Liberty Matters

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

By: David Womersley, Mark Packer, Freya Johnston, Brian Young, and Béla Kapossy


Arriving in 1776, as the Declaration of Independence gave birth to a new nation and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations gave birth to a new discipline--modern economics, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall explored the enduring significance of one of the most influential works of historical scholarship.

Sections

Scholars examined Gibbon’s interpretations of Rome’s decline, his literary style, and the book’s lasting impact on the study of history, while also considering how modern historians have reassessed his arguments and legacy.

Perspective Essay Edward Gibbon: Empire, Barbarism, and Religion

2026 sees the 250th anniversary of the publication of volume one of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is a book that demands to be read on its own terms, as by general consent the greatest historical narrative we possess, and one devoted to describing and understanding one of the major points of inflection in European history. But equally, as a profound study of empire, barbarism, and religion, it has the power to provoke reflection on the energies that are reshaping and reforming our modern world.
It is sometimes carelessly assumed that The Decline and Fall is an elegy for empire, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The very first sentence of the first book Gibbon published, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (1761), is unequivocal in its condemnation: 'L'Histoire des Empires est celle de la misère des hommes.'[1] A few years later, when Gibbon was in Rome, he was enraptured by what he saw, but no more reconciled to empire as a political form: ' I am now Dear Sir at Rome. [...] I have already found such a fund of entertainment for a mind somewhat prepared for it by an acquaintance with the Romans, that I am really almost in a dream. Whatever ideas books may have given us of the greatness of that people, Their accounts of the most flourishing state of Rome fall infinitely short of the picture of its ruins. I am convinced there never never existed such a nation and I hope for the happiness of mankind that there never will again.'[2]
From where did Gibbon derive this idea that empire was an unnatural and oppressive political formation? Of course, there are many places where he could have found it. But the most likely source is in the work of David Hume, who was a great influence on Gibbon from the 1760s onwards. Hume gives a very clear statement about the unnaturalness of empire in his essay ‘On the Balance of Power’, which was first published in 1752, but composed between 1750 and 1751: 'Enormous monarchies are, probably, destructive to human nature; in their progress, in their continuance, and even in their downfal, which never can be very distant from their establishment.'[3]
One wonders which empires Hume had in mind when he wrote that, because the world in his day contained at least one ‘zombie’ empire, namely the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, Hume clearly states, from a normative standpoint, that enormous monarchies are precarious and transient. This was an insight Hume had long been pondering. There is a very interesting manuscript in the Hume papers in the National Library of Scotland, referred to normally as the ‘Early Memoranda’. It comprises about twenty or so pages of manuscript jottings, arranged rather like a commonplace book, but not organised by subject. And this is one of the entries from that manuscript:
There seems to be a natural Course of Things, which brings on the Destruction of great Empires. They push their Conquests till they come to barbarous Nations, which stop their Progress, by the Difficulty of subsisting great Armies. After that, the Nobility & considerable Men of the conquering Nation & best Provinces withdraw gradually from the [frontier inserted above the line] Army, by reason of its Distance from the Capital & barbarity of the Country, in which they quarter: They forget the Use of War. Their barbarous Soldiers become their Masters. These have no Law but their Sword, both from their bad Education, & from their Distance from the Sovereign [to whom they bear no Affection inserted above the line]. Hence Disorder, Violence, Anarchy, & Tyranny, & a Dissolution of Empire. [4]
What Hume is describing here is a natural history of the decline of empire; a sequence of stages that explains why it is that immoderate greatness will naturally (i.e. inescapably, and without conscious human intention) bring in its wake collapse and disorder. When Gibbon began thinking about empires, his thought was very much modelled on these insights of Hume’s.
But as soon as Gibbon began work on the manuscript of the Decline and Fall (which happened, he says, about February 1773), his thought about empire underwent further development. We can see this if we consider the ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’, which is a free-standing essay that Gibbon placed at the end of the second instalment of the Decline and Fall, published in 1781. It is however a very misleading positioning, because we know that in fact Gibbon composed the ‘General Observations’ between February 1773 and May 1774.
How do we know that? Because in the ‘General Observations’ Gibbon makes a disparaging comment about the idleness of the Bourbon monarchy. When it was published in 1781, Louis XVI took offence at this as a personal reflection on him. To exonerate himself from the charge of having insulted a reigning monarch, Gibbon explained in his ‘Memoirs of My Life’ that these words had been written before the accession of Louis XVI. In other words, if these words are a reflection on a king of France, then they reflect on Louis XV (to whom in fact they are much more appropriate). The ‘General Observations’ were thus composed between February 1773 (when Gibbon began work on the text of the Decline and Fall) and May 1774 (the accession of Louis XVI). They show that for Gibbon, the nature of the problem of empire has once again shifted. Hume thinks that empire is an unnatural form and that it is necessarily very transient. For Hume, the thing to be explained is how empires come into existence. How could such an unnatural political form arise? But for Gibbon, as he starts working on the subject of Roman decline, the problem is not the origins, but rather the durability of the Roman empire:
The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.[5]
That movement away from the positions about empire that I think were influential on Gibbon as a younger man is an example of a paradigm that I believe is true also of his comments on barbarism and on religion. That is to say, Gibbon’s points of intellectual departure on all these subjects tended to be close to those of Hume. But the process of composition and research drew Gibbon away from those positions towards greater complication. The process of historical research and composition had brought to light aspects of the past, from which the sociological philosopher, always drawn towards a trans-historical template, had tended to be distracted.
We see something very similar when we consider Gibbon's comments about barbarism. Again, I will begin with the 'General Observations', since that seems to have been written as a kind of ‘scoping document’, composed at the very outset of Gibbon's research and as a way of organising his thoughts.
The first part of the 'General Observations' is all about why Europe is safe from a future irruption of barbarians. Gibbon says western Europe is now secure since before any modern barbarians can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous. In other words, barbarism somehow evaporates on contact with civilisation. Why does Gibbon think that? He grounds his confidence on improvements in military technology. The military technology of modern Europe means that the west is now safe. As he would write of the German tribes in chapter nine of The Decline and Fall:
Impatient of fatigue or delay, these half-armed warriors rushed to battle with dissonant shouts and disordered ranks; and sometimes, by the effort of native valour, prevailed over the constrained and more artificial bravery of the Roman mercenaries. But as the barbarians poured forth their whole souls on the first onset, they knew not how to rally or to retire. A repulse was a sure defeat; and a defeat was most commonly total destruction.[6]
But when, in the instalment published in 1781, Gibbon considered the military discipline of the pastoral nomads, it is clear that they have moved on from the northern barbarians, because they possess a discipline to which the northern barbarians were strangers. They have acquired this through something that is halfway between hunting and sport:
