The Jacques Barzun Prize for the best English-language book in cultural history for the year 2000 has been awarded to J. G. A. Pocock for Barbarism and Religion. The two volumes mark the culmination of a half century of work on early modern British historiography and also the beginning of a major study of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that will appear serially over the next several years. Over the course of Pocock’s career the Enlightenment has undergone a considerable transformation as a term describing the eighteenth century, and Pocock himself has made no small contribution to that transformation. The present volumes continue that effort, impeaching the validity of the Enlightenment as a concept or rubric that includes all of eighteenth-century intellectual life. Notice first of all the plural in the title of the first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon. Pocock has carved Europe into several geographic and intellectual regions, which do not even conform to national boundaries. Pocock takes it as "a premise of this book that we can no longer write satisfactorily of ‘The Enlightenment’ as a unified and universal intellectual movement" (Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, p. 12, hereafter cited volume: page). The easiest of the several Enlightenments in which Gibbon shared is the French Enlightenment, bound both politically and linguistically by France itself. Among the members of the French Enlightenment we find the usual suspects, chiefly Voltaire, Montesquieu, and d’Alembert. Although the French Enlightenment is the most intuitive, Pocock’s exposition of it is complex.
Pocock makes no attempt to explain the French Enlightenment as a whole. He is not concerned with salon society, Grub Street, la république des lettres, or the formation of a critical public sphere, which have become fashionable in the past decade or so. This is intellectual history, not cultural history (Barzun Prize notwithstanding), and Pocock limits his inquiry to the historiographic currents in eighteenth-century France, and specifically to the historiography that interested the Englishman Edward Gibbon. Thus Montesquieu, Voltaire, and d’Alembert are discussed only in terms of their historiography.
Philosophes like Voltaire and d’Alembert wrote history to account for what Europe was and how it had come to its Enlightened age. Rather than explaining that development in terms of the transformation of civil and ecclesiastical systems or of law and faith they took a more "philosophical" approach. Interested in broad structural changes in society they wrote instead of the history of moeurs et l’esprit des nations, of sociability, manners, politeness, and total ways of living. They called it the history of the human spirit. The philosophes began with the premise that culture was the product of mind, i.e. a human creation, and reciprocally that mind was shaped by its own created culture. As culture became more sophisticated so did the capacity of mind itself. Voltaire, e.g. in his Essai sur les moeurs and Siècle des Louis XIV recounted the decline of moeurs in late antiquity when Roman Christians submitted themselves to superstition and priestcraft. The Germanic chieftains who conquered the Romans were no more conducive to Enlightenment, and moeurs languished for a thousand years. Finally in the Renaissance, sociability, toleration, and politeness began to surmount barbaric sectarian fighting as Europeans began to cultivate the arts and sciences. d’Alembert concurred with Voltaire, and in a lengthy exposition of the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie Pocock explains the implications of d’Alembert’s division of the faculty of mind into memory, reason, and imagination. D’Alembert cited the representatives of the three mental faculties – historians, philosophers, and poets respectively – as unable to communicate with each other, and that inability to communicate resembled the medieval age when intellects failed to communicate and the study of classical Greek and Latin languished. The neglect of the arts, indeed the neglect of mind, was an enabling factor of the millennium of darkness that separated antiquity from the age of Enlightenment.
The philosophes represent only one side of French Enlightenment historiography. On the other side are those whom Pocock calls érudits (Gibbon understood it as a term of derision), antiquarians associated with the great scholarly enterprises of seventeenth-century France, the Bollandists, Maurists, and the Academy of Inscriptions. Interested in minute inquiry into language, meaning and context, the érudits developed ways of reading that made every document yield more information that its author put there, extracting meanings that the author did not necessarily intend (1:142, 156). When Mabillon established methods for determining whether monastic charters and other documents were authentic, for example, he reinforced the both authority of those charters and whatever authority had granted them (royal, papal, episcopal, abbatial). The monarchy channelled the efforts of the érudits into instruments of royal power by sponsoring their inquiries via the Academies. That is to say, textual criticism preserved ecclesiastical authority while placing it under institutional and royal scrutiny. Through their studies of the antiquities of church and monarchy the érudits developed methods of historical and philological reconstruction and simultaneously strengthened the monarchy, setting it up as a neo-classical edifica with foundations in Greco-Roman antiquity, late Roman Christianity, and the world of barbarian invaders whom it civilized.
Around mid-century the philosophes began to challenge érudite scholarship which had a pedigree dating back to the humanists. Following Blandine Barret-Kriegel’s four volumes on French Enlightenment historiography Pocock identifies an authority problem among the philosophes who felt disenfranchised by their exclusion from the academies (1). The philosophes aligned themselves against the authority both of the church and of érudition (texts), replacing both with an esprit philosophique. Kriegel writes of la défaite de l’érudition, but from the perspective of Gibbon Pocock finds that the disjuncture between philosophes like d’Alembert and érudition was not complete. In writing their own history the philosophes relied heavily on the findings of érudite scholarship, but they refused to acknowledge their debt to it (2). From the other side there were érudits who were interested in philosophical history. Nicolas Fréret, president of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in the 1740s, was able to move across the divide between érudition and philosophy. And standing between the two sides was Montesquieu, both érudite and philosophical.
Although he was respected by the philosophes for the philosophical aspects of L’esprit des lois and his association with the Encyclopédie, Montesquieu was not one of them on account of his érudite sympathies and his opposition to Voltaire over monarchy, despotism, and orientalism. In the 1740s both érudits and philosophes began Enlightened critiques of the French monarchy but from different points of view. On behalf of the érudits Montesquieu argued that the arts and sciences could flourish only under liberty and virtue. He indicted the monarchy of Louis XIV as the opposite of that, a despotism, which he exposed through his studies of oriental despotism. On behalf of the philosophes Voltaire defended Louis XIV as a great patron analogous to Lorenzo de Medici, Augustus, and Pericles without whose generosity the progress of letters and polite society could not exist. Decay set in, Voltaire believed, when the monarchy failed to support the arts and sciences. At stake in the methodological difference was the interpretation of the rise of the arts and sciences, of government, law and modern warfare that had put an end to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century and the millennium of darkness before that. That is to say, at stake was the interpretation of the progress of the human spirit. Was Enlightenment the product of civil and ecclesiastical order or of the improvement of manners and taste?
Gibbon first encountered the French Enlightenment during his exile in Lausanne in the 1750s following his conversion to Catholicism at Oxford. There he read the nouvelles and bibliothèques of the philosophe république des lettres and the érudite Mémoires of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. The balance between the érudits and the philosophes became the problematic in his mind. His first published essay reveals his struggle to sort out the competing agendas in French intellectual life in the mid-eighteenth century. Chapters six through ten of Volume I constitute an extended reading of Gibbon’s first published essay, his 1761 Essai sur l’etude de la littérature. Pocock interprets the Essai as a response to d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discouse to the Encyclopédie, as a defense of érudition against philosophy and to some extent a defense of ancients against the moderns. Although Gibbon later rejected the Essai as a youthful diversion, Pocock believes the essay constitutes a major landmark on the road to the Decline and Fall. The relationship between érudition and philosophical history took a long time to work out, but Gibbon’s triumph was to forge a synthesis between the two and to impose a narrative upon them both.
Yet Gibbon did not share full membership in the French Enlightenment, despite his years in Lausanne and his essays written in French. In fact by Pocock’s reckoning Lausanne itself was not a part of the French Enlightenment, which was bounded rigidly by the Swiss border. Instead Lausanne formed the southern terminus of a different intellectual and cultural region that encircled France like an early modern Maginot Line, running from the Lake of Geneva, down the Rhine, and across the channel to England. What was the Calvinist heartland in the sixteenth century and remained so in the eighteenth Pocock defines by the heretical and opposition movement that existed in its midst as the "Arminian Enlightenment." This Arminian Enlightenment Pocock sees as a unit that unified intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds through the Arminian critique of orthodox Calvinism. By virtue of his membership in the Arminian Enlightenment Gibbon could move across national, linguistic, and regional boundaries with ease, finding intellectual continuity from Oxford to Lausanne.
The Arminian aspect of Calvinist culture had been present since the beginning of the seventeenth century when Joseph Arminius taught that man had a share in his own salvation by exercising his reasonable and social nature, i.e. by his own works and virtues. Arminius’s ideas were rejected as compromising the sovereignty of God at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1614, but his doctrine persisted. Similar reactions against strict Calvinism occurred in all Calvinist cultures, including among the Huguenots, in Geneva, and in Puritan England. It is this reaction that unified the different regions and subcultures into a single Arminian Enlightenment. The Arminian underground emerged into full Enlightenment in the 1680s in the Netherlands with the simultaneous exile of John Locke (from James II), Jean Le Clerc (from Geneva), the Polish Socinians, and the Huguenots of the Refuge.
