Political Observer offers a review of J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, Volume 1 and 2.
The Historians, as the pretenders to the status of Oracles, never disappoint in their quotations from each other. John Rapley ends his New York Times essay, framed by American National Security State hireling/historian Graham T. Allison’s much quoted “Thucydides’ Trap”. It’s like reading, that sychophatic praise for the American charlatan Fukuyama’s Hegelian pastiche, that signaled the arrival and permanence of The American Political Hick, that has bridged an ocean!
For America, it’s a cautionary tale. In responding to the inevitability of China’s rise, the United States needs to ask itself which threats are existential and which are merely uncomfortable. There are pressing dangers facing both the West and China, such as disease and climate change, that will devastate all humanity unless nations tackle them together. As for China’s growing militarization and belligerence, the United States must consider whether it’s really facing “Thucydides’ Trap” of a rising power or simply a country defending its widening interests.
If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.
To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity
Where might The Reader begin her search for an alternative to John Rapley?
J. G. A. POCOCK. Barbarism and Religion. Volume 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 339. $49.95. J. G. A. POCOCK. Barbarism and Religion. Volume 2, Narratives of Civil Government. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 422. $49.95.
The American Historical Review , Volume 107 (2) – Apr 1, 2002
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) is probably the most famous and perhaps the most misunderstood history written in the past three centuries. It is often cited, and is even well known in popular culture (Bugs Bunny glances at a parody of it on a vampire’s shelf in an old Warner Bros. cartoon), yet more than two-thirds of it, concerning the Greek Eastern Empire, has been largely ignored. Its memorable title has also become falsely associated with popular accounts of the moral decay of the early, Julio-Claudian empire described by Tacitus and Suetonius-a period that Gibbon, who began with the “Five Good Emperors” of the secondcentury Antonine dynasty, did not even address. These misconceptions aside, the multivolume work has the stature of a monument to Enlightenment culture (though not to philosophe agendas). Study of it has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, including David Womersley’s recent critical edition of the entire text and Patricia B. Craddock’s authoritative two-volume biography of Gibbon. How much there is left to say on Gibbon himself, or his masterpiece, is a question one might be excused for asking. The answer, however, would be “a great deal,” and if one has any doubts about that, they are dispelled after reading the first two massive volumes of J. G. A. Pocock’s ongoing study. These get us only to the eve of Gibbon’s writing the first volume, which appeared in 1776 (a year otherwise notable in intellectual history for the death of David Hume and the publication of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith-two North Britons who feature prominently in the second of these volumes). Pocock’s study is not, as one might expect, another biography-though biographical details both enter into his account and prove significant-but an attempt, largely persuasive, to situate Gibbon in as many different intellectual and political contexts as can be imagined or reasonably described from the evidence, and through that exercise (which is far from complete at the end of volume two) to arrive at a much richer understanding of the Decline and Fall.
There is an impressively symphonic quality to Pocock’s major works, at least in their design. In The Machiavellian Moment (1975), his study of the transmission and transformation of ancient ideas of republican virtue through medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth-century English, and North Atlantic filters, he began with a dazzling analysis of a millennium of intellectual history up to Niccolo Machiavelli, slowed the pace notably for a middle section on Machiavelli’s contemporaries, and picked it up again for a concluding sprint through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is something of the same here, and what we have is the first two movements-each with several melodic lines simultaneously developed. Volume one of Barbarism and Religion does not cover a vast chronological sweep, but it does follow Gibbon’s life (and, importantly, the lives of his father and grandfather) and travels against the backdrop of a very complex and distinctively English political and religious climate. The goal of this is more obvious than the road toward it: to demonstrate how and under what circumstances the former apostate, turned militiaman, turned gentleman of letters arrived at his understanding of late antiquity, and of the proper method and suitable style for recounting that understanding to the reading public. There was clearly a much longer and more complex ferment than one can glean from a surface reading of his Memoirs alone; the inspirational moment in 1764 when he mused “amidst the ruins” of the Capitol may explain the occasion of his writing the Decline and Fall, but not the process that permitted that occasion to occur, much less its results. Along the way, we get a wonderful account of the often conflicting streams of English history from the Elizabethan settlement through the Civil War, the Restoration, the revolutionary settlement, Jacobitism, and the advent of a culture of party, commerce, and civility.