They acquire [through general hunting-matches] the habit of directing their eye, and their steps, to a remote object; of preserving their intervals; of suspending, or accelerating, their pace, according to the motions of the troops on their right and left; and of watching and repeating the signals of their leaders. Their leaders study, in the practical school, the most important lesson of the military art; the prompt and accurate judgment of ground, of distance, and of time. To employ against a human enemy the same patience and valour, the same skill and discipline, is the only alteration which is required in real war; and the amusements of the chace serve as a prelude to the conquest of an empire.[7]
The pastoral nomads are very different people from the stereotypical northern barbarians. Gibbon is beginning to grasp that barbarism has a history, and does not stand outside history, as it had seemed to do for Tacitus. Gibbon was no follower of Rousseau. He probably would have had little time personally for any barbarian, had he happened to meet one, and certainly he was no subscriber to the idea of the ‘Noble Savage’. But he nevertheless realised that the historical record does not allow us to stigmatise barbarism as some kind of pure negativity, still less as a static or motionless form of the human character. Gibbon came to realise that barbarism and civilisation are not simple antagonists. For the barbarian contribution to civilisation is something much more far-reaching than just the replacement of imperial servitude by rough liberty.
We see a similar movement from simplicity to subtlety in Gibbon's treatment of religion. Gibbon tells us in his Memoirs that the notorious skeptical history of early Christianity in chapters fifteen and sixteen had caused him great difficulty:
[...] the fifteenth and sixteenth Chapters have been reduced, by three successive revisals, from a large Volume to their present size, and they might still be compressed without any loss of facts or sentiments.[8]
In these chapters Gibbon was wrestling with material that was intractable or difficult in some way. This is confirmed by a letter that Hume wrote to congratulate Gibbon on the publication of the first volume in 1776:
When I heard of your Undertaking (which was some time ago), I own I was a little curious to see how you woud [sic] extricate yourself from the Subject of your two last Chapters. I think you have observ’d a very prudent Temperament; but it was impossible to treat the Subject so as not to give Grounds of Suspicion against you, and you may expect that a Clamour will arise.[9]
As of course it did. So the subject was inescapable, but in the event Gibbon was unable, in 1775 when he was probably writing those chapters, to resist succumbing to an ‘off the peg’ eighteenth-century solution to how you write about early Christianity, which was to flavour the prose with a deistical seasoning. Yet Gibbon was not a deist, so it was unfortunate that, enmeshed in compositional difficulties, he should reach for that solution to his problem, because his views about religion were about to become much more complicated.
Let us begin with a quotation from chapter three:
But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connexion between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.[10]
This seems to me to be completely aligned with what Hume says about the political tendency of ecclesiastical establishments. But Gibbon’s opinions have already started to change by the second instalment in 1781, when he is fascinated by Athanasius. This is perhaps surprising. After all, Athanasius is the church father associated most closely with the doctrine of the Trinity, which in the eighteenth-century Church of England was the cornerstone of sacerdotalism and the claims of the priesthood to possess and exercise a supernatural power. But Gibbon was impressed by Athanasius not because of his doctrinal opinions, but because of the political resistance he mounted to the emperor Constantius: 'the son of Constantine [i.e. Constantius] was the first of the Christian princes who experienced the strength of those principles, which, in the cause of religion, could resist the most violent exertions of the civil power.'[11] That shift in Gibbon's opinions about how ecclesiastical establishments and political authority might come together or clash is confirmed by a passage from the third instalment of 1788: '[...] in the implacable discord of the two factions, the Ghibelins were attached to the emperor, while the Guelfs displayed the banner of liberty and the church.'[12] Roman Catholicism, despite everything that Hume had written about its oppressiveness, might (so the historical record tells us) align itself with the cause of liberty.
What of Protestantism? Here we must turn to chapter fifty-four, the chapter on the Paulicians, which creates an extraordinary line of sight down more than a millennium of ecclesiastical history, from 660 to 1788. The Paulicians, as Gibbon says early in that chapter, sustained a ‘perpetual alliance with the enemies of the empire and the Gospel’. One might expect that this would induce Gibbon to think kindly of them. But in the final three or four pages of this chapter, Gibbon gives us an extraordinary. account of the Reformation and its effects on morals and politics. Protestantism gets rid of transubstantiation and the Protestants themselves make a great deal of noise about this cleansing of the theological stables of Roman Catholicism. But what Gibbon draws attention to in addition is how the Protestant churches have themselves invented many doctrines which are just as irrational as transubstantiation, such as 'the stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, faith, grace, and predestination'.[13] Gibbon then goes on to think about the political risks of reformation. The problem is that reformation can have only two outcomes: enthusiasm or indifference. Both of those outcomes pose threats to the fabric of society:
It only remains to observe, whether such sublime simplicity be consistent with popular devotion; whether the vulgar, in the absence of all visible objects, will not be inflamed by enthusiasm, or insensibly subside in languor and indifference.[14]
This prepares the way for the astonishing conclusion to the chapter:
The liberty of conscience has been claimed as a common benefit, and inalienable right: the free governments of Holland and England introduced the practice of toleration; and the narrow allowance of the laws has been enlarged by the prudence and humanity of the times. In the exercise, the mind has understood the limits, of its powers, and the words and shadows that might amuse the child can no longer satisfy his manly reason. The volumes of controversy are overspread with cobwebs: the doctrine of a Protestant church is far removed from the knowledge or belief of its private members; and the forms of orthodoxy, the articles of faith, are subscribed with a sigh or a smile by the modern clergy. Yet the friends of Christianity are alarmed at the boundless impulse of enquiry and scepticism. The predictions of the Catholics are accomplished: the web of mystery is unravelled by the Arminians, Arians, and Socinians, whose numbers must not be computed from their separate congregations. And the pillars of revelation are shaken by those men who preserve the name without the substance of religion, who indulge the licence without the temper of philosophy.[15]
In these sentences, we are privileged to overhear a great historical intelligence communing with itself.
Endnotes
[1] L'Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (1761), p. 1. (The history of empires is that of the misery of mankind.)
[2] The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols (London: Cassell, 1956), vol. I, p. 184.
[3] David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 340-41.
[4] NLS, MS 23159, item 14, p. 27.
[5] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols (London: Allen Lane, 1994), vol. II, p. 509. Hereafter cited as Decline and Fall.
[6] Decline and Fall, vol. I, p. 248.
[7] Decline and Fall, vol. I, p. 1030.
[8] The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (1896), p. 308.
[9] Hume to Gibbon, 18 March 1776, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Grieg, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), vol. II, p. 310.
[10] Decline and Fall, vol. I, p. 85.
[11] Decline and Fall, vol. I, p. 814.
[12] Decline and Fall, vol. III, p. 144.
[13] Decline and Fall, vol. III, p. 437.
[14] Decline and Fall, vol. III, p. 437.
[15] Decline and Fall, vol. III, pp. 438-39.

