French historical school mesmerized by macro-phenomena, but a mix of economic analysis (Ferguson), philosophic cum sociological investigation (Schama) and intelligent attention to apparently minor events.

Unfortunately that is not the case of this book I decided to buy because of my great passion for the late XVIII century and Enlightenment in general.
The hope was to find a challenging portrait to confront those, often too deferential, we got used to. And must confess at first I was pleased by the book, because - after all - Mrs. Himmelfarb is a very good writer and knows how to please her reader.
But the more I kept reading, the more frustrated I became: the portrait of the era, the presentation of the Enlightenment, a pervading moralizing attitude and finally the unwarranted arrogance of the author let me truly shocked...

There are too many points to be analyzed for a short review like this, and I will be truly glad to discuss specific issues with any reader who wants to write me.
Let me focus on some of the more relevant points.

The main confusion comes by avoiding a clear definition of Enlightenment. Most of the times it is considered like a "period" (like the Middle ages, or the cold War years), sometimes as an "intellectual movement", sometimes like a social sensibility, but with no unambiguous meaning.
By these implicit assumption, Mrs. Himmelfarb is able to present as Enlightenment champions historical figures never before considered as part of it: both Wesley and Burke, for example, are given ample space in the chapters dedicated to England.
But she does not explain why - by the same standard -other thinkers living in the same period are not included (Saint Simon for France, for example, but the list is very long).
The lack of definition reverberates also in confusion about the length of the period the author considered as relevant: a careful reader cannot but realize that she considers almost only the years from 1770 to 1789, that most historians define as "Late Enlightenment", a period peculiar under many aspects (not least because of the emergence of a different sensibility both in taste and philosophy). Some scholar goes further describing this period as "Pre-Romanticism" and some has even fostered "heretical" theses blaming on it those great disasters like the French Revolution and the rise of Totalitarism (Schama).
Considering this late period the only "official" Enlightenment is highly misleading, and leaves in complete neglect all the hard background (the emergence of rationalism with thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz and Port Royal Logicians, the socio-cultural milieu in which the movement prospered and expanded - continental diffusion of the French language, the cultural salons in Paris, the emergence of a "Republic of Letters"- and the dispersion all over Europe of the new ideas thanks not just to enlightened rulers but also to brilliant and often less known intellectuals - not just Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot).

But nothing is so frustrating as the underlying thesis of the essay: one reader has proposed to rename the book "Reclaiming French Fries" and this can only give an idea of the arrogance of the author...
Some of her opinions are too good not to be cited.

Pag.3 "This book is an ambitious (sic) attempt to reclaim the Enlightenment ... from the French who have dominated and usurped (sic) it"
Later we are told that Enlightenment was a British creation, stolen by the evil and self-important French.
Mrs. Himmelfarb must be credited to be the first scholar with the courage to "reclaim" the Anglo-Saxon ownership of Enlightenment: no one before - not even contemporaries in Germany, Italy, England, Russia, Austria - ever realized this momentous truth.... More than 200 years and no one to understand this self-evident truth!

Pag.8 "It was only its association with the French Revolution that gave the French enlightenment the primacy it now has... "
By 1789 Enlightenment was almost finished... its legacy already in the hands of history. Even the immediate connection between French Enlightenment and Revolution is not holding anymore under the scrutiny of history - or at least not in the automatic association of cause and effect.

Pag.21 "...France having had neither a religious reformation nor a political revolution..."
Probably a lapse of the author. France DID HAVE a Reformation. It suffered a long religious war between French Catholics and French Huguenots, culminated with the St. Bartholomew night bloodbath, the murder of the pro-Catholic Guise and later with the Nantes Edict. A Huguenot reformed church is still existing today in France!
Besides, suspension of the Toleration Edict by the Sun King is still credited to have been a forerunner of the Enlightenment: diffusion of the French language all over Europe tutored by learned Huguenot ?migr?s and dissenting intellectuals created a common language, a common arena and a common culture over which Enlightenment spread.

Pag.5 "What is conspicuously absent (in the historical studies about Enlightenment) is virtue. Yet it was VIRTUE, RATHER THAN REASON THAT TOOK PRECEDENCE FOR THE BRITISH..."
A fresh instance about the true meaning of Mrs. Himmelfarb's true Enlightenment, resulting in complete confusion between morality, sociology and philosophy!
En passant, I have observed she is not alone today in showing a tendency to analyze history with the meter of morality in search of "Empires of Virtue". It is an attitude I already denounced for Warren Treadgold's "A Concise History of Byzantium" and it can be highly distorting. The mission of historical analysis is different from the construction of Arcadian heavens.

