Barbarism and Religion

by J. G. A. Pocock

• ISBN13: 9780521672337
• ISBN10: 0521672333
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

'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 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, recounting the end of the classical civilisation Gibbon and his readers knew so much better than the worlds that followed.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Note on usages	xi
List of abbreviations	xii
Introduction	1	(6)
PROLOGUE
1 Gibbon's first volume: the problem of the Antonine moment	7	(10)
PART I THE FIRST DECLINE AND FALL: ANCIENT PERCEPTIONS
2 Alibi quam Romae: the Tacitean narrative	17	(15)
3 The Gracchan explanation: Appian of Alexandria and the unknown historian	32	(29)
4 The construction of Christian empire	61	(16)
PART II THE AMBIVALENCE AND SURVIVAL OF CHRISTIAN EMPIRE
5 Orosius and Augustine: the formation of a Christian anti-history	77	(21)
6 Otto of Freising and the two citics	98	(29)
7 The historiography of the translatio imperii	127	(26)
PART III HUMANIST CONSTRUCTION OF DECLINE AND FALL
8 Leonardo Bruni: from translatio to declinatio	153	(26)
9 Flavio Biondo and the decades of decline	179	(24)
10 Niccolo Machiavelli and the imperial republic	203	(36)
PART IV EXTENSIVE MONARCHY AND ROMAN HISTORY
11 Pedro Mexia: empire and monarchy	239	(19)
12 History in the western monarchies: barbarism, law and republican survivals	258	(18)
13 Lipsius and Harrington: the problem of arms in ancient and modern monarchy	276	(31)
PART V REPUBLIC AND EMPIRE: THE ENLIGHTENED NARRATIVE
14 European Enlightenment and the Machiavellian moment	307	(18)
15 The French narrative:
I Bossuet and Tillemont	325	(13)
II Montesquieu and Beaufort	338	(34)
16 The Scottish narrative:
I David Hume and Adam Smith	372	(27)
II Adam Ferguson's history of the republic	399
PART VI GIBBON AND THE STRUCTURE OF DECLINE
17 The Antonine moment	419	(29)
18 The Severi and the disintegration of the principate	448	(16)
19 The Illyrian recovery and the new monarchy	464	(25)
EPILOGUE
20 The Constantinean moment	489	(12)
Bibliography of works cited	501	(15)
Index	516