Perspective Essay History and Liberty in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Brian Young

Edward Gibbon (1737-94) began his literary career in French, publishing his Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature in 1761; he had originally planned to go on to write a history of the Swiss in the same language. These were intellectual ventures that could only have appealed to a distinctly small, decidedly self-selecting audience. Happily for his many subsequent readers, Gibbon reverted to writing in English, sagely following the advice of David Hume, who had presciently looked across the Atlantic to see a new empire emerging for the English language; and Gibbon’s historical ambitions enlarged greatly, turning from the liberties of the Swiss to no less a theme than the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first of the six volumes of this monumental study in philosophical and narrative history appeared in London in 1776, and it was soon republished in Philadelphia. The Decline and Fall effectively established Gibbon’s credentials as a master of English prose in the very years in which the new Republic of America was created. Hume, calmly contemplating this political climacteric, had the great consolation as he lay painfully dying of cancer in Edinburgh in 1776, to read two newly published masterpieces of the British Enlightenment: the opening volume of The Decline and Fall and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 1776 was an annus mirabilis for European as well as for North American liberty. Liberty, both religious and political, was a matter of great moment in the Decline and Fall, initiated in the year of the Declaration of Independence, and completed shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution.
J.G.A. Pocock (1924-2023), the leading Gibbon scholar of his generation, identified the historian as the greatest exponent of a conservative, clerical English experience of Enlightenment, one which placed him at odds with many of his stridently atheistic francophone contemporaries. It took the long aftershock of the violent end of the ancien régime to usher in the conservative liberal tones in which in 1812 a young François Guizot (1787-1874) translated and annotated the Decline and Fall for a French readership. Guizot’s father had been executed in the Terror, and his mother had fled with her young son to Geneva, where he was subsequently educated. The Swiss had readily reciprocated Gibbon’s interest in their history. Seven years after Guizot’s work on the Decline and Fall appeared, the Swiss political thinker Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) would deliver a celebrated oration in Paris comparing the liberty of the ancients and the moderns; but Constant’s admired ancients were the Athenians, not the Romans who primarily concerned Gibbon and Guizot. In the era of Lord Byron (1788-1824), who died defending Greek liberty against the Ottomans, the newly recovered ideals of ancient (and modern) Greek Republicanism animated a younger, more radical, and defiantly idealistic generation. Byron had described Gibbon in his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as ‘the lord of irony’, ‘Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer’[1]; this was heavily qualified praise for an historian whose own commitments to liberty were altogether more mitigated and judiciously balanced than were those of the politically radical poet and his like-minded contemporaries. Gibbon, living in literary retirement in Lausanne when the French Revolution broke out, was far too attached to the old order to side with his erstwhile friend Charles James Fox in welcoming its challengers. He was closer to Edmund Burke, a fellow member of The Club (Dr Johnson’s literary society). In common with his admirer Guizot, Gibbon was a conservative liberal. Irony was appropriately and subtly the key to Gibbon’s conception of liberty.
But what was that conception of liberty? To echo Isaiah Berlin’s dichotomy in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (an essay inspired by Constant), Gibbon celebrated negative over positive liberty. The Geneva to which he had been sent by his family to recover him for the Protestant fold after his conversion to Catholicism at Oxford, was balanced, conservative, prosperous, mildly hierarchical, cautiously luxurious, nominally Calvinist. This was the Geneva against which Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Berlin’s primary agent of positive liberty, had rebelled as he launched himself into voluntary exile from his native city. Rousseau’s tendency to act all too influentially as a terrible simplifier was the reverse of Gibbon’s taste for refined complexity; the Decline and Fall is a study in the many contradictions of political and religious liberty, a consummately civilised meditation on the many ambiguities of civilisation. Not for nothing was Gibbon’s preferred mode of historical generalisation constituted by profoundly ironic and invariably measured antithesis.
Fundamental to the English Enlightenment was the defence of a political nation uniquely dedicated to the pursuit of negative liberty. An historian of a younger generation, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), praised the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-89 as a preservative revolution, denouncing the French Revolution, in the style of Burke, as a destructive revolution. This was the conception of political liberty that had allowed Burke consistently to defend the rights of Americans to self-determination and later to condemn the illusory philosophy that inspired the French Revolution. And this was a perspective shared by Gibbon, although he had served in the administration of Lord North, who effectively lost the American colonies; he would, nonetheless, as a man of integrity and loyalty, dedicate the fourth volume of the Decline and Fall to North, by then long out of office, in 1788. Gibbon was a sceptical Whig, just as he was a sceptical member of the Church of England. Balance and irony formed his personal as well as his historical philosophy. He much preferred a conservative variety of Enlightenment to any form of religious or political ‘Enthusiasm’, be it represented by the Transatlantic ‘Great Awakening’ or the rootless, relentlessly rationalistic ambitions of Radical Enlightenment. Succumbing neither to reaction nor to revolution, Hume’s essay on ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm’ provided the lodestar of Gibbon’s thinking; he was a mitigated sceptic, opposed to excess of any kind, religious, philosophical, or political.
Quintessentially a product of an age of continuing exploration and colonialism, Gibbon imagined the world accurately and geographically, organising his opening study of the world-historical situation of the Roman empire through a minutely attentive survey of the many regions comprising it, from Britain to North Africa. A characteristic criticism of a fellow scholar occurs in one of his inimitable footnotes, where he declares of Thomas Templeman’s Survey of the Globe, ‘I distrust both the doctor’s learning and his maps.’[2] For Gibbon, the past persistently informed the present, as when he noted of Croatia and Bosnia that ‘the former obeys an Austrian governor, the latter a Turkish pasha’, contiguous territories marking ‘the doubtful limit of the Christian and Mahometan power.’[3] This was a passage that firmly resonated as the former Yugoslavia descended into civil war in 1991, fully two hundred and fifteen years after it was originally composed. As this example economically demonstrates, Gibbon, though never exactly a geographical determinist, nevertheless limited the possibilities of the potential for liberty in any region by reflecting deeply on its geography and its history. He also considered theology both regionally and internationally as a prime determinant of intellectual and moral liberty.
Religion is one of the prime motors of the Decline and Fall, reflecting Gibbon’s own experience of cradle Anglicanism, brief and youthful conversion to Catholicism, and ultimate Protestant reconversion into something like religiously observant scepticism. He was not the first European to undergo such a spiritual journey: Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) had converted from his Huguenot origins to Catholicism before reverting to a highly sceptical variant of Protestantism. In his 1682 tract, Reflections on the Comet, Bayle had mischievously imagined the possibility of a thriving society of atheists, something literally unthinkable to the great majority of Europeans. It was a provocation that led to many responses, including Vico’s New Science, but there is a more positive echo of its sentiments in Gibbon’s celebrated account of Roman polytheism as he invoked its ‘Universal spirit of toleration’: ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.’[4] Something of this spirit informed his controversial account of the purely natural causes of the rise of Christianity, complete with a tacit critique of the miraculous and a subtle merging of the eighteenth-century present with the second century past, the sceptical historian referring knowingly to ‘an age of science and history.’[5]
Religion was regularly to be called into account in Gibbon’s own ‘age of science and history’, and respect for its usefulness tended to be more esteemed by him than its supposed philosophical plausibility, as when he had implicitly contrasted the antisocial virtues of early Christian monasticism with the sociability of Zoroastrian practice: ‘The saint, in the Magian religion, is obliged to beget children, to plant useful trees, to destroy noxious animals, to convey water to the dry lands of Persia, and to work out his salvation by pursuing all the labours of agriculture.’[6] Once Christianity had been established, however, there was no point in reverting to Roman polytheism. The dead could not be restored to life; and hence Gibbon’s highly critical portrayal of Julian the Apostate, whose attempt to reverse the religious revolution enacted by Constantine was condemned by the historian as an outbreak of Neoplatonic ‘enthusiasm.’[7] For the rest of the unavoidably religious story told by the Decline and Fall, the Christian West and the new Rome of Byzantium are subject to dispassionate irony, with an outburst of confessionally tolerant zeal as Gibbon lamented the impact of the Crusades as he did all religiously motivated outbreaks of cruelty, from the murder of the female philosopher Hypatia - in the ‘bloom of youth and in the maturity of wisdom’ – mercilessly undertaken by crazed celibate monks instigated by Cyril of Alexandria, onwards.[8] Sharing the suspicion of metaphysics of most enlightened thinkers, he had some regard for the unitarian rationality of Islam, having earlier in his history excoriated newly orthodox Trinitarian violence launched against Arians in the fourth century due to purely grammatical differences over an iota in philosophical Greek.[9] Irony was a uniquely powerful register.
As he closed the Decline and Fall in the fifteenth-century Renaissance of papal Rome, Gibbon appealed admiringly to the pacific example of Erasmus, the ‘father of rational theology’, as the violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation led to a new age of religious war and persecution in the sixteenth century, out of which Enlightenment Europe had painfully and slowly made its way.[10] Politics and religion were constantly intertwined in the logic of the Decline and Fall, and while similarities between Gibbon’s thought and that of Machiavelli in the Discourses on Livy can occasionally be discerned, Gibbon was no tirelessly resolute celebrant of ancient Republicanism as he surveyed the new realities of a world in which America had become a new Republic. What Pocock had identified in a 1975 magnum opus as The Machiavellian Moment - encompassing Machiavelli’s Florence, seventeenth-century England, and the founding of the American Republic - was but one of many political moments recorded in the Decline and Fall. If Gibbon idealised any such temporal political scrutiny, it was through what might be called a Tacitean Temporality.
Tacitus was for Gibbon the ‘first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts.’[11] The Roman historian was nostalgic for Republican Rome, but he was a realist who demonstrated how the Emperor Augustus had created a dictatorial dynastic regime through a deliberately delusory reimagining of republican ideals. (It was as if the Founding Fathers had veered off towards instituting the monarchy some Americans had favoured once independence was gained.) For Gibbon as for Tacitus, liberty was to be exercised wisely within necessarily accepted constraints. Political nostalgia would inevitably lead to the violence endemic to positive conceptions of liberty, as in Rousseau’s idealisation of Sparta as realised through Robespierre’s Terror. For Tacitus and Gibbon, on the other hand, politics was impure, the product of history and circumstance, and hence the variety of polities across the eighteenth-century globe. It was the historian’s task to narrate that history in a manner that encouraged readers to celebrate the many negative liberties made possible through the commercial wealth of nations. Modern liberty, as Gibbon reminded his readers in the preface to his first volume, was the paradoxical product of ‘the subversion of the Western Empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe.’[12] And it was as he wrote those words that liberty was extending across the Atlantic.
Endnotes
[1] George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (London, John Murray, 1812-18), Canto the Third, Stanza CVII.
[2] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (3 vols., Allen Lane, Harmondsworth, 1994), I. 89, note 9.
[3] Decline and Fall, I. 51.
[4] Decline and Fall, I. 56.
[5] Decline and Fall, I. 512.
[6] Decline and Fall, I. 218.
[7] Decline and Fall, I. 864-958.
[8] Decline and Fall, II. 945-46.
[9] Decline and Fall, I. 787.
[10] Decline and Fall, III. 438, note 38.
[11] Decline and Fall, I. 230.
[12] Decline and Fall, I. 2.