Pag.227 "In America today Enlightenment is alive and well..."
Which Enlightenment? Explanation is required: she means the British moral attitudes (virtue having precedence over reason) that informed the years between 1770 and 1800. Strange Enlightenment indeed..
In the following pages we are still to be lectured about Compassionate Conservatism as the sole rightful heir of the Enlightenment...

There are also some others saucy remarks, I wasn't able to trace back...
One about the supremacy of the American enlightenment over the French based on the number of reprints of "The Federalist" compared ... not with those of "The Spirit of the Laws", but of the "Encyclop?die" (by the same token we can state the primacy of "Playboy" over "The Federalist", based on diffusion and number of reprints).
An other interesting remark is lecturing the reader over the supremacy of English language over French, based on the less rhetoric emphasis of the former (I recommend readers to give a look at the instances she uses as proofs - they are too good to be true).

These are only some of the most offending parts of the book, but inaccuracies are almost countless, also in the part dedicated to America.

American Enlightenment is reduced to the political writers of the "Federalist". Only passing mention is done (and in a different context) of Franklin. The Founding Fathers are considered as demi-gods with a reverence that hinders the many differences between them and a dispassionate analysis of their ideas.
No attempt is done to frame the American Revolution in the larger debate about rights (Whig) and duties (Tory)... a debate that led more than one commentator to talk of "American rebellion" and of a British civil war exported on American soil.

If you happen to be fond of these themes, you may be interested in other works I chanced to read about the same topic:
FRENCH & EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT:
- "The Republic of Letters. A cultural history of the French Enlightenment" by Dena Goodman. Very interesting and well written, but uneven in the result, and sometimes with a too marked militant feminist approach (yet the author doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that Enlightenment was the first period in which women had a true relevant cultural role).
- "The Age of Conversation" by Benedetta Craveri - a must read for sure! Gripping like a novel and hugely learned, this is the story of the development of that culture of bonne manieres, intelligent conversation, informal culture and tact that we now tend to associate with Enlightenment and the last years of the Ancien Regime.
- "Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution". One of the best works on the French Revolution I ever read, it tries to answer the question if the French Revolution was the authomatic consequence of Enlightenment ideas. The reply is no.
- "France in the Elightenment" by Daniel ROCHE. More a sociologic analysis of the age... Probably the most boring and driest book I ever read.
- "The Roots of Romanticism" by Isaiah Berlin. The great philosophers and one of his best books. Reading it cannot be but a pleasure.
ENGLISH ENLIGHTENMENT
- "Enlightenment" by Roy Porter... a more appropriate title should be "The British enlightenment", since the author focuses exclusively on the national dimension. Extremely interesting, not always easy nor pleasant.
AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT
- "The Long Affair : Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 by Conor Cruise O'Brien excellent. In depth study about Jeffersonian thought and French revolutionary ideas.
- "A few Bloody Noses - The American War of Independence" by Robert Harvey (columnist, editor and former British MP ), an appraisal of the war from an all British point of view. Interesting but average. Well explained the thesis of the American Revolution as a civil war
- "The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson" by William Howard Adams. Very interesting, but incomplete.
MISCELLANEA:
- "Miniature Portraits" by G. Lytton Strachey. More on the literary side, but the portrait dedicated (indirectly) to Voltaire and the one dedicated to Hume are true cameos.

You are most welcome if you can suggest other interesting readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.

I started reading this book with some apprehension, raised by the opening sentence in which Himmelfarb purports to do to the Enlightenment what the US Congress cafeteria not so long ago did for potatoe fries: reclaiming it from the French. In fact, Himmelfarb's book is not so much an attack on French 'philosophes' as it is an attempt to make the Enlightenment more inclusive, broadening its scope beyond a narrow focus on reason in order to include the "sociology of virtue" of British moral philosophers and the "politics of liberty" of America's Founding Fathers. As noted by other reviewers, the chapter devoted to the French 'Siecle des Lumieres' is short and rather superficial. Himmelfarb is more convincing when she shows that the Enlightenment, at least in its Anglo-american versions, was not always inimical to religion. The chapter on Methodism makes a valid claim that religious revivals such as Wesleyanism in England and the Great Awakening in America can be seen as an extension of the Enlightenment's phenomenon, and that their ideals of social virtue and moral compassion are still very much alive today.

But did she have to reject anything French to make that point?