Britain’s last four prime ministers have all been, in their different ways, Victorians. Margaret Thatcher’s Victorian values were thrift and sound money; John Major’s were a kind of basic family decency (something he found easier to preach than practise); Tony Blair’s were socially progressive Christian good works. But Gordon Brown is perhaps the most Victorian of the lot. Not only does his persona (stiff, high-minded, politically devious) carry with it a strong whiff of Gladstonian rectitude and hypocrisy, but he has made no secret of the fact that he is a devotee of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the high priestess of Victorian studies.

Himmelfarb (who is married to one leading American neoconservative intellectual, Irving Kristol, and is mother to another, William Kristol) believes the Victorians have been unfairly caricatured as cold and heartless capitalists. She has written numerous books extolling what she sees as the virtues of the 19th-century mindset, with its emphasis on character, sympathy and social cohesion. Now Brown has written his own introduction to the first British edition of Himmelfarb’s 2004 study of the “proto-Victorians”, those enlightened 18th-century thinkers who provided the intellectual backbone for this altogether more benevolent form of capitalism.

The case Himmelfarb wants to make depends on separating out three different “Enlightenments” — the British, the French and the American. All three were founded on the principle of reason, but only one — the French — turned reason into its own religion, crushing everything else in its path. In Britain, by contrast, reason was “humanised” through the philosophy of, among others, Adam Smith, who made it clear that self-interest was compatible with moral sentiment. This “sentimental” Enlightenment produced a society of tolerant, sceptical individualists, by contrast to the dogmatic and intolerant French. Meanwhile, in America, both rationality and sympathy had to take a back seat to the pressing demands of achieving liberty from the British Crown, and building a new kind of state that could sustain that freedom.

The story Himmelfarb tells is a familiar one, and it contains its own share of clichés (she portrays the French philosophes as unfeeling snobs with a weakness for enlightened despotism) but she writes with real grace and her effortless prose brings the history of ideas to life. Brown, however, is less successful in trying to explain what this story might have to teach people living in Britain today. He says in his introduction that the social virtues of sympathy and benevolence that Himmelfarb identifies at the heart of British Enlightenment thinking “have remained a dominant theme of Britishness ever since”. But this entirely glosses over the lesson Himmelfarb herself draws, which is that the only society in which these virtues are now on prominent display is America. She argues that it was the American experiment with liberty that in the end allowed room for the religious impulses needed to underpin “the passion for compassion”. The Victorians may have had this passion, but during the 20th-century the British people lost it, and though Himmelfarb does not spell it out, it is clear that much of the blame in her eyes lies with the architects of the welfare state.

This is the old belief in American “exceptionalism”, but with a new twist. “If America is now exceptional,” Himmelfarb writes, “it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have discarded.” In the United States, a preoccupation with freedom produced that combination of rampant capitalism, self-sufficiency and moral endeavour within which benevolent and sympathetic instincts could flourish. Poverty was understood as a great affliction, but something that needed to be handled with sensitivity, looking to identify where possible the individual’s personal responsibility for his or her predicament. In Britain meanwhile (and even more so in France), the dead hand of the state eventually got in the way, making it much more difficult to maintain the quintessentially Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. It was of course precisely this distinction that the British Labour party had as its original mission to abolish.

So what is a Labour prime minister now doing writing an introduction to an apology for such a distinctively American form of compassionate conservatism? Even by his own standards, Brown is being exceptionally disingenuous in claiming that Himmelfarb shows us what it still means to be British, given that she is really saying that what it once meant to be British now means being American. But Brown has another aim in view — to remind us that at the heart of Britishness lies a form of Scottishness, given that so much of the British Enlightenment had its origins in Scotland. He uses Himmelfarb to continue his campaign to resurrect Adam Smith as the godfather of his own version of benevolent capitalism, and he repeats verbatim a claim he made in his recent introduction to Iain McLean’s Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: “Coming from Kirkcaldy as Smith did, I have come to understand that his Wealth of Nations was underpinned by his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, his invisible hand in the economy supported by the helping hand in civil society.”

This is not just embarrassing — when people want to know how Brown finds the time to write all this stuff, “by plagiarising himself ” is not a good answer — it is also absurd. What about those of us who don’t come from Kirkcaldy? And what about people who do live in Kirkcaldy today — are we really meant to believe that theirs is still the model of “mutual societies, craft unions, insurance and friendly societies and co-operatives and faith groups” that Brown extols as the essence of what it means to be British? Brown has taken a book that roots ideas in particular places and times and chosen to identify those ideas with quite different places and times to suit his own political purposes. It is worth asking how a prime minister finds the time to write this stuff, because he really ought to have better things to do.

The odd couple

Gordon Brown is so smitten by his elderly neoconservative muse Gertrude Himmelfarb, that he even offered to hold a launch party in Downing Street for her book. He likes her claim that the British Enlightenment was defined by the idea of “social virtues”: respectability, responsibility, decency, industriousness, prudence and temperance.

In his introduction, Brown says the social virtues “have remained a dominant theme of Britishness ever since . . . a theme that finds its best expression in the British tradition of strong voluntary associations and faith groups”. But what does he have to say of his muse’s conclusion, which approvingly cites proposals to replace welfare with workfare? Not a squeak. Perhaps it’s just as well that that offer of a Downing Street book launch was politely declined.

THE ROADS TO MODERNITY: The British, French and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Introduction by Gordon Brown
Vintage £8.99 pp284

Available at the Books First price of £8.54 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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