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Barbarism and Religion: The First
Decline and Fall J. G. A. Pocock Volume Three
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'Barbarism and religion' - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the
title of a sequence of works by John Pocock
designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
in a series of contexts in the history of the eighteenth-century Europe. This
is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians,
challenging the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and positing instead a
plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. The first two
volumes of Barbarism and Religion were warmly and widely
reviewed, and won the Jacques Barzun Prize in
Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. In this third
volume in the sequence, The First Decline and Fall, John Pocock offers an historical introduction to the first
fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work. He argues that the first Decline
and Fall is a phenomenon of specifically 'ancient' history in which
Christianity plays no part, and whose problems are those of liberty and
empire. The first Decline and Fall is that of ancient, imperial and
polytheist Rome, and Gibbon's first fourteen chapters recount the end of classical civilization, a civilization with
which Gibbon and his readers were vastly more familiar than with its
late-antique successor. Only towards the end of this present volume do
Christians appear, and Gibbon's history begins to move towards its dominant
themes. Born in |
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