The Enlightenment in the Netherlands emphasized a person’s sociability (i.e. his works in society) and rationality (leading to criticism and perhaps skepticism). The Arminian Enlightenment replaced the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity with natural law and religious belief with intellectual debate. In fact even the notion of debate was contentious, because the mere admission that religious truths were open to debate reduced Christ from a spiritual presence to an idea. The very possibility of religious debate implied at least a limited religious skepticism. "Religious belief began to be substituted by the critical reading of texts," says Pocock (1:75), and this criticism was prompted by humanist érudition that tended to historicize all things. Religious dogma and heresy alike were presented as the particular beliefs of particular men acting under particular historical circumstances. The consequences of such érudition were frequently heterodox, not because the ideas produced were heterodox in themselves but because the very inquiry into church history historicized orthodoxy. The Republic of Letters (in this context the Huguenot diaspora centered in the late seventeenth century Netherlands and wholly different from la république des lettres that would emerge in France half a century later) (3)came to be seen by some as more than an international community of scholars. Jean Le Clerc viewed the intellectual community almost as a secular church, whose object of worship was not Christ and the redemption wrought through his death and resurrection but the mere discussion of theological possibilities past and present. Throughout Volume One Pocock emphasizes the "Enlightenment as a response to Calvinism" (1:111) and "Enlightenment as the anti-Nicene consequences of a subordination of spiritual to civil authority" (1:295). Arminian scholarship was closely allied with French érudition in terms of method, chronology, and intent. Both placed ecclesiastical authority under the civil magistrate. Note also the chronological component of Arminian and French érudition, which were seventeenth-century traditions aligned with late humanism. Philosophical history emerged only in the mid-eighteenth century, in France as a challenge to érudition and in other places as an augmentation to it. Despite the passing of time the concerns, methods and implications of érudition remained relatively unchanged.
Gibbon encountered a similar configuration of antitrinitarian skepticism a lifetime later in Lausanne (1753-62). Throughout his life Gibbon kept a keen interest in theological controversy, particularly Trinitarianism both ancient and modern, and those are themes explored in great depth throughout the Decline and Fall, not only in the infamous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters.
Thus far we have two Enlightenments, a Protestant and Arminian Enlightenment, whose "genius of the age" was "civil morality organized as natural jurisprudence and scrutinized by methodical philosophy" (1:87), and a French and Montesquieuan Enlightenment whose genius of the age was "the ‘philosophical’ explanation of laws, customs and civil behaviour by reference not only to a generalized human psychology and the moral law accompanying it, but to the mind’s operations under conditions to be reconstructed by late-humanist érudition" (1:88).
A third Enlightenment, separate from the French and Arminian Enlightenments but analogous to them in terms of its critique of religious and political authority lay in the northernmost region of Britain. With centers at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Glasgow, the Scottish Enlightenment Pocock identifies as a third distinct Enlightenment. One might expect the Presbyterian Scots to fall into the same category as their lapsed-Calvinist brethren to the south, but Pocock understands the Scots as forming a separate intellectual group that emerged from a set of political circumstances different from the Dutch Remonstrants. Nor were the Scottish intellectuals analogous to the French. Unlike the philosophes who established a critical space by observing political power while excluded from it, the Scottish intellectuals held legitimate offices in the church, law, and universities. Moderates, unionists, and whigs to a man, their philosophy was intended to support the established order, not to critique it. The distinction enables Pocock to account for the prominence of histories of civil society and conjectural history that appeared in Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ferguson, Smith, Hume, Kames, Millar, and William Robertson all wrote in the wake of the united monarchy of 1707, sharing a crisis of political and cultural identity now that Scotland was reduced to a British province. Like Montesquieu the Scots tied the progress of the arts and sciences to liberty and virtue. Yet when Scotland was excluded from the militia system, the Scots felt deprived of that military virtue celebrated by Tacitus that was so important to civil society. Here we encounter one of the many tensions internal to the Enlightenment. The keeping of arms was linked to liberty, also to virtue and citizenship, where the citizen was the man capable of taking up arms in a common cause. The replacement of the citizen militia with the mercenary standing army, necessitated by heavy arms and gunpowder, threatened the traditional concept of virtue and liberty by placing arms in the hand of Leviathan. Yet the consolidation of arms within the State, accomplished by the "absolute" monarchy, marked the end of the wars of religion and allowed polite or civil or commerical society to triumph over both barbarism and religion (1:ch. 4). Gibbon had acquired military experience as a commander of troops in the Hampshire militia in the early 1760s, which he believed gave him an insight to the decisions of Roman generals, but the Scots lacked that experience. Instead the Scots put their energies toward the development of a polite and commercial society. Over fourteen chapters in Volume Two Pocock explores the Scottish form of philosophical history, the history of civil society as written by Hume, Robertson, Smith, and Ferguson.
In dividing northwestern Europe into three distinct intellectual regions Pocock is following a suggestion made by the late Franco Venturi over the course of a decade and a half of scholarship (4). Venturi defined the Enlightenment by the presence or absence of philosophes (or gens des lettres), self-appointed secular intellectuals who critiqued society and presented themselves as its guides towards modernity and reform. These types were not to be found in England (although they were in Scotland, e.g. Smith, Ferguson, Millar) before the 1780s and 1790s with Paine, Price, Godwin, and Bentham. Venturi emphasized concurrent developments in republican, Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Iberia, France) and monarchical eastern Europe, but he excluded England from the equation, saying that "in England the rhythm was different." Simultaneously Venturi acknowledged Gibbon as "a giant of the Enlightenment." In his exclusion of England from the Enlightenment of the philosophes until late in Gibbon’s life Venturi was left with a dilemma. Either Gibbon was no philosophe or he was a lonely figure in England in the 1760s and 1770s.
Pocock opts for the former, building on Venturi’s thesis by finding an Enlightenment in which Gibbon did share, the Arminian Enlightenment. In doing so he dropped the definite article from Enlightenment and pluralized the term. Pocock says that his concept of Enlightenment "has retained the philosophes and their enterprises, the settecento riformatore and perhaps even ‘the Enlightenment Project’, as cosmopolitan and Europe-wide phenomena, while denying them the privilege of defining ‘Enlightenment’, or ‘Europe’, by formulae from which either Gibbon or England must be excluded" (1:295; cf. 1:6, 87). The first volume of Barbarism and Religion, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, is dedicated to the memory of Franco Venturi.
No less complex than the several Enlightenments in which Gibbon participated were the historiographic traditions within which he worked. Of these three are relevant. One is antiquarian humanist scholarship à la mode Valla, Erasmus, Lipsius, and Casaubon, which endeavored to discover the lost fragments of antiquity. Pocock’s shorthand term for this tradition is "érudition." A second kind of historiography comprises accounts of the arts and sciences, manners, morals, and the development of polite and commercial society. Pocock calls this historiographic tradition "philosophical history." Finally there is the historiographic tradition of men and events in the mode of Thucydides and Tacitus which described the res gestae and arcana imperii of great men, holding them up as moral examples in terms of manly virtue and vice. Érudition, philosophical history, and narrative history – Pocock has been working on the relationship between these historiographical modes since The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) just as he has been working on the relationship of England between Scotland and France.
In the eighteenth century the interaction of these three historiographical modes altered historical writing. Classical narrative was reinterpreted in the contexts presented by philology. Context in turn was placed in the framework of systematic change by philosophical history which saw society developing in stages. The result was a macronarrative of the progress of the human spirit, or as Pocock calls it, "The Enlightened Narrative." The Enlightened Narrative followed the Latin provinces of Rome through the Christian millennium of barbarism and religion, the Christendom of Empire and Papacy, into the emerging Europe of states and manners, commerce and Enlightenment. Each of the three Enlightenments took its own approach to writing the history of Europe. The Scottish account of civil society laid the greatest emphasis on philosophical history. The Arminian Enlightenment turned humanist érudition into a literary republic. In France érudition and philosophical history stood at odds with one another. In Narratives of Civil Government, the title of Volume Two, Pocock sorts out the historiographical contexts in which Gibbon wrote. The synthesis of these three traditions Arnaldo Momigliano identified as Gibbon’s great achievement, and Pocock dedicated volume II to Momigliano’s memory (5).
Of these historiographic concerns philosophical history requires particular attention. Philosophical history had nothing to do with metaphysics, epistemology, or minute philosophy. Philosophical history offered a broad view of humanity as it developed through specific stages in its journey from the savage state to Enlightenment and ultimately (hopefully) to perfection. David Hume explained the purpose as well as anyone in a short essay "On the Study of History" (1741). Philosophical history offered the opportunity to observe human society, in its infancy, making the first faint essays towards the arts and sciences: To see the polity of government and the civility of conversation refining by degrees, and every thing which is ornamental to human life advancing towards its perfection. To remark the rise, progress, declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing empires: The virtues, which contributed to their greatness, and the vices, which drew upon their ruin. In short, to see all [the] human race, from the beginning of time pass, as it were, in review before us(6).
The trick, at least for Hume and later for Gibbon, was to balance philosophical
history with the neoclassical narrative of high politics, statecraft,
and war. In traditional historical narrative the actions of men remained
arcane, not susceptible to general causes but to the mysteries of the
human psyche. Men and deeds were held up as moral examples of virtue and
vice which young men and rulers would do well to imitate or avoid respectively.