Perspective Essay Gibbon and Freedom

Freya Johnston

In the last sentence of the second chapter of his Memoirs of My Life (1788-93), Edward Gibbon turns with relief from remembering his years at school, ‘the cavern of fear and sorrow’, to another model of self-directed education. It is that of a grown-up, and driven by a single natural instinct and desire:
Freedom is the first wish of our heart; freedom is the first blessing of our nature; and, unless we bind ourselves with the voluntary chains of interest or passion, we advance in freedom as we advance in years.[1]
This is a Johnsonian thought in the sense that it acknowledges, albeit only in passing, the power of ‘voluntary chains’ to imprison us, however strong our appetite for liberty may be. However, if this sentence had been written by Johnson rather than by Gibbon it would most likely serve not as the conclusion but as the opening of a moral essay, one which would go on to demonstrate the general vulnerability of human beings to their interests and passions. The different momentum of Gibbon’s culminating sentence is created by the repeated word ‘first’ yielding to the repeated word ‘advance’. He probably had at the back of his mind John Dryden’s lines, quoted under the initial definition of ‘FREEDOM’ (‘Liberty; exemption from servitude; independence’) in Johnson’s Dictionary (1755):
O freedom! first delight of human kind!Not that which bondmen from their masters find,
The privilege of doles; nor yet t’ inscribe
Their names in this or t’ other Roman tribe:
That false enfranchisement with ease is found;
Slaves are made citizens by turning round.

