Barbarism and Religion: Volume 3, The First Decline and Fall

‘Barbarism and Religion’–Edward Gibbon’s own phrase–is the title of an acclaimed 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 of ideas, challenging the notion of any one ‘Enlightenment’ and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. 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, arguing that Decline and Fall is a phenomenon of ‘ancient’ history. Having set out classical and Christian histories side by side, and considering Enlightened historiography as the partial escape from both, Pocock finally turns his incisive lens on Gibbon’s text itself. J.G.A Pocock is a prize-winning historian of political, including historical, thought and discourse. He has been active since 1984 in founding and directing the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, for which he edited The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993). His work has focused on the early modern period, but he is active also in the history of New Zealand, where he comes from. Other books he has written include Barbarism and Religion, I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon; II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985), and Machiavellian Monument (Princeton, 1975).