In philosophical history by contrast, the intent was to understand causality
in history. If like causes produced like effects, then philosophical history
could explain what circumstances were conducive to the progress of the
arts and sciences. Modern Europe could then replicate those circumstances
and perpetuate the age of Enlightenment. Unlike the Encyclopedists, Hume
did not mean philosophical history to replace narrative, or, as Pocock
puts it, "cultural history to replace political." But there
were difficulties both literary and scientific in reconciling narrative,
philosophy, and érudition within a single historical work. "The
first concerned the deeds of individuals; the second generated reflections
and digressions, and the third footnotes" (2:185). That is to say,
in Hume (and also Smith, see 2:326) the philosophical history was still
a digression from the narrative which framed and defined his history.
Among the philosophes, and as I shall argue below among certain German
historians, philosophical history itself became the centerpiece. The progress
of the human spirit became the story, not the deeds of men.
Thus far Pocock has divided Europe into three distinct Enlightenments,
French, Scottish, and Arminian or Protestant. At the beginning of Volume
Two he toys with a Neapolitan Enlightenment in his discussion of Giannone,
but since Gibbon knew the former’s writing only in French he does
not pursue it. Just as Gibbon only knew and wrote the history of the sometime
Roman provinces west of the Rhine, so Pocock limits his inquiry to the
same region. However if Pocock’s work is to stand as a major monument
of Enlightenment history, we must consider the broader implications of
dividing eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history into many
separate movements. How many Enlightenments were there? Is Germany best
organized as a Counter-Enlightenment as Isaiah Berlin suggested? (7) Or if religious and political critique lay at
the base of each Enlightenment, perhaps we could speak of a Pietist Enlightenment,
centered at Halle or Berlin in Brandenburg
(8). Yet the Pietists stood in opposition to orthodox Lutheranism,
so we would have to exclude them from any Enlightenment in Leipzig –
or at least Berlin and Leipzig must be held at odds similar to the érudit-philosophe
divide in France. What of the Hanoverians, politically allied to Great
Britain through the Kings George, who in many ways in the first half of
the eighteenth century defined themselves in opposition to the activity
in Halle and in the second half to the Enlightenment in Berlin? What of
the Württembergers with their own intellectual, religious, and political
configuration?(9) What of the flowering of intellectual
activity in Sweden, also orthodox – was there a Scandinavian Enlightenment,
led perhaps by Pufendorf in the first generation and Linnaeus in the next?
And I am only speaking of the Lutherans. How would the Catholics be organized?
I wonder at what point it will become impossible to speak at all of The
Enlightenment.
I also wonder if in the recent trend toward multiple Enlightenments from Venturi to Isaiah Berlin, then in a different manner to Porter and Teich, and now Pocock we are drawing distinctions that do not necessarily need to be made (10). What strikes me when I read Pocock’s volumes and other histories written in the eighteenth century is the similarity of interest between authors of different Enlightenments. From Scotland to Naples, from Silesia to Spain historians wrote the Enlightened narrative, the course of history from the fall of Rome to the millennium of barbarism and religion to the recovery of the arts and sciences in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. All of Europe was talking about it. Historians differed on methods, interpretation, and the implications for the future of modern Europe, but everywhere the conversation was the same: Why Europe? What contributed to the progress of the human spirit in Europe while other nations stagnated? What circumstances were conducive to the arts and sciences? Could humanity continue on its course toward perfection? And not historians only. Ethnographers, theologians, philosophers of mind, and naturalists alike looked to the ancient past and to modern primitive societies to understand what lay in the European character that made them capable of their rapid advance from darkness to light.
Not only was the discussion itself of European progress of universal interest, but the manner in which it was discussed was also similar. Once one has read several works of philosophical history from the eighteenth century, regardless of language, those works begin to sound the same. The same common places are repeated. In addition to the standard chronology, even the topical organization was the same: the arts fine and mechanical; the sciences natural and human; commerce and navigation; government, law, and warfare; manners, customs, and religion. This story generated surprisingly (at least to me) little debate in terms of the common places of history. The debate occurred less over Europe’s past than over its future. How one used those common places depended on where one believed European society was headed in the eighteenth century. Would the age of Enlightenment continue, or would Europe descend into decadence and follow the ancients into decline and fall?
In Chapters Twelve through Fifteen of Volume Two Pocock juxtaposes the philosophical and narrative aspects of Hume’s History of England. Rather than juxtaposes I should say subordinates. The philosophical aspects provide the context and offer an outlet for the author’s reflections on the narrative of men and deeds. The philosophical sections are digressions. The narrative is the centerpiece. How would the story change if in this discussion of Hume Pocock had emphasized rather than subordinated the philosophical history aspect of the History of England? In addition to the narrative written in the mode of Thucydides ("masculine history," Pocock calls it, 2:203), Hume paid considerable attention to topics designed for a female audience (see 2:180-85), the rise of the arts and sciences and the progress of the human spirit. This philosophical aspect, if emphasized, would bring Hume into commerce with France (where he of course lived for a few years) and would open the door to Germany and even to Vico. In other words, rather than distinguishing between different Enlightenments, the Herodotean side of Hume would enable Pocock to see the Enlightenment as a European-wide phenomenon – with different characteristics in different regions but with all of Europe concerned with similar issues related to the rise of civil society. Pocock could have told this story in Volume Two around pages 203-205, but he aborted the discussion and returned to Thucydidean history. Pocock treats the Herodotean face of Hume’s history as the context of the Thucydidean emphasis. Pocock is not incorrect in his emphasis. He treats the introduction to William Robertson’s History of Charles V ("View of the Progress of Society") in a similarly to Hume’s History of England, as philosophical history that lays out the framework in which the great men accomplished their deeds. Nevertheless the History of England is full of explanatory accounts of moeurs and esprit. Both Robertson’s "View" and Hume’s History are similar to Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs in their philosophical in orientation.
If Pocock had emphasized the philosophical aspects as novel to the eighteenth century rather than the more traditional narrative, then the historiography of Enlightenment might look different. His emphasis is so because he is building the case that Gibbon resolved the Momiglianan dilemma by synthesizing érudition, philosophical history, and narrative. However the philosophical component of that equation is the only one that was newly invented in the Enlightenment. By emphasizing the novelty of philosophical history and by showing that philosophical history was written by authors in all three Enlightenments, we might be able to avoid cloistering the several Enlightenments into their own separate compartments.
In Scotland we have Hume and Robertson writing philosophical history along side of or as a prelude to their historical narratives of the rise of modern civil society. In France we have Voltaire and Montesquieu and others writing philosophical history to account for le progrès de l’esprit humain. In Germany also we find a similar trend – histories of the arts and sciences, commerce, trade, military arts, manners, religions, and civil constitutions also to explain the rise des menschlichen Geistes. J. G. Herder was well aware that a complete understanding of humanity in general and European society in particular could only be had by explaining the simultaneous development of all aspects of society. The totalizing method of philosophical history lies at the heart of his most important works that appeared in the 1770s and 1780s (11). Although written in a context other than that of France and Scotland, Herder’s philosophy of mind was specifically a philosophy of mind in society. As such he was interested in the same themes as Hume and Robertson, Voltaire and Montesquieu and he knew their work well. When the Germans – and Herder was far from alone in this – distinguished philosophical history (they called it Menschengeschichte) from "universal history" that recounted the history of events and rulers, they consciously rejected the tradition of narrative for the history of the human spirit(12). They not only responded to the same set of concerns that motivated philosophical history in several languages, they thought in similar categories and employed similar methods also.
Why this similarity of interest in the eighteenth century, in several regions that developed unique Enlightened critiques from indigenous political and religious traditions and circumstances at about the same time? We know THAT historians from three different Enlightenments wrote the Enlightened Narrative in philosophical mode. We would also like to know WHY. Why then, and why so suddenly? Gibbon might not have known what was happening in German scholarship as he prepared the Decline and Fall, but that does not mean that his work cannot be fitted into a broad context of a scholarship with markedly similar concerns despite their different provenance. The more interesting question here is not which authors exerted a direct influence on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall but what was happening in the several Enlightenments that authors from each used the same kind of philosophical history to explain something about their world. I.e. what was it in the European mind that provoked so many similar histories from authors each of whom claimed to be doing something never done before?
I suspect that when writing about antiquity or when writing European history in the philosophical mode, Enlightenment authors were not writing about the other so much as they wrote about themselves. If it can be said, as have Mabillion, Block, and Pocock, that within texts can be found meanings never intended by the author, meanings that mark that document as a product of its age, then surely we can apply that principle to the philosophical history of the eighteenth century.
