Mourning Liberalism: A Reactionary Treatise : ON LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS; Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society <i> by Gertrude Himmelfarb</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf; $23, 192 pages

Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of those academics who can drive readers up the wall. Not because she’s obscurantist or pedantic--in fact she’s a fluid writer--but because she’s so threatened by non-traditional thinking.

“On Looking Into the Abyss” is a congenial read for those who admired Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” and proves more thoughtful than the earlier screed, yet the book raises far more questions than it answers. The biggest question is easily stated: What is it about recent, relativistic scholarship that drives conventional academics so quickly from reasoned debate to rigid, defensive disputation?

The seven essays in this collection, all but one revised versions of previously published articles, are not limited to academic thought. But it’s for good reason that Himmelfarb, an emeritus professor of history at the City University of New York, has dedicated the book to the memory of Lionel Trilling; he is the book’s guiding spirit, for his abiding, high-principled belief in the social and cultural importance of “the liberal imagination” ( liberal in its older, commendatory sense).

Himmelfarb, judging from this volume, sees liberalism under siege on today’s campuses, because everywhere she looks traditional standards are disappearing, traditional methods are mocked, traditional values are subverted.

The “new historians”--beginning with H.G. Wells--are antiheroic, intent on composing a “history from below” that discredits the “great men” who dominated previous accounts of the past. Contemporary postmodern historians admit to writing “a kind of propaganda,” a description Himmelfarb finds appalling rather than honest or provocative.

The philosophy of neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty “verges on nihilism” in part because he adopts some of Heidegger’s ideas while passing over his Nazism (an ability to separate the life from the work that Himmelfarb later praises, incidentally, in Victorian thinkers). And the multiculturalists politicize history, as if the decision to write history from one vantage point rather than another isn’t inherently political. Himmelfarb even criticizes Art Spiegelman’s Maus books on the Holocaust, which she believes appeal to postmodernists because they embrace a kind of amoral aesthetic, a distancing and dehumanization of history.

You get the idea--the orthodox liberal ways of thinking about the world, the ones Himmelfarb practices, are the best ways. With one exception, of course: No liberalism allowed when it comes to thinking about liberalism, for here Himmelfarb and her band alone hold keys to the kingdom.

It’s extraordinary, really, to find common liberalism coupled to such deep conservatism, to such bare-faced authoritarianism, because the postmodernists Himmelfarb takes to task aren’t supplanting traditional liberalism (although many fool themselves into thinking otherwise) so much as supplementing it.

Why, then, does Himmelfarb find postmodern thought so threatening--to the point that she feels compelled to warn that Rorty’s philosophy “may ultimately subvert liberal democracy”? Because it says that the emperor of traditional objective scholarship, if not exactly buck-naked, isn’t nearly as finely clothed as he believes.

“The presumption of postmodernism,” Himmelfarb writes, “is that all history is fatally flawed, and that because there is no absolute, total truth, there can be no partial, contingent truths.”

Some contemporary scholars do take that view, but this definition misrepresents the views of many other postmodernists who continue to make claims to truth--but only on a limited and personal basis. (One wonders: Does Himmelfarb ignore these thinkers because they are not the “great men” of postmodernism, the extremist, high-profile academics?)

These scholars have come to understand that the writer is incapable of transcending private, often unconscious interests, and that those who claim transcendence, who brazenly advertise their objectivity, are deluding themselves.

Himmelfarb writes mockingly in her introduction that “On Looking Into the Abyss” could be called “The Confessions of an Unregenerate Prig” because it is “dedicated to the proposition that there are such things as truth and reality.” The implication, of course, is that her scholarly opponents are not similarly dedicated.

Most are, in fact, but wear their dedication with a difference: While Himmelfarb believes she can see into the heart of things, they continue to look for solid ground, believing truth and reality to be elusive, complex and subject to multiple, divergent interpretation.

John Milton understood in 1644 what Himmelfarb seems not to 350 years later: “The golden rule,” he wrote in the “Areopagitica,” is not to force belief through “the outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds,” but “to be still searching what we know not by what we know.”