Volume two provides the more relaxed andante to this opening allegro: here, Gibbon himself almost slips from view till the very last, as Pocock presents sequential free-standing studies of the major civil histories that provided the narrative exemplars from which Gibbon could depart (he could not really imitate them since they principally dwelt on more modern times). These include two major continental historians (Pietro Giannone and Voltaire), and his major older British contemporaries (principally the Scots Hume, William Robertson, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Smith); there is not much hen: about English neoclassical history writing, which was in a state of decline, although there is a brief but interesting account of the reception of Hume’s major rival, Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay. As with volume one, these studies are valuable in their own right, but they also provide a further context to the writing of the first volume of the Decline and Fall. (So relentless is Pocock’s attention to strict chronology that Robertson’s History ofAmerica [1777] does not feature in his account of that historian, because it appeared too late to have any effect on Gibbon’s first volume, and because it belongs to a different intellectual context: that of the American Revolution.) They are, however, only half the story. One of the unresolved questions here is exactly how Gibbon solved the problem of models for his later volumes, on the Byzantine east, after his history had taken him in directions, or painted him into corners, that he had probably not anticipated when he first conceived it. One answer would seem to be that Gibbon needed to rely to a much greater extent than has been acknowledged on ecclesiastical historians, and we can expect that there will be a parallel to volume two, later in this series, examining that genre.
Each of these volumes also stands on its own as an exploration of two other intellectual questions not directly related to (or at least not circumscribed by) the study of Gibbon. In The Enlightenments ofEdward Gibbon, which is dedicated to the memory of Franco Venturi, the question is to what degree England experienced an Enlightenment at all, and how its “rhythm” differed from the continental and Scottish versions. The plural in the title is not an affectation. The case here is very much for multiple enlightenments, that of the philosophes not being the same as that of the erudits, and the European being no more singular (or normative) than the English. A secondary theme in this volume is provided by the argument of Arnaldo Momigliano that there were distinctive historiographic streams from Renaissance to Enlightenment-narrative, philosophe, and antiquarian or “erudite”-and that Gibbon was the man who managed to integrate them in the Decline and Fall. Narratives of Civil Government, dedicated to the memory of Momigliano, takes up this latter theme more directly, though the emphasis is squarely on the narrative (Hume) and the philosophical (Voltaire) streams, with rather less stress on erudition in the mode of Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Sebastien Tillemont. For any historiographer for whom Momigliano’s famous essays have become central-which is to say most of us working on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-this is a welcome addition to the corpus: the least satisfactory part of Momigliano’s overall argument was his explanation of exactly how Gibbon achieved this synthesis, and by what stages.
These are not easy volumes to read, their pages filled with gallicisms, lengthy extracts, and highly complex sentences weighted with qualifying clauses. The nuances will be lost on anyone unfamiliar with some of the ongoing debates in the history of ideas (and particularly the history of historiography), or with the architecture of the Decline and Fall itself. The turns in the argument are conducted with such precision, and at such a pace, that a napping reader may soon be left behind. But in combination, they represent a very significant advance in our understanding of Gibbon, and of the intellectual and political worlds in which he lived. We are not there yet: there is no climactic third movement imminent, and at the current rate one might expect several more volumes before we hear it.
One of Pocock’s first principles of intellectual history has been that authors end up saying both more and less than they intend, and that what they intended and what we take them to mean depends not only on their own, but also on our, context. “Barbarism and religion,” Gibbon’s most quotable phrase, had one meaning in his time and another in ours. Indeed, it resonates differently between the appearance of these 1999 volumes and the post-September 11, 2001 world in which we must now read them.
D. R. WOOLF McMaster University
I have probably broken some cardinal rule by posting the whole of D. R. Woolf’s review. The reference to September 11, 2001 is out of place, to say the least! Having read both volumes reviewed , and The Machiavellian Moment, which places J. G. A. Pocock in a class by himself. Pocock writes History within a political/historical/moral/intellectual frame that is unrivaled, most assuredly not by John Rapley.
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