Gibbon’s is not the only history of the decline and fall of Rome written in the last third of the eighteenth century. Certainly his is the most famous, but a number of other scholars wrote similar works. While their achievement may not be of the magnitude of Gibbon’s nevertheless the proliferation of essays on Roman decadence in the eighteenth century I believe indicates something about the mindset of the age that a close look at a single work misses. Why the interest in Rome? Was it simply the logical result of three centuries of humanist education in which school boys learned the lives and characters of first-century B.C. Romans so well as to affix the latters’ identities to their own? (13) Or was it the result of broader classicizing tendencies in eighteenth-century European culture generally? Neither accounts for the interest in the later Roman Empire, in Roman decadence rather than grandeur. The concern with decadence in antiquity was not limited to fourth century Rome. Scholars wrote on the ruin of Roman Republicanism and on Greek decadence as well. When we consider two perspectives – philosohical history that followed broad structural changes in society and the history of decadence in the ancient Mediterranean and elsewhere – we can triangulate from those perspectives to identify an underlying motive: Fear – Fear that moderns would go the way of the ancients.
Let me illustrate the conjunction between Enlightenment on the one hand and decline and fall on the other with the example of one of Gibbon’s German contemporaries who also wrote on the decline and fall of Rome in the 1770s and 1780s, the now-obscure Göttingen philosopher Christoph Meiners. Meiners was actually relatively well-known throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century. A corresponding member of scientific academies in Pavia and Moscow, his work on the Origin, Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Arts and Sciences in Ancient Greece was hailed by its French translator who said that "of all the modern works on Greece, none are so informative as those of C. Meiners in terms of discernment, sagacity and true philosophy"(14). John Gillies considered the same work "one of the most valuable and accurate treasures of Greek learning contained in every modern tongue"(15).
To Meiners the question of Europe’s future lay in that bond between individual and society identified by Tacitus and emphasized by Montesquieu and the Scots, virtue. Meiners came to the conclusion in the course of his studies of antiquity – particularly Greece – that virtue was the only thing that made people happy. Not wealth, nor power, nor even learning (16), but virtue distinguished the happy person. "Anyone else," he wrote, "was like an unbridled horse" (17). Meiners of course was hardly novel in his emphasis on virtue. Historians of all political stripes, whether moderates like Ferguson, conservatives like Burke, or republicans like Catherine Macauley, were intent on either recovering or perpetuating virtue. Of what that virtue consisted specifically is difficult to determine in many authors. Ferguson was relatively clear, and Pocock devotes a chapter to the former’s notion that virtue in a raw form was present in the barbaric (i.e. nomadic) stage of the Germanic nation’s existence (18). Greece originally was settled by virtuous nomads from central Asia as was Rome, and Rome was overthrown by barbarians from the European forests. In all three cases, wrote Ferguson, new barbaric energy and virtue was not stifled by the advance of culture. Rather the cultivation of society, the rise of the arts and sciences, channelled that raw energy and allowed virtue to emerge more fully than in the nation’s original condition.
Meiners similarly wrote of virtue and the barbaric stage. He pointed out that the ancient authors were virtually unanimous in harkening back to an earlier period in the nation’s history when its citizens had been more pure and virtuous than they were at present. He found that mythical sayings and epic dramas all set the period of virtue and happinesss before the discovery of agriculture, when the happy innocent person won all that he needed from the hand of nature or the beneficence of the gods. Meiners placed the period of greatest virtue among the Greeks, Romans, and Germans a bit later – the happiest and most virtuous period in Athenian history was the age leading up to Pericles; in Roman, the age between the struggle of the Orders and the Second Punic War; in Germanic, the early age of migrations as the Germanic tribes were just coming into contact with the Roman frontiers. In each case there was very little wealth and no luxury to speak of. The arts and sciences were hardly cultivated. The society relied more on agriculture than on commerce. Most and the best citizens spent the bulk of the year on the land where they had larger and more beautiful homes than in the cities. The early history of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans showed that nations without the arts and sciences could construct wise laws, good constitutions, a high degree of virtue, security within the community and honor to those observing them from outside, and a considerable degree of domestic and public happiness. Travellers reported similar societies, uncultivated yet virtuous and happy in the modern age. One described a happy, healthy, and strong people entirely devoid of the arts and sciences living in the mid-eighteenth century beyond the Hebrides (19). A similar report came from Nantucket where the people were literate yet simple and avoided all religious fighting despite a population two-thirds Quaker and one-third Presbyterian (20). In every case – Greece, Rome, Germania, the Hebrides, and North America – an uncultivated people found happiness without wealth or luxury, without the arts or sciences. The source of their happiness, Meiners believed, was virtue. The progress of the human spirit, if there should be any lasting progress at all, could only be had by a virtuous nation.
Yet in each case the victor assumed the decadence of the vanquished. In each case wealth came too quickly and too easily. Decay did not set in immediately or at least it was not apparent. The men and women who won the victory maintained their love of liberty even as they enjoyed the spoils of their victory. But they neglected to raise their children with the same strength of character. Decadence was insidious, infecting the second or third generation.
Gibbon fixed the second century A.D. as the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous (21). Meiners gave that designation to the other end of Roman conquest, on the eve of the Second Punic War (22). The Roman Senate never acted with more wisdom than during that crisis. Roman generals were never more clever, and the army of free farmer-soldiers was never so willing and obedient even in the face of almost certain death. Roman morals, fear of the gods, and trueness to oaths were at their pinnacle.
Yet already in the victory over Carthage one could see the seeds of Roman decay. Now master of the western Mediterranean, Rome became instantly wealthy from the spoils of war. Wealth brought luxury, and luxury brought decadence. Describing Rome’s subsequent conquest of the eastern Mediterranean Meiners wrote,
Every step the Romans took in Greece and Asia was a step toward their own destruction. And every glorious expansion of their power brought them closer to their downfall, as the conquered nations contributed both their wealth and their vices or awakened new unbridled desires and yearnings in [the Romans] (23).
Over the course of several volumes Meiners wrote the cultural history of Roman decadence (24). Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit as games, singers, dancers, pantomime actors, delicate food, banquets, art, mystery religions, homosexuality, and general sexual license flowed to Rome. The spoils of war made Rome so wealthy that at one point the Senate could offer the payment of tribute to the entire nation. With the growth in material wealth came other forms of decadence. Rome had too many slaves, so many that slaves outnumbered free Romans, and Meiners pointed out the effect of their sheer numbers on Roman morality and virtue. Still there was not enough honest agriculture in Italy, so Rome developed a dependency on foreign grain. Romans spent their wealth even faster than they plundered it from the provinces. Patrons put on public entertainments, the games, banquets, and handed out food to the poor. The result was "enormous debt." By the first century B.C. both men and women were deeply implicated in Roman decadence. A result of the depravity of both sexes was the neglect of child-rearing. Lacking male role models, young men grew up weak and cowardly. Eloquence and legal aptitude declined as did the ability of Romans to fight. Meiners described the rise of mercenary armies, recruited from the provinces, where many soldiers never saw the city they were defending. The Roman constitution was ruined by the decadence of the rich, the poor, the citizens, the military, women, men, and children alike.
In his Roman histories Meiners did not say a word about contemporary Europe. There were many analogies that he could have drawn concerning the influx of wealth, the inequality between rich and poor, excessive luxury, standing armies with no stake in what they were defending, decline of morals, the acquisition of colonies, the morality of slavery, and the price of grain, the result of which was civil war, chaos, and the seizure of power by a few. Instead he left it to his readers to make these connections themselves. Yet in the 1780s and 1790s the study of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not value-free.
Two decades after Gibbon’s first sojourn in Lausanne and a year before he would return to take up residence with his friend Deyverdun, Meiners visited the Pays de Vaud including Lausanne and, in August of 1782, Geneva. Order had been restored there following the revolution only shortly before. The city was still occupied by Bern, France, and Savoy, and Meiners reflected on the causes of revolution there. As in Greece and Rome in the past and France in the future, the cause of revolution was moral depravity (Sittenverderbniß). Rome’s tragic flaw was revealed at the height of Roman virtue (during the Second Punic War). In Geneva Meiners traced the origin of the revolutions to a 1738 edict that opened the guilds, allowing any Genevan to practice any trade or craft. Prima facie this was a good thing as it enabled people to open manufacturing companies and factories, which increased population, prosperity, and also Enlightenment. Very quickly one of the smallest states in Europe became one of the most Enlightened. However the Genevans’ extraordinary industry soon generated what he called an anti-republican inequity of wealth and the accumulation of millions in individual hands and families (25).
The envious masses began to mimic the wealthy, who were also the least moral, and the whole city was engulfed by immeasurable greed and lust for wealth, virtue-killing unbelief, and a relentless hatred for the ancient constitution that entitled the rich to no more rights than the poor.
The root causes of the revolution in Geneva were not political events or even ideology but the loss of morality due to a change in mindset, due in turn to the rapid influx of wealth.