                                                          Dryden’s Pers. [Fifth Satire of Persius][2]
Dryden’s speaker, the Stoic philosopher and rhetorician Cornutus, is at pains to demonstrate the tendency to mistake ‘false’ liberty for genuine freedom, and Gibbon’s brief, exhilarating vision of ceaseless progression and accumulated liberties does not itself ring entirely true. For one thing, it cannot be quite right to say that we continue to the very end of our lives to advance in freedom—a point ruefully conceded in the final paragraph of the Memoirs, where the author permits himself to imagine his old age:
This day may possibly be my last; but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow me about fifteen years; and I shall soon enter into the period, which, as the most agreeable of his long life, was selected by the judgement and experience of the sage Fontenelle. His choice is approved by the eloquent historian of nature, who fixes our moral happiness to the mature season, in which our passions are supposed to be calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambition satisfied, our fame and fortune established on a solid basis. I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this comfortable doctrine; I will not suppose any premature decay of the mind or body; but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.[3]
Gibbon died three years later, aged fifty-six. The progress through life that he tentatively envisaged for himself here was not the trajectory he was permitted to follow. It is as if his sentences already accommodate such a possibility—of human wishes proving to be at odds with reality; of any individual being at best only dimly able to apprehend futurity. Even were he to be granted a long life, he also recognises that its ‘supposed’ advantages may not really be those celebrated by some of his predecessors. A similarly dynamic multiplicity and combination of attitudes governs his interpretations of the past, but there is always an anti-climactic quality to his autobiographical writing—apt for the author of a work whose title was the Montesquieu-influenced Decline and Fall rather than (say) The Origins and Rise of the Roman Empire. Having cast about for many years in search of the right subject upon which to exercise his mind—another possibility was a ‘History of the Liberty of the Swiss’—Gibbon chose to narrate an empire in its twilight years rather than in its period of ascendance.[4] Such a choice entailed the development of a style that was capable of acknowledging not only the human appetite for improvement, enlargement, and progress, but also the human reality with which such desires are frequently met: decline, disappointment, and futility. Gibbon, author of a work to which he refers in the Memoirs as ‘my Roman decay’, saw himself, it seems, as the end of a line.[5]
The freedom to write history is directly related to the freedom to act in it as well as to travel imaginatively across its vast territories; David Womersley has written of Gibbon’s ‘mind ranging freely over world literature and making intelligent connexions with a perfect liberty of movement’.[6] (Such liberties include, as was usual in the period, the invention of speeches for historical figures; as Gibbon puts it in a footnote to volume 4 of Decline and Fall: ‘I give this speech as original and genuine. Ammianus might hear, could transcribe, and was incapable of inventing it.’)[7] Hence, in part, the interest and value of reading his Memoirs alongside The Decline and Fall; of considering the private alongside the published historian. Not that the Memoirs are overtly confessional or anecdotal, for Gibbon—despite claiming there to ‘have exposed my private feelings, as I shall always do, without scruple or reserve’—disapproved of such tendencies in eighteenth-century life-writing.[8] The record of his youth and middle age duly repudiates gossip and the inclusion of what he represents as needless commentary on other people. Instead, he seeks to identify in the growth and development of his own emerging character the traits he had already observed and remarked upon in other, historical figures; to discern patterns and impose form on what are presented as typical as well as individual experiences (hence his intermittent habit of referring to himself in the third person). Gibbon’s Memoirs reflect primarily the intensity with which he appreciated the freedom to shape his own life as well as his capacity to perceive the strengths and weaknesses of ancient leaders in appreciating the true meanings and value of liberty.
There are more and less desirable kinds of freedom, of course; it may be barbaric or civilised, ‘tumultuous’ or ‘rational’, private (e.g. conversational) or public (e.g. electoral), and it will be more or less dependable and lasting a condition as a result.[9] Freedom may be natural, but it is not always secure; it is sometimes described as a right, at other times as a gift. Most obviously, it is not guaranteed to whole swathes of ancient societies—those kept in slavery, for whom it could be at best an aspiration:
Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition, was not denied to the Roman slave; and, if he had any opportunity of making himself either useful or agreeable, he might very naturally expect that the diligence and fidelity of a few years would be rewarded with the inestimable gift of freedom.[10]
Here, ‘freedom’ is quite properly the last word—the motivation and the goal—of the sentence.
In volume 2 of Decline and Fall we learn of ‘the balance of freedom’ and ‘the equality of freedom’, phrases which are invoked to describe the relationship of the people to their leaders (without any leaders at all, freedom is unworthy of the name).[11] Such phrasing also captures Gibbon’s sense in the Memoirs of the emergence of his own ‘impartial’ character as a historian, how he handles rival or multiple claims on his attention, and the ways in which his style adjudicates between them.[12] Freedom in this context is best understood as the ability to keep more than one interpretation of the same character or event in play, without losing command of the sentence or the capacity to govern the historical scene.
It is a truth in both personal and national terms that ‘freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge’.[13] Gibbon’s infancy and adolescence left, inevitably, a marked impression on his approach to history. Largely ignored by his mother, the only survivor of seven children, he found his greatest comfort in solitary reading (initially guided by his aunt Catherine). After a patchy early education which was further disrupted by illness, he arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, in his ‘fifteenth year’, only to be neglected once again by those officially charged with his care.[14] Guided by his own miscellaneous and fitful reading, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1753. His father responded to the crisis by sending Gibbon to live with a pastor in Lausanne in Switzerland. The ensuing period saw him not only return to Protestantism but embark on a demanding programme of study in ancient and modern literature. By the time he came back to England in 1758, he had become the fiercely ambitious yet guarded man whose devoted friendships belied a seemingly chilly emotional life. Crucial to his sense of self and of history was the ability to impose structure and order on his surroundings.
Just as hierarchy and subordination do not entail the loss but guarantee the possibility of freedom in a public or social sense, so Gibbon’s capacity as a historian to organise his materials permits the reader to reach a variety of conclusions about his attitudes to those whose conduct he is surveying. Another sense of freedom is relevant here: not so much the licence to do something as the liberty to refrain from it. He may refer in Decline and Fall to ‘the truth and simplicity of historic prose’, but Gibbon’s own writing of history insinuates a combination of opinions and judgements whose effects are far from simple or resolute and which offer a multi-faceted, inconclusive appraisal of the past.[15]
Take this passage, which is itself concerned with the gradual corruption of virtue. The Roman and the Asian, the West and the East, have by this stage become impossible to separate, so that, eventually, ‘not a vestige was left of that severe simplicity which, in the ages of freedom and victory, had distinguished the line of battle of a Roman army from the confused host of an Asiatic monarch’:[16]
