Tristram Hunt Quotes (1974-)

“In that sense the latent rationality of Christianity comes to permeate the everyday experience of the modern world— its values are now variously incarnated in the family, civil society, and the state. What Engels particularly embraced in all of this was an idea of modern pantheism (or, rather, pandeism), a merging of divinity with progressing humanity, a happy dialectical synthesis that freed him from the fixed oppositions of the pietist ethos of devout longing and estrangement. "Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism. . . . The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the 'modern pantheists",' Engels wrote in one of his final letters to the soon-to-be-discarded Graebers.”

“Then there is the nuclear option: Gertrude Himmelfarb... this great doyenne of reactionary history has somehow inveigled the Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] under her spell. Her specialism is Victorian attitudes to poverty and she herself has long adopted the lofty mien of a lady bountiful: for Professor Himmelfarb, the problems of the poor are always questions of morality and character, not class or condition. No doubt this appeals to Mr Brown's Puritan ethos just as her championing of the British enlightenment above the continental version tickles his Euroscepticism.”