Gertrude Himmelfarb is a very smart lady. I haven't yet read this book, but I have read some of her essays over the years. I expect this will be well worth reading.
The American Revolution was one of the few revolutions in world history to succeed. The French Revolution was an unmitigated disaster. It led first to the Terror, then to the Napoleonic wars, then to the great unrest of 1848, and eventually to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and all the worldwide terrors and mass murders that were performed by Communists over the course of the 20th century and are still with us today.
Nothing enlightened about it. But, regretably, this is still the version of Enlightenment favored in our universities today.
>> ...Unlike the French who elevated reason to the primary role in human affairs, British thinkers gave reason a secondary, instrumental role. In Britain it was virtue that trumped all other qualities. This was not personal virtue but the “social virtues”—compassion, benevolence, sympathy—which the British philosophers believed naturally, instinctively, and habitually bound people to one another. <<
I disagree that it was just "social virtues". Personal virtue -- honor, duty, courage, steadfastness, strength -- "naturally, instinctively and habitually bound people to each other" as well. Personal virtue embodies the noble and heroic among us and both are at the center of the divine human character ... at the well spring of enlightenment ... both give joy to reason.
As argument, here's an excerpt from Walter Pater's 1869 essay on the Mona Lisa, ironically France's most treaured possession:
"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."