The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia. The distinctions of personal merit and influence, so conspicuous in a republic, so feeble and obscure under a monarchy, were abolished by the despotism of the emperors; who substituted in their room a severe subordination of rank and office, from the titled slaves, who were seated on the steps of the throne, to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.[17]
Such passages in Decline and Fall often turn on the distinction between, or more properly the loss of a distinction between, virtue and vice. It is characteristic of an empire in decline that the difference between good and evil should become harder to discern, even more so in a passage such as this in which individual human beings are not distinguished as agents but represented instead by abstracted elements such as ‘pride’, ‘vanity’, and ‘manners’. The mixture of passive and active constructions contributes to the overall effect of vigour and direction being slowly, fatally, compromised by hypocrisy and insincerity, and this is a carefully chosen stylistic effect throughout the history—it communicates the general point that the Roman Empire fell not only to the barbarians, but because its citizens themselves ceased to be active participants in their own society and became instead unthinkingly obedient to those above them. The introduction of Christianity had its own role to play in this insidious process of enervation, dependence, and the fatal depletion of martial vigour:
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.[18]
In volume 9, Gibbon expands again on the distinction between eastern and western varieties of freedom, or between the ‘simple’ and the ‘nice and artificial’:
The slaves of domestic tyranny may vainly exult in their national independence; but the Arab is personally free; and he enjoys, in some degree, the benefits of society, without forfeiting the prerogatives of nature. […] The grandfather of Mahomet and his lineal ancestors appear in foreign and domestic transactions as the princes of their country; but they reigned, like Pericles at Athens, or the Medici at Florence, by the opinion of their wisdom and integrity; their influence was divided with their patrimony; and the sceptre was transferred from the uncles of the prophet to a younger branch of the tribe of Koreish. On solemn occasions they convened the assembly of the people; and, since mankind must be either compelled or persuaded to obey, the use and reputation of oratory among the ancient Arabs is the clearest evidence of public freedom. But their simple freedom was of a very different cast from the nice and artificial machinery of the Greek and Roman republics, in which each member possessed an undivided share of the civil and political rights of the community. In the more simple state of the Arabs the nation is free, because each of her sons disdains a base submission to the will of a master. His breast is fortified with the austere virtues of courage, patience, and sobriety; the love of independence prompts him to exercise the habits of self-command; and the fear of dishonour guards him from the meaner apprehension of pain, of danger, and of death. The gravity and firmness of the mind is conspicuous in his outward demeanour; his speech is slow, weighty, and concise; he is seldom provoked to laughter; his only gesture is that of stroking his beard, the venerable symbol of manhood; and the sense of his own importance teaches him to accost his equals without levity and his superiors without awe.[19]
This passage, adjudicating at once boldly and uncertainly between the rival merits of personal and public freedom, between the simple and the artificial, the Arab and the Greek, then merely invites us to smile at ‘the venerable symbol of manhood’ which amounts to no more than a beard. We naturally turn to the historian’s or narrator’s voice to help us negotiate the past, to establish who was right and who was wrong—a despotic persona hardly seems desirable in this context, and Gibbon was himself no defender of empire, but does he offer us a sufficiently clear sense of his own character or position? Does he enjoy a personal authorial freedom without explaining its origins or intentions? Some readers have found the absence of explicit direction a positive enjoyment in his work; others have found it maddening. Clive James, reflecting on the fact that he had never reached the end of Decline and Fall, concluded that the style of the work was complicated for its own sake; that, while its author may have affected compression, he achieved effects that were excessively laboured:
He gives you contrivance. In him we can study the arrangement of prose pushed to its limit—not to the limit of prose, but to the limit of arrangement, where a trellis weighs like a bronze door. Though the intention might be the opposite, there is a risk of turning the permanent into the evanescent.[20]
Guidance to the reader is markedly absent, then, even if we retain the indubitable sense of an authorial personality at work on organising its materials; the risk of what Fred Parker has described as the ‘overtly constructed quality of Gibbon’s prose—so unlike the facility and flow of Hume’s History’ is that no strong impression is left behind.[21]
There could, however, be very good reasons for refraining from a definitive judgement on the past. One and the same cause might be responsible for vices and virtues, such that there is no possibility of meaningful judgement on its rightness or wrongness:
Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements, of social life.[22]
While the reader may look for clear distinctions, the past often yields a bewildering and seemingly paradoxical combination of qualities: that ‘mixture of servitude and freedom’, for instance, which Gibbon diagnoses (with characteristic nicety) as ‘not unfrequent in Oriental history’.[23] Perhaps one conclusion that may be offered is that, as Johnson put it to Boswell, ‘the natural tendency of all things is downwards’.[24] History is not itself exempt from the laws of gravity, or from the effects of time and accident; they govern all of our efforts to understand and interpret the evidence of the world around us, and they define the limits of the freedom with which we attempt to act. As Gibbon puts it in one of the most climactic passages of his story of ‘Roman decay’:
[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.[25]
Endnotes
[1] Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. with an Introduction by Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984, repr. 1990), pp. 73-4.
[2] Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language [1755], https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com.
[3] Memoirs of My Life, p. 175.
[4] Memoirs of My Life, p. 132.
[5] Memoirs of My Life, p. 151.
[6] David Womersley, The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 96-7.
[7] Online Library of Liberty: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury with an Introduction by W. E. H. Lecky (New York: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906), in 12 vols., vol. 4.
[8] Memoirs of My Life, p. 43.
[9]  Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 1.
[10] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 1.
[11] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 2.
[12] Memoirs of My Life, p. 163.
[13] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 11.
[14] Memoirs of My Life, p. 75.
[15] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 3.
[16] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 3.
[17] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 3.
[18] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 6.
[19] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 9.
[20] https://archive.clivejames.com/books/gibbo.htm.
[21] Fred Parker, ‘Gibbon’s Style in The Decline and Fall’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gibbon, ed. Karen O’Brien and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 167-83 (p. 179).
[22] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 2.
[23] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 11.
[24] Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Jack Lynch and Celia Barnes (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2020), p. 240.
[25] Online Library of Liberty: Decline and Fall, vol. 6.