Unearned wealth and an accompanying taste for luxury, which is characterized by selfishness, that is by seeking one’s own personal good ahead of the commonwealth – this was the cause of decline and fall in both Athens and Rome, in Geneva and, Meiners warned already in 1782, probably also in France. Meiners discussed the number of splendid houses, virtually palaces, owned by the wealthy in one section of Geneva, which contrasted with the squalor in which the poor lived. He described the speculation in rents by Genevans who owned investment property in their own city and as far away as Paris. Poor wage earners looked with envy on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and they did their best to imitate them – but to their own detriment. Textile workers and watch manufacturers dressed well beyond their means, and changing fashions in the burgeoning cotton industry encouraged them to neglect even their own nutrition for new clothes. The new prosperity made even the clergy self-seeking. The youth grew up in such splendid houses that they were no longer willing to make the sacrifice of joining the clergy, and the rare person who tried to uphold the old Calvinist discipline looked like a character from a Voltaire novel. Through splendor and moral decay the clergy had lost its influence, and, lacking honorable men in the clergy, religion and good morals declined. Meiners pointed to disorderliness in church services and the ease of divorce as examples. And always underlying the moral decay was unearned wealth: too many millionaires, too many splendid houses, huge amounts of money flowing into Geneva.
The more industry grows and wealth increases, the more also luxury and moral decay also increase, and one is tempted to draw a maxim that trade and industriousness are disgraceful [!] and that only a gradual increase beyond the [...] things possessed by ones forefathers is honorable and decent (26).
Meiners’s reflections on decadence in Geneva were written just as he was concluding several studies on decadence in antiquity, and it is not coincidental that he found similar effects produced by similar causes. When Meiners thought of Rome he also thought of Europe. When he wrote philosophical history, he still wrote in the mode of classical narrative, finding moral examples to be imitated or avoided not in the deeds of great men but in the transformations of culture. It would be interesting to know whether Gibbon thought in the same way. Were the six massive volumes that appeared over twelve years – that spanned three Enlightenments and synthesized as many historiographical traditions – the result of an epiphany that occurred on the Capitoline in the fall of 1764? Or was there a deeper motivation somewhere in Gibbon’s mind? Can the Decline and Fall also be made to reveal more than its author intended?
Barbarism and Religion bears very careful reading and reflection. It is lengthy, indulgent, and written in a lofty style. Pocock has filled two volumes, and he has not yet even made it to the Decline and Fall. At the same time these volumes are a pleasure and exciting to read and bear much food for thought. We eagerly await the third instalment Barbarism and Religion III: The First Decline and Fall.
Michael C. Carhart
Rutgers University
The publication of these two volumes is unquestionably a major event, both in the study of Gibbon and Enlightenment historiography, and in John Pocock’s own intellectual itinerary. Half a century ago, Giuseppe Giarrizzo published what until now has stood as the only full-length study of Gibbon by an intellectual historian: Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del settecento (1954). Reviewing the work which had preceded his, Giarrizzo was contemptuous: in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond, he remarked, Gibbon has been the pretext for the most banal methodological observations, and the silliest chatter. Since then much has been done to redress the deficiency. There have been good editions of Gibbon’s letters, journals and memoirs, a catalogue of his library, an edition of his English Essays (though we still want one which includes his writings in French), and, most recent and most valuable, a new edition of the Decline and Fall itself, by David Womersley. Patricia Craddock has put much labour into two volumes of intellectual biography. The historical understanding of Gibbon’s achievement has been transformed in a series of essays and articles by Arnaldo Momigliano, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Peter Ghosh and John Pocock himself. But the two volumes which Pocock has now given us are an enterprise of an altogether different order: this is historiography on the grand scale.
As it stands, Barbarism and Religion is already longer than his previous magnum opus, The Machiavellian Moment (1976); when the new work is complete, the earlier one will be dwarfed. But although Pocock has published and initiated much in the intervening years – notably the debate over the scope and character of a properly ‘British’ History – the conception of the present work followed closely upon completion of its predecessor. ‘It was in the Piazza Paganica at Rome, in the month of January 1976, that the idea of writing a book with the present title first started to my mind’ (I.1). So explicit an echo of Gibbon’s own moment of inspiration tells us much: self-conscious as well as (justifiably) self-confident, Pocock is as aware of the shaping presence of his own mind and style in these volumes as he is of Gibbon’s in the Decline and Fall. The result is a work which is as demanding as it is absorbing. Readers who already know and are sympathetic to Pocock’s mind and style will find an enormous amount to enjoy; but newcomers, I fear, may find the going hard. If the adjective most commonly used in reference to The Machiavellian Moment is ‘magisterial’, the corresponding one for Barbarism and Religion might be ‘oracular’: there is a bracing, but some may feel off-putting, impression of the tablets being brought down from the mountain. The impression is reinforced by the striking dust-jacket reproductions of paintings by Sebastiano and Marco Ricci and by Giambattista Tiepolo, in both of which the viewer’s gaze is drawn up towards a figure seated amidst symbols and hieroglyphs of learning; and again by Pocock’s own suggestion that these volumes be viewed, in the distinction drawn by the erudits of the Académie des Inscriptions, as peinture rather than récit – as depiction rather than narrative.
Nevertheless, I shall argue, the key to understanding Barbarism and Religion is to read it as a récit, in the sense of a story or series of stories within intellectual history. Far from being limited to ex cathedra pronouncements (there are a few), the two volumes possess a structure of argument and develop lines of interpretation which can be identified and opened for discussion. Before I attempt to do this, however, it is important to register what the volumes are not. They do not offer a complete intellectual biography of Gibbon, though Volume I in particular discusses aspects of his intellectual formation in some detail. Nor do they examine the text of the Decline and Fall itself, though incidental references are frequent, and the closing sections of both volumes do address the question of Gibbon’s preparation for writing it. (Further volumes, their number prudently not anticipated, will be devoted to the Decline and Fall). In different ways these two volumes are intended rather to provide contexts for Gibbon’s writing of the Decline and Fall: this is what Pocock has in mind by peinture. But since Pocock is far too good a historian to limit himself to the érudit function of peinture, the reconstruction and elaboration of those contexts is itself an act of récit, a richly complicated, and seriously debatable, interpretation of ‘European culture in the eighteenth century’ (I.1 – the phrase clearly an evocation of Giarrizzo’s title).
The two volumes are organised by their dedications, the first to the memory of Franco Venturi, the second to the memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. Venturi provides Volume I with a respected antagonist: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon is framed as an argument against Venturi’s judgement that England did not participate in the Enlightenment, leaving Gibbon on his own as ‘the English giant of the Enlightenment’. In England, Venturi said, ‘the rhythm was different’. Pocock objects, first and fundamentally, to the definite article in ‘the’ Enlightenment: we should speak of ‘Enlightenment’ without the article, and we can, he believes, think in the plural, of a series of Enlightenments. Specifically, it is quite possible to find Enlightenment in England. It was not Enlightenment as the philosophes practised it in France, for such an intellectual class, formed outwith the state structure, did not exist in England. Here Enlightenment was ‘clerical and conservative’, part of a process of Protestant Enlightenment distinct from that which occurred in Catholic countries. Pocock first made this case almost twenty years ago, but now gives it fresh depth and nuance; and it is notable that he no longer seeks to elide the differences between the English and Scottish Enlightenments. (The contrast between Pocock’s argument for an English Enlightenment and that recently advanced by Roy Porter could hardly be greater: the one is as considered as the other is indiscriminate.)
If Enlightenments are not to be multiplied at will, however, they must have had something in common. Pocock uses the noun ‘Enlightenment’ to denote ‘a process at work in European culture’. It can be characterised, he suggests, in two ways: ‘first, as the emergence of a system of states, founded in civil and commercial society and culture, which might enable Europe to escape from the wars of religion without falling under the hegemony of a single monarchy; second, as a series of programmes for reducing the power of either churches or congregations to disturb the peace of civil society by challenging its authority’ (I. 5, 7). In this second aspect Enlightenment is more specifically characterised as ‘an indictment of Nicene theology – and ultimately of the central doctrines of the Incarnation, the Atonement and the Trinity – as encouraging the belief that a kingdom not of this world might nevertheless be exercised in it’ (I. 7-8). In place of such theology, Pocock argues, Enlightenment sought to anchor the life of the mind in the life of civil society.
The second characterisation of Enlightenment is developed first, in the chapters concerned with the education and re-education of Gibbon in England and Switzerland. What emerges from these chapters is, in effect, an account of the Socinian origins of Enlightenment; and whatever conviction it ultimately carries, in relation to Gibbon or to Enlightenment in general, it provides the two volumes of Barbarism and Religion with an original and arresting point of departure. The story begins with ‘the inherited predicament’ of the Church of England, ‘caught between the need to reconcile its status as apostolic church and member of Christ’s body with its acceptance of the sovereignty of the crown’ (I. 19-20), and between the claims of Rome, which held the church independent of any ruler, and of the sects, who held the spirit immediately present in the congregation or even the individual. From about 1600, however, efforts were being made to mediate, or at least bypass such claims by those whom Trevor-Roper (and indeed Gibbon before him) identified as the English Erasmians. These were the Arminian admirers of Grotius who rejected Calvinism yet sought to keep their distance from the aggressive ritualism of Archbishop Laud – only to lay themselves open to the charge of ‘Socinianism’.
