Moyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Liberalism against Itself falls within the book’s fourth chapter, which is about Gertrude Himmelfarb, the American historian of Victorian England who died in 2019.Visit Samuel Moyn's website.
The chapter is framed around appropriations in the 1940s of the great nineteenth century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — when Himmelfarb wrote her dissertation and first book on him. And page 99 explores some differences and parallels between her interest in Acton and that of Herbert Butterfield, the then famous don at the University of Cambridge who hosted Himmelfarb during her visit there in 1946-7 to do archival work.
Himmelfarb later became a neoconservative. But she got there from Cold War liberalism, which is the larger topic of my new book. Page 99 is just another example of the strategy I pursue across Liberalism against Itself. The book is a set of character studies, which I pursue on the grounds that individual Cold War liberals can help generalize about Cold War liberalism. But I look carefully at each character to capture their particularity.
Something unique to the chapter on Himmelfarb is at stake on page 99 too. It is common to observe that Cold War liberals were secular Jews, and Himmelfarb was one too. But it is essential that the ambiance and spirit of the movement made much room for Christian thought and theology.
Himmelfarb revived Christianity in order to reject secular theories of progress — which had supposedly led to the Soviet Union and its crimes. The comparison with Butterfield on page 99 was worthwhile to me because he stressed more forthrightly than she did that Christians believe in providence (Acton certainly did), which is just a cousin of the idea of progress.
As I show, Himmelfarb took Acton’s significance to be his insistence on the relevance of moral norms outside history, ones that allowed potentially severe judgment. Butterfield loved Acton (his predecessor as the Regius Professor of History at the university) too. Butterfield, however, found that worship compatible with a less judgmental and more relativistic stance. He had been friendlier to National Socialism than some might like — indeed, decades later Himmelfarb angrily disowned her one-time mentor for that reason. Where Himmelfarb wanted to contest the Soviet Union’s claims to be the vanguard of progress in history, Butterfield couldn’t conceal that those rejecting a rational theory of progress might do so in order to insist that God is working for humanity’s benefit in more mysterious ways. Is that better—or worse?
The Page 99 Test: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.
The Page 99 Test: Christian Human Rights.
The Page 99 Test: Humane.
--Marshal Zeringue
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