Perspective Essay Gibbon’s Metaphysics

Mark Packer

As did many of his contemporaries, Gibbon rejected metaphysics. In his more generous moments, he described metaphysical thinking as little more than superstitions folly.[1] But sometimes he went much further, faulting metaphysics as the source of a Christian dogmatism that suppressed the moral qualities which had once enabled Rome to flourish.[2] Gibbon’s skepticism was historically appropriate. By the late 18th century, British philosophers had absorbed sufficient influence from the natural sciences that their epistemology advocated strict adherence to empirical observation. For these thinkers, even non-religious metaphysical ideas were too abstract, too vague, and thus beyond the reach of verification to be of much use.[3] Rather than aspire to transcendent truth, philosophy should focus on what is knowable through experience and should be functionally pragmatic. The traditions of Western metaphysical thinking fell woefully short of these goals, and were thus dismissed by empiricist thinkers as little more than ungrounded theories with little explanatory value.[4]
These are among the reasons why Gibbon’s historiography eschewed providential inferences and oral traditions. The study of history, for him, was to be rigorous and practical, relying on primary sources such as preserved documents and inscriptions. Rather than appeal to supernatural causes for historical insight, the historian must confine his analyses to what secular sources reveal about the political, social and economic conditions of the events he is studying.
In spite of Gibbon’s negative attitude towards metaphysics, I intend to show that his reasoning relied on assumptions that do in fact display metaphysical qualities. I will argue that without such notions, he would have been unable to inquire into the deep structures of history or generalize to the broad ranging explanations that comprised his principal goals. Gibbon considered himself to be a “philosophical historian,”   which means that he was aspiring to disclose universal and inevitable mechanisms in the historical process, rather than merely record its incidental occurrences. But as I will indicate, this raises a serious question about the compatibility of these larger themes with the empirical methods he claimed to employ.
Metaphysical qualities often appear in Gibbon’s descriptions of what he believed are the defining characteristics of human nature. Such would include the virtues necessary for the growth of empires, as well as the inevitable debauchery that causes them to decay. If he did not regard these traits and the cycles they generate as inevitable and universally shared, then Decline and Fall would have had to remain a cramped study of narrow particularity, providing little more than chronicles of the Roman emperors, legislative enactments of the Senate, and shifting behavioral tendencies of the Roman aristocracy. Moreover, the explanatory principles that Gibbon sought were moral in nature, rather than consisting of merely factual descriptions. He assumed that these normative structures are the conditioning principles of the historical process itself, rather than merely inductive generalizations based on social or psychological data. Logically speaking, empirical information is simply not strong enough to do the heavy lifting that Gibbon had in mind. When he extrapolated from his analysis of Roman history to develop a comprehensive ethical theory explaining why empires rise and fall, Gibbon had to rely on ideas that are much more than mere generalizations, ones that are universal in scope and carry the force of necessity.
These points can be illustrated further by scattered remarks about human nature that appear throughout Decline and Fall. Early in his analysis, in Chapter 1 for example, he enumerated some of the virtues that he observed among the Romans, but which he also believed to be necessary for all civilizations to flourish. Such would include patriotism, which he claimed “is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of free government of which we are members.” (p. 39). Gibbon’s use of the present tense in this statement is revealing, suggesting that he intended to do much more than merely describe an historically local sentiment. This is the expression of a moral principle, one which denotes a necessary relationship between citizens and their nation, without which societies cannot evolve and thrive. But in addition to describing the virtues that he thought necessary for strong and successful civilizations, Gibbon also discussed specific vices, such as the “natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,”[6]  which is a principle that he offered to explain why Rome had lost its moral substance. It is clear that by using such terms as “natural” and “inevitable,” Gibbon did not intend to identify an incidental occurrence peculiar to the history of Rome. The semantic markers of this statement indicate a far more general maxim applicable to all empires, ancient as well as modern.
Regardless of their factual content, there are several formal qualities these comments display which suggest metaphysical thinking. First, statements about inevitability carry a degree of logical force that exceeds anything empirical evidence can support. Sense experience can identify sequences and correlations between events, but cannot validate claims about their inexorability or necessity. Second, remember that Gibbon’s intent was to go much farther than just a description of Rome. It was his hope that the findings of Decline and Fall could be universalized to provide lasting lessons for his own and future generations. This comprises a range of explanation the scope of which far exceeds what empirical sources alone can avail. And third, as we have already seen, to derive the philosophical insights that Gibbon had in mind, he had to assume that history is a morally conditioned process, rather than merely a patterned sequence of physical and social occurrences. Gibbon’s friend and mentor, David Hume, argued persuasively that values cannot be logically derived from facts alone.[7]  Whatever information sense experience may yield, valid moral inferences demand that normative premises be conjoined with empirical data. Otherwise, our observational claims are confined to factual descriptions only, and lack the judgments necessary to add ethical insight to our theories. Thus, to move from observable facts to the epic moral conclusions that he sought, Gibbon’s study had to transcend his empirical findings and search for necessary ethical principles. Without such notions, which are clearly metaphysical in character, Gibbon would not have been able to magnify the range of his theories from the particular to the universal, from the contingent to the inevitable, and from the descriptive to the normative.
There are many similar comments about human nature in Decline and Fall for which Gibbon offered no empirical arguments, but which were indispensable for grounding his explanations. These include a belief he shared with David Hume that human behavior is driven primarily by passion rather than reason,[8]  and that the ambitious pursuit of power is a ubiquitous influence on choice, conduct and human relationships. Most important, perhaps, was the thesis running throughout Decline and Fall that as empires age, they eventually lose the discipline and the call to sacrifice they are willing to bear while they are growing and expanding. These reflections imply that historical events are subject to deep ethical cycles, in addition to emerging from material and political conditions. As with the remarks we examined earlier, such claims express normative evaluations of the human condition, and not just empirical descriptions.[9]  Gibbon intended these ideas to have universal, or near universal application, and to express a degree of necessity that logically exceeds anything observational data can support. There is nothing in the most scrupulous empirical analysis that can avail enough evidence to articulate any moral principles of history.
A limited study such as this can do little more than explicate just a few of the metaphysical assumptions at work in Decline and Fall.[10]    A more thorough analysis would be required to see whether these notions merely provide heuristic assistance, or if they have meaning and value that can be assessed independently of the functions they serve to facilitate the philosophical historian’s thinking. If they are strictly heuristic, then these concepts may amount to little more than expedient, ad hoc stipulations. But if they do have independent meaning, then they may prove to be concepts essential not only for the investigations of Decline and Fall, but which condition the very possibility of narrative history itself.
I can merely suggest at this point that there is one such metaphysical idea that narrative history cannot dispense with, and that is free will. Analytical history, which narrows its aperture to such physical evidence as coin inscriptions and tax receipts, has little use for this concept. The more empirical an historical study becomes, the more mechanical are its explanations. The analytical approach often reduces human action and relationships to behavioral statistics derived from demographic, environmental and economic data. Free will vanishes under these lenses, as human decisions are seen retrospectively as predictable outcomes produced by material sequences of events.
The narrative historian, on the other hand, has a much broader purview, inquiring into how choice impacts the contingency of circumstance. When free will is assumed, decisions appear to follow from ethical possibilities that can occur spontaneously, and with consequences that are unforeseeable to those present in the moment. The idea of free will is not empirically provable or reducible to any kind of physical evidence. For this reason, it is rightly considered to be a non-scientific concept. But without free will, it would be impossible for the historian to engage in an assessment of moral character, either of individuals or their societies, which was a defining goal of Gibbon’s study.  It would be equally difficult to understand the laws, values and institutions of a civilization as responses to the urgings and consequences of personal agency and responsibility.
If this is correct, then the metaphysical idea of free will may place narrative history somewhere between social science and literature. The physical and material data of such disciplines as archaeology and economics provide bedrock evidence grounding history in verifiable fact. But the metaphysical idea of free will liberates the historian’s imagination to investigate the humanity of the populations under study, such as Gibbon was attempting in Decline and Fall. History is thereby deepened and enriched, providing an intuitive and subjective portal into the lives of those who came before and who, like us, struggled to make sense of their lives and find meaning in the world in which they found themselves.
Endnotes
[1] Decline and Fall, Chapter 28.
[2]  ibid, Chapters 20-21.
[3] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)
[4] See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
[5] Cf., Hume The History of England, (1754-62); Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, (1748)
[6] Decline and Fall, Chapter 28.
[7] A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section I.
[8] ibid, Book II, Part III, Section III.
[9] As a matter of comparison, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau attempted to explain the human condition with state-of -nature hypotheses. These notions are also non-verifiable, presented as they are in a language resembling fable. Such examples provide additional evidence which shows that accounts of human nature aspiring to universality require modes of expression that are unconstrained by the limits of empirical information. Rousseau’s theory in particular conveniently evaded verification by asserting that the original stage of human development, the period of innocent contentment that he cited as the basis of human nature, had already been left behind by the 18th century (Inégalité, p. 114).
[10]  I fully appreciate the manner in which Gibbon tempers and filters these ideas so that his analysis remains sensitive to the nuances of careful empirical study, e.g., his notion of circumstantial causality. Such is clearly not the case with Hegel’s philosophy of history, in contrast, which coerces history into a priori categories.