Here Pocock takes the argument a crucial step further than Trevor-Roper. The Socinianism which interested Trevor-Roper was a general philosophy of rational Christianity, cultivated by Falkland and his circle at Great Tew; what Pocock emphasises is Socinianism’s theological and ecclesiological content. In holding Christ divine in mission but not in nature, and in denying his co-substantiality and co-eternity with God, Socinianism broke the connection between Christ’s body and his church, and opened the latter to erastian subordination to the state and civil society. Such was the charge levelled against William Chillingworth by a Jesuit antagonist in the 1630s; and it remained the accepted implication of Socinianism through the Restoration and Glorious Revolution, and into the eighteenth century. At the same time, Socinianism was inherently unstable both as argument and as accusation: often loosely applied, it is best understood as a moving spectrum of heterodoxy, on which any who questioned the central dogmas of the Nicene Creed might find themselves exposed – and unable to fix a position. As Pocock appreciates, it was precisely this conceptual instability which made Socinianism so dangerous to ecclesiastical authority: once embarked on its questions, as Chillingworth discovered, it was not easy to return to the fold of authority, even when as inclusively defined as by the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The particular problem facing Pocock, however, is that of finding evidence for Gibbon’s acquaintance, in these early years, with the Anglican Socinian tradition. At home in Putney he was caught between the non-juring, mystical pietism of William Law and the aggressive deism of the Malletts: between these extremes (about which Pocock says relatively little) there is no sign of a mediating Latitudinarian Socinianism. On holiday in Stourhead the fourteen year-old Gibbon devoured High Anglican historical and oriental scholarship, with potentially far-reaching consequences for the direction his interests were to take in the Decline and Fall; but only his Laudian namesake, the Arabist Edward Pococke, supplies a tenuous link to Grotius and a Socinian tradition. At Oxford, of course, Gibbon encountered Middleton, whose argument that no miracles had occurred after those of Christ and his immediate disciples was open to the imputation of Socinianism; but the argument served only to frighten Gibbon into the capaciously Trinitarian arms of Bossuet. Five years later, Pocock has noticed, Thomas Waldegrave wrote to Gibbon to say that had he known of his crisis, he would immediately have recommended ‘Mr Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants; any one page of which is worth a library of Swiss divinity’ (I. 48). But Waldegrave was not there when he was needed; and Gibbon had to go to Switzerland.
There, Pocock proceeds to argue, Gibbon was exposed to a second tradition of Socinianism. For the Protestant learning which he was set to read in Lausanne was that of the liberal Huguenot Academy of Saumur and its pupils in the Huguenot diaspora, most notably Jean Le Clerc in Amsterdam. Moving along this continental Arminian axis, Pocock spells out the implications of Socinianism in more theological detail, in passages of considerable complexity but lasting significance for his subsequent argument. Two such passages are to be found on pages 53-54 and 59-61. As the Arminians played down actual contact with Christ in communion, they were led into discussion of Christ’s person, in which discussion the primary duty of the Christian became that of being reasonable about Christ. But – and here Arminianism unavoidably joined the moving spectrum of Socinianism – to open Christ’s person to rational discussion was to render Christ as no more than an idea, with no presence in the structure of any visible church. It was a position which expressed the laudable hope of replacing ‘both persecuting Catholicism and rebellious Protestantism by the operations of states which were tolerant because they no longer saw Christ acting directly or institutionally in the structure of human societies’. But it was also a position which entailed the reduction of the Church of Christ to a series of debating societies, and of theology to the study of the history of its debates.
In developing this account of Huguenot Socinianism, Pocock more than once refers back to Chillingworth’s English variety; but he does not, so far as I can see, establish significant links between them. He knows, however, that a liberal, Saumurois Calvinism was the culture of Gibbon’s first preceptor in Lausanne, Daniel Pavillard, and that under his guidance Gibbon studied works by Le Clerc and his pupils. From this he draws two conclusions, crucial to his understanding of Gibbon’s Enlightenments. One is that the Socinian view of theology as the history of debate is the Protestant intellectual basis of erudition, the critical study of sources, and thus that Gibbon’s respect for erudition is Socinian in foundation. The other is that Venturi was mistaken to identify the English sources of Enlightenment in deism, and specifically in the radical version of deism articulated by John Toland. For there was a difference between the sober Socinian subordination of religion to the civil order and the deist idea of ‘natural religion’, and an even greater difference when the latter was represented by Toland as a ‘religion of nature’. This was a spectrum (distinct from the Socinian) on which deism passed into pantheism and thence to atheism; it was the intellectual territory of Spinoza, and before him of Epicurus and Lucretius. And Spinozist, Epicurean naturalism was, Pocock insists, a metaphysics, a form of philosophical enthusiasm quite different from the methodological scepticism which was the philosophical expression of Socinianism. Pocock insists on the distinction because, I think, it is vital to his understanding of Enlightenment in general and Gibbon in particular. To demonstrate that the roots of Enlightenment are Socinian is to exclude Spinozist and Epicurean naturalism from the story; and it is already clear that the Gibbon whom Pocock has still to write about, the immediate author of the Decline and Fall, will be presented as a Socinian historian of the early Church and its theological controversies. (It is also strongly suggested, as I shall observe shortly, that Hume belongs in the same Socinian rather than Epicurean camp.) To put the point another way, Pocock’s Enlightenment is directly opposed to that with which Jonathan Israel has just presented us (at even greater length) in Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001).
Gibbon’s return to England in 1758 after his first period in Lausanne enables Pocock to develop the other, more political face of his Enlightenment. This is the subject of the chapter ‘The Hampshire militia and the problems of modernity’ (a strong contender in any competition for the most oracular chapter title). To begin with, Pocock picks up where he left off in The Machiavellian Moment: Enlightenment is modern commerce and its values challenged by the ancient ideal of civic virtue. But he now has in mind something more, for which he coins the term ‘the Utrecht Enlightenment’. By this he means the ‘system of states’ instituted by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714, and designed to secure a ‘balance of power’ in Europe, preventing any recurrence of the threat of Universal Monarchy. The system, Pocock emphasises, was very much a western European phenomenon, being effectively an Anglo-French consortium; it lasted until the last quarter of the century, when it was fatally undermined by imperial rivalry and extra-European wars. In some respects even more novel than the idea of a Socinian Enlightenment (my term, not Pocock’s), the ‘Utrecht Enlightenment’ is clearly related to Gibbon’s (and Montesquieu’s) idea of Europe as a ‘great republic’ of states; but its broader significance will become clear in the second volume, when Pocock presents ‘the Enlightened narrative’ as composed of the histories of the states which subscribed to the Utrecht system.
Gibbon’s service with the Hampshire militia was significant in another, more personal respect. It confirmed that he was, after all, an English gentleman, and that his vocation would be that of the scholar. As a gentleman-scholar, however, Gibbon could not be a philosophe, still less a reformer in Venturi’s sense of the term riformatore. Socially as well as intellectually, his Enlightenment would be different.
Militia service over, Pocock’s Gibbon is ready for Paris and its Enlightenments. These were two, the érudit and the philosophe. Pocock presents the érudit Enlightenment through a study of the Académie des Inscriptions and its foremost intellect, Nicolas Fréret. Fréret, Pocock argues, was the exponent of a sceptical méthode for the interpretation of texts, not of a philosophical système. His scepticism led him deep into the criticism of Christianity – but not so deep, Pocock assures us, that he should be thought a Spinozist: in identifying Confucianism with Epicureanism, Fréret was saying that it too was a metaphyics, a system rather than a method. It is at least implied that Fréret’s conception of erudition was close to that of the Protestant Socinians.
Against the érudits was ranged the Enlightenment of the philosophes, represented by D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire à l’Encyclopédie, to which Gibbon had responded in the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature of 1761. D’Alembert’s object in the Discours préliminaire was precisely to write a ‘natural history of the mind’, to demonstrate that it is the human mind, as a part of human nature and thus of nature itself, which produces the sciences, the arts and the métiers. He is emphatic that ‘philosophical history’ must be ‘natural history’ of this sort; mere chronological history cannot explain the emergence of the arts and sciences. Pocock acknowledges that the lines dividing the protagonists in this debate were not clear-cut. D’Alembert was ‘irresistibly fair-minded’ towards the érudits; Gibbon was perhaps unfair to D’Alembert in seizing on his apparent exclusion of the faculties of imagination and judgement from the study of history. But the difference between Gibbon and the philosophe was nonetheless fundamental. Gibbon thought that the history of literature and the mind should be written as ‘civil’ not natural history. Texts should be studied as the érudits had insisted: in their historical contexts, methodically rather than systematically, with an eye for the ironies of the unexpected. Such a reading of Gibbon’s Essai leaves Pocock to explain the presence within it of passages which are indubitably a natural history of religion; he is insistent that while they suggest Gibbon was proceeding deeper into scepticism, this was not a manifestation of deism or Spinozistic non-theism.
