[In the following review, Brown is highly critical of Himmelfarb's The De-Moralization of Society, asserting that her historical analysis is marred by political rhetoric.]

Though its author is a well-known historian, it might be kinder to review this book [The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values] as a tract for the times. However, history is what it purports to be, and as such it can only be judged harshly. While it contains occasional passages of sophisticated historical analysis, as a whole it is bizarrely simple-minded, highly selective and partisan, and dispiritingly illustrates the pitfalls of trying to write history in the service of particular political positions and views. Mrs Thatcher is the heroine and patron saint of the project, praised in the opening paragraph for raising the need for a return to ‘Victorian values’, and the Thatcherite agenda in Britain—and the American right's crusade for a similar return to ‘family values’—are unhesitatingly and unquestionably taken to be serious attempts at a moral regeneration of society. The author argues that certain ‘virtues’—the word she prefers for what she regards as nineteenth-century moral qualities, though she uses it interchangeably with values—have somehow become lost since the nineteenth century ended, so that morality has become ‘thoroughly relativised and subjectified’. Nietzsche is singled out incidentally as almost alone in realizing what was happening, and Weber is placed among the vast majority who did not. This is one of the unintentionally amusing remarks, which come as a welcome relief from the relentless grinding of axes. The author's tendency, like her heroine's, is to judge people very firmly on the basis of whether they seem ‘one of us’. There is a strange chapter which argues that the admired virtues or values are not just Christian, capitalist and middle-class but also Jewish, which manages to mention that Mrs Thatcher ennobled the Chief Rabbi, and which repeats Harold Macmillan's joke (though it may not be his) that there were ‘more Estonians than Etonians in her cabinet’. The values remain, of course, above all quintessentially English (even though Mrs Thatcher is quoted as once calling them Scottish). The whole argument is confused not only by partisanship but also because the author often does not know what she is talking about, or at any rate does not know enough. She knows, for example, that the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act ‘left out’ paupers, and seems to approve of their exclusion, but apparently does not know that this pauper disqualification was repealed in 1910. Some contentious remarks, some of them simply untrue, are made without any supporting evidence. For example, it is asserted that welfare has become ‘in recent decades divorced systematically from moral sanctions and incentives’. Neil Kinnock's description of Victorian values as ‘cruelty, ignorance, drudgery, squalor and ignorance’ is dismissed for confusing values, which do not govern behaviour but set standards for conduct, with social realities. But she herself is keen to make some connection between values and conduct in terms of cause and effect. The defining characteristic of Victorian society is seen as moral progress, apparent in increasing family stability and in decreasing illegitimacy, drunkenness, crime and public violence. This progress and the subsequent decline are ‘measured’ in the book's concluding section by graphs of crime and illegitimacy (despite a passing admission that problems surround the interpretation of the statistics). It should not be necessary to say so, but perhaps it should be said in conclusion, if only because of other recent books such as the British Academy symposium on ‘Victorian values’, that the Victorian age was a very long one of great intellectual change and diversity, and that it is misguided to let present-day political rhetoric obscure this obvious point.