Book Review

Methods/Theory

J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion. Volume 2, Narratives of Civil Government. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 422. $49.95.

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 second-century 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.	1
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.	2
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 Niccolò 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.	. . .