Volume II of Barbarism and Religion is devoted to historiography. In this case the dedicatee, Momigliano, is treated as a patron rather than an antagonist. Pocock wishes to develop Momigliano’s insight that Gibbon’s originality as a historian lay in his combining erudition with philosophy. To this end he rephrases the question, to ask how erudition and philosophy were combined with eighteenth-century historians’ persisting commitment to narrative. In focussing on the construction of narrative, Pocock makes the same point as Mark Phillips in Society and Sentiment. Genres of historical writing in Britain 1740-1820 (2000), a work of no less interest to readers of this journal: that narrative was still the ‘classical’ form of historical writing. But Pocock and Phillips are headed in very different directions: what interests Pocock is not genre but the argument and content of what he calls ‘the Enlightened narrative’.
The Enlightened narrative – there is no hesitation in using the definite article – is succinctly defined at the outset of Volume II. Its subject was the Christian millennium in Europe: depending on the specific preoccupations of its historians, it covered the period from Constantine to Charles V, or from Charlemagne to Louis XIV. Its connecting themes were those of barbarism and religion. By ‘barbarism’ was meant the culture of the Germanic and central Asian invaders who overran the Roman Empire, and also the system of feudal social relations which they instituted on the basis of land-holding; by ‘religion’ was indicated the assertion of papal and clerical power within the western Christian Church, and the would-be subordination of temporal and particularly Imperial power to the spiritual. The end – Pocock explicitly calls it the telos – of this narrative was the Europe of Enlightenment, of the Socinian and particularly the Utrecht Enlightenments described in Volume I. It is now, in fact, that the Utrecht Enlightenment comes into its own, and in this volume it overshadows (without extinguishing) the Socinian. This is because the Enlightened narrative may be regarded as a response to the need of Europe’s post-Utrecht system of states for a new and more ambitious historiography of statecraft. An early attempt to meet the need had been made by Pufendorf and others in their accounts of the ‘interests’ of states. But the histories written by a Giannone or a Voltaire, by a Hume or a Robertson, were far more sophisticated in seeking to construct the narrative of the coming-into-being of the states which Utrecht had brought together.
Identifying the senses in which the new historiography was ‘philosophical’ presents Pocock with more of a challenge. He attempts the task in a Prelude devoted to ‘the varieties of early modern historiography’. With its plain, unoracular title, the chapter is all too likely to attract readers seeking a short-cut to Pocock’s main arguments. They should be warned: this is the most difficult chapter of them all, comprehensible only in the light of the rest. But the central argument is clear and by now unsurprising: ‘philosophical history’ is not to be confused with ‘natural history’. The conviction that human nature was part of the natural world, and that a philosophical or scientific history was therefore an account of the natural working and products of the mind was, Pocock acknowledges, ‘enormously reinforced by the practice of organising all information regarding human society, culture and morality under the rubric of “natural law”’ (II. 22). But philosophical history, at least as Hume and Gibbon understood it, was written against the grain of such naturalism. Accepting the counter-rational diversity of human behaviour, philosophical history focussed on the development of states as the best means of organising its accounts of that behaviour. Philosophical history, therefore, was ‘civil history’, recounting the development of states in relation to manners, customs and the contemporary climate of ‘opinion’, and, most important of all, in relation to the spiritual pretensions of ecclesiastics. Enlightened narratives were civil histories of this kind, and are thus to be thought of as ‘philosophical’, mixing their philosophy with varying degrees of erudition.
Successive sections of Volume II are then devoted to the histories of Giannone, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, Smith and Ferguson. Here I shall concentrate on Pocock’s treatment of the Scots, but I do not thereby discount the chapters devoted to Giannone and Voltaire. The extended analysis of Giannone’s Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples is particularly welcome, since it has been little discussed in English. Voltaire’s histories receive almost as much attention as Hume’s, and are treated by Pocock with a perhaps unexpected sympathy. Voltaire’s contempt for erudition, he suggests, was a reflection of his interest in the fluid diversities of culture, which were not easily documented and referenced.
But it is undoubtedly David Hume who is of most interest to Pocock in this volume. An introductory (but this time readily intelligible) survey of historiography and intellectual culture in Hanoverian Britain suggests that when Hume made his famous remark about this being the historical age and the historical nation, he was surely speaking of Britain, and not merely Scotland. Separate chapters are then devoted to the Essays as contemporary history, and to the successive instalments of what became the History of England. Two themes are pursued through these. One concerns Hume’s treatment of religion. Hume was, of course, an exponent of the natural history of religion, most notably in the dissertation of that title and in the essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’. But his treatment of religion in the History proper, Pocock argues, broke with this mould. It became clear that the cultic, naturally superstitious religion of the people posed no serious problem, either before or after the Reformation. The danger arose when clergy began to make truth claims about the nature of the godhead. The arrogant manner of Henry VIII’s reformation had given them their cue; and the crisis of the Laudian Church in the mid seventeenth century had enabled a crowd of priests, Scots and sectaries to use such theology to claim an authority rivalling that of the civil magistrate. Such ‘enthusiasm’, Hume realised, was all the more dangerous for being theologically derived: it was not simply an expression of fanaticism. In other words – though Pocock does not use them explicitly – Hume had moved to a tacitly Socinian position on the dangers inherent in upholding Nicene theology. Having done so, Hume then committed himself, in the volumes on the Tudors, to a thorough-going erastianism. Rejecting the alternative of a free market in religion, he envisaged an established church strictly subordinated to the civil power, presiding over the eventual euthanasia of religion through sheer boredom with its disputes.
A second theme of the chapters on Hume is his increasing respect for the law and constitution of England. Short-circuiting the argument of Colin Kidd, Pocock more or less takes it for granted that Hume’s History of Great Britain, as it was initially conceived, was firmly Anglo-British in its focus; thereafter the decision to call it the History of England meant exactly what it said. Hume’s conclusion to the History as he had written it (that is to the medieval volumes) – that it was a lesson in the fluctuations rather than the antiquity of the constitution – is acknowledged. But before reaching that conclusion, Pocock points out, Hume had repeatedly shown that ‘he could whig it with the best’ (II, 245), celebrating Alfred’s foundation of the Common Law, and Magna Carta’s enshrining of principles of natural equity. Duncan Forbes was thus mistaken to characterise Hume’s History as a ‘cosmopolitan’ answer to the ‘vulgar whiggism’ of the ancient constitution. Rather Hume’s perspective was that of the Utrecht Enlightenment: philosophical history was best written as the development of statecraft in (what we would term) ‘national context’. The English possessed such a historic national context, as the Scots did not; but an Anglo-Scot such as himself was perhaps uniquely well-placed to appreciate just how enduring, if periodically disrupted, that English context had been.
Turning to Robertson, Smith and Ferguson, the scene changes again. Where Hume has been set in Hanoverian Britain, these are studied in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Pocock identifies this Enlightenment squarely with the group of Moderate clergy and professors led by Robertson, and studied by Richard B. Sher (on whose work Pocock in turn bestows the title ‘magisterial’); he assumes that Smith can be associated with them, at least for the period of his professorship at Glasgow. If a definition of the Scottish Enlightenment which marginalises Hume seems a little odd, the reason for it soon becomes clear. For these Scots are seen to have by-passed several of the most urgent preoccupations of previous exponents of the Enlightened narrative, Hume as well as Giannone and Voltaire. For one thing, the Moderate historians and Smith barely engaged with the history of religion. Deliberately, it must be supposed, they declined to discuss the rise of clerical pretension; and they showed no interest whatsoever in the course and consequences of theological debate. Even though his History of Scotland covered the early stages of the Reformation, Robertson, as Pocock puts it, showed no inclination to follow Hume ‘in proclaiming that the absolute decrees of grace were a principal source of enthusiasm, or to begin enquiring how far their modification by the heirs of Arminius must necessarily point in an anti-Nicene direction, Socinian or Grotian, deist or sceptic [...] far better to rely on the incessant practice of politics, on committees, resolutions and temporary coalitions and majorities’ to ward off his strict Calvinist opponents (II, 297). Whatever their private thoughts on the Westminster Confession, the Moderates were never to be caught questioning the Trinity.
Equally, after Robertson’s initial attempt, these Scots eschewed the writing of history in national context. Having discovered that Scottish history was much less susceptible to ‘philosophic’ treatment than Hume had found English, Robertson himself turned to the reign of Charles V, devoting the first volume to A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, which surveyed the entire European terrain of the Enlightened narrative. Smith and Ferguson, meanwhile, abandoned narrative altogether, and wrote their histories of ‘the progress of society’ and of the progress and corruption of ‘civil society’ as extensions of the natural jurisprudence which they taught their students. In doing so, Pocock suggests, they were able to strengthen the Enlightened narrative by clarifying and fixing one of its fundamental premises, the difference between ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ societies. Savage societies were static, confined to hunting and gathering, without stable property and government: they were characteristic of the Americas. Barbarian societies, by contrast, were mobile and dynamic; nomad pastoralists, they recognised property and political authority. Emanating from Central Asia and Siberia, these had pushed westwards, first to found the aristocratic city commonwealths of ancient Greece, and then to overrun the Roman Empire. It was barbarian rather than savage peoples, therefore, who initiated the history which was the subject of the Enlightened narrative. This had two important implications. On the one hand, it excluded savage peoples from ‘the progress of society’; on the other, it identified the progress of society as a European phenomenon, in which aboriginal America and Africa could not participate, unless they were taken over by Europeans. (Where this left modern Asia the Scots did not seriously enquire.) Going well beyond Locke, the Scots had turned the history of property and society into an ideology of imperialism.
Significant though the enquiry into savage and barbarian societies might be – and Gibbon would later owe much to the Scots – it could only be an extended preface to the Enlightened narrative itself. Smith did indeed follow the enquiry with an outline of ‘the history of government in Europe’, from the barbarian invaders’ creation of allodial property, through its evolution into the feudal system, to the rise of cities and commerce under the aegis of stronger monarchies. But since he also insisted that history proper was narrative in the classical manner, he clearly did not regard himself as writing the Enlightened narrative. Ferguson’s treatment of barbarism in the Essay on the History of Civil Society may have presupposed the Enlightened narrative as its sequel; but he too did not write it, jumping forwards instead to discuss the threats which corruption and despotism still presented to modern society. To these Scottish historians, therefore, it seems that the preoccupations of the Utrecht Enlightenment were of limited and diminishing concern; and there came a point when, like those of the Socinian Enlightenment, they might simply be ignored. In the great intellectual drama of Pocock’s Enlightenments, the Scottish Enlightenment (as he defines it) would appear to be cast as little more than a supporting player.
This is one respect in which, as it works itself out, Pocock’s argument comes to seem puzzling, and even begins to lose conviction. The puzzle derives, I think, from a continuing uncertainty over the relation between the process of ‘Enlightenment’ and the several ‘Enlightenments’ in which Pocock is interested. The singular process, he recognises, is the necessary condition of its plural manifestations, since it establishes the common characteristics which allow the historian to use the same term in different settings. But if there was ‘a’ process of Enlightenment, what prevents this from being thought of as ‘the’ Enlightenment? The answer seems to be that use of the definite article identifies Enlightenment with a particular set or type of intellectuals, philosophe and riformatore. Without the definite article in front of Enlightenment, the social and political identity of its adherents can be left open, since Enlightenment is then defined or ‘characterised’ in terms which allow it to be found in very different social and political, or ‘national’, contexts. But it is not clear why ‘the’ Enlightenment must be associated with a particular type of ‘intellectual’ (Venturi’s anachronistic term). Might it not refer, as evidence permits, to men and women of letters who for a period in the eighteenth century were conscious of participating in a European movement of ideas, and of sharing a certain range of intellectual interests and goals? As it stands, Pocock’s characterisation of Enlightenment in terms of two broad ideas or programmes is open to the objection that it treats ideas as independent agents in history, with only a contingent relation to the people by whom and the contexts in which they were articulated.
To this Pocock might respond that Enlightenment had a necessary not a contingent relation to its national contexts. But he seems reluctant to do this. At one point he denies it outright: ‘it is an incidental, not an essential effect that some emphasis must fall on “Enlightenment in national contexts”’ (I, 138 – a remark which in its context is a rebuke to this reviewer). But national context does play a crucial, even an indispensable role in Pocock’s accounts of both the Socinian and the Utrecht Enlightenments. Right at the start it is admitted that ‘Enlightenment in England was of course bound up with the special, indeed unique character of the Church of England’ (I, 8). It was as an established church in a specific national context that the Church of England encouraged Socinian tendencies among its broader-minded adherents. Likewise the Utrecht Enlightenment was the product of an agreement between the major western European nations to form themselves into an orderly system of states; and when historians constructed the Enlightened narrative to explain how this had come about, they found – or at least Giannone, Voltaire and Hume found – that the best way to do this was to write histories of statecraft in national context.
Why, then, do the Scots appear to play such a minor part in Pocock’s Enlightenments? It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that they failed to write Enlightened narratives in the full sense of the term because, having surrendered their statehood in 1603 and 1707, they no longer possessed a proper national context. Without the authority of a state immediately to hand, the Moderates could not openly question Nicene dogma; and Scots could participate in the Utrecht Enlightenment only courtesy of the Anglo-British state. Recognising this, Hume mentally crossed the border to write the History of England, leaving the Scottish Enlightenment to employ the last resources of natural law in the construction of conjectural histories of barbarism. The scope for participation in Pocock’s Enlightenments, it would seem, was proportional to the strength or weakness of the national context, which was in turn determined by statehood.
By the end of these volumes, however, the greatest uncertainty surrounds the relation to Enlightenment of Gibbon himself. As Pocock freely acknowledges, Gibbon did not write the Enlightened narrative as Giannone, Voltaire, Hume and Robertson understood it. Instead of writing about the Christian millennium, Gibbon devoted himself to late Roman history, and then to the empires, societies and religions of the Near and Middle East. To him barbarism and religion had much less to do with feudalism and the Papacy than with steppe nomads and desert tribes, the controversies of the Eastern church and the rise of Islam. An affinity for Socinian erudition may explain his interest in the long struggle to secure Nicene orthodoxy, while his studies of barbarism owed more than a little to the Scots. But whatever else it was, the Decline and Fall was not a history of statecraft in national context, supposedly the paradigm form of the Enlightened narrative. For an account of what it was, and therefore how it stands in relation to Enlightenment, we must, however, wait for Pocock’s next volumes.
John Robertson
University of Oxford
(*) These reviews are also forthcoming in print format in Storia della Storiografia, 39 (2001). We thank Storia della Storiografia's Editors for their kind permission to anticipate them here. John Robertson's review has appeared in a shorter version in "Eighteenth-century Scotland. The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society", whose Editor, Richard B. Sher, we wish to thank for agreeing to its present republication in an enlarged form
(1) Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les historiens et la monarchie, 4 vols. (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1988-89); cf. Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie; étude sur la connaissance historique à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).
(2) Dale Van Kley points out that the same may be said of the church. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); The Jansenists and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
(3) Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, La république des lettres (Belin: De Boeck, 1997); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and for a slightly earlier period Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe : Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
(4) Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 132. Venturi’s developed his thesis over a decade and a half in Settecento Riformatore: da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin: Einaudi, 1969); Settecento Riformatore: La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti (Turin: Einaudi, 1976); Settecento Riformatore: la prima crisi dell’Antico Regime (1768-1776) (Turin: Einaudi, 1979); Settecento Riformatore: la Caduta dell’Antico Regime (1776-1789). (1) I grandi stati dell’Occidente; (2) Il patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell’Est (Turin: Einaudi, 1984). Vols. 3 and 4 have been translated into English by R. Burr Litchfield as Franco Venturi: The End of the Old Regime in Europe (1768-1776): The First Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe (1776-1789), 2 parts., Part 1: The Great States of the West, Part 2: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
(5) Arnaldo Momigliano, "Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method", Historia 2 (1954): 450-63; reprinted in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955), 195-211; and in Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 40-55.
(6) Pocock, 2:182, citing Eugene F. Miller, ed., David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 565-66.
(7) Pocock thinks not. See "Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution; A Euroskeptical Enquiry," History of Political Thought, 20 (1999): 125-39.
(8) Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997); W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
(9) Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemberg, and Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
(10) Cf. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
(11) J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (1774); Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91) in Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, vols. 5 and 13 (Berlin, 1877).
(12) C. Meiners, Grundriss der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer, 1786, 1793).
(13) Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (Dublin: Smith and Bradley, 1741), xix-xx.
(14) C. Meiners, Histoire de l’origine, des progrès et de la décadence des sciences dans la Grèce, trans. Jean-Charles Laveaux (Paris: Laveaux, 1798).
(15) John Gillies, The History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies, and Conquests; from the Earliest Accounts till the Division of the Macedonian Empire in the East, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1786), viii.
(16) C. Meiners, Historische Vergleichung der Sitten, und Verfassungen, der Gesetze, und Gewerbe, des Handels, und der Religion, der Wissenschaften, und Lehranstalten des Mittelalters mit denen unsers Jahrhunderts in Rücksicht auf die Vortheile, und Nachtheile der Aufklärung, vol. 1 (Hannover: Helwing, 1793-94), 35.
(17) C. Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom, vol. 2 (Lemgo: Meyer, 1782), i-iv.
(18) Pocock, 2, ch. 23.
(19) Martin Martin, Voyage to St. Kilda, the Remotest of all the Hebrides, or Western Isles of Scotland (London, 1749).
(20) J. H. St. John, Letters from an American Planter (London, 1782).
(21) Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 103 (chapter 3).
(22) C. Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782).
(23) Meiners, Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer, 23, citing Lucan’s description of the effect of growing wealth on the Romans.
(24) Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten und der Staatsverfassung der Römer, (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); Beytrag zur Geschichte der Denkart der ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt, in einigen Betrachtungen über die Neu-Platonische Philosophie (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1782); Geschichte des Verfalls der Sitten, der Wissenschaften und Sprache der Römer in den ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt, (commissioned as an introduction to the German translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall) (Vienna and Leipzig: Stahel, 1791).
(25) C. Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Cotta, 1791), 2:250.
(26) Meiners, Briefe über die Schweiz, 2:250-62.