Perspective Essay Edward Gibbon - Historian of Republics

Béla Kapossy

Edward Gibbon, the eminent historian of empire, had many other interests, including, and perhaps surprisingly, the history of republics. Although Gibbon never actually published a work specifically dedicated to this field, in his correspondence, travel journals, and some of the manuscripts that were subsequently published by his friend, Lord Sheffield, he frequently commented on the administration and politics of Europe’s city republics, how they had managed to acquire their freedom and, in some cases, also lost it. Before arriving in Rome, for example, Gibbon visited several of the once famous Italian city-states. In Genova, where he arrived on 28 May 1764, he commented on how the local aristocracy managed to maintain its hold on power. The highest magistrates were paid very little, while lower and much more lucrative offices were passed on to the most important citizens. Meanwhile, those excluded from political life, the "common people", were offered the "flattering perspective" of gaining access to the Genovese citizenry through a complicated process that occurred every ten years. Even though the chances for being co-opted into the select group of citizens were slim at best, the mere hope of a possible change in status, Gibbon concluded, was "enough for man to suffer all the hardship" of the republic’s autocratic rule.[1] In Florence, which he visited in June, the only trace he could detect of the city’s glorious republican past was the popular horse race, the Corsa dei Barbari, which the Florentines cherished as the "sole remnant of their ancient liberty", the rare occasion where the citizens reunited "under the eyes of their magistrates".[2] The city of Lucca, which he reached on Sunday 23 September, reminded him of Geneva, partly because of its industriousness, but more so because of its determination to defend the city’s independence against much larger neighbours. The extended fortifications, he maintained, served the double purpose of fending off any surprise attack while at the same time keeping the "courage of its citizens" alive. Gibbon regretted not being able to stay long enough to study the city’s constitution, claiming that "republics always merit our attention. They are as different to one another as monarchies resemble each other".[3] Pisa, finally, which he reached the following day, was a mere shadow of its former greatness. Once a centre of maritime trade, its population had fallen from 150,000 to a mere 20,000.[4]
Prior to his journey to Rome, Gibbon had lived for nine months in Lausanne (1763-1764), a municipal town of the Vaud which the republic of Bern had conquered in the sixteenth century. Gibbon commented on the political principles of Bern and how it affected life in the vassal territory in an anti-Bernese tract, Lettre sur le Gouvernement de Berne, which was composed during that time, probably after having read Rousseau’s Contrat Social.[5] During its over two hundred years of occupation, Gibbon claimed, Bern had failed economically to develop the subject territories, instead siphoning off riches and storing them in the vaults of the capital’s city hall. The widening gap between members of Bern’s sovereign citizenry and the rest of the population reminded him of Rome’s treatment of its allies with all the dangers this entailed.
Given Gibbon’s critical comments in 1763 and 1764 on the few remaining republics, it might seem surprising that his first serious attempt at writing a historical study was to become his history of Swiss liberty which he started working on after his return to Britain in 1765. Together with his close friend from Lausanne, George Deyverdun, who stayed at Buriton over the summer months of that year, he set out to gather material for a study that was to cover the first period of the Swiss Confederation, spanning the late thirteenth century up to the Italian wars of the early sixteenth century which saw the end of the Swiss republics’ direct involvement in European politics. Looking back, Gibbon claimed that:
[a]ccording to the plan, which was soon conceived and digested, I embraced a period of two hundred years from the association of the three peasants of the Alps to the plenitude and prosperity of the Helvetic body in the sixteenth Century. I should have described the deliverance and victory of the Swiss who have never shed the blood of their tyrants, but in a field of battle; the trophies of the Austrian, Burgundian, and Italian wars; and the wisdom of a nation, who after some sallies of martial adventure has been content to guard the blessings of peace with the sword of freedom.[6]
Gibbon’s interest in Swiss history and the constitutions of its republics, in fact, can be traced back to his first stay in Lausanne (1753-1758) when he visited several of the historical sights during a tour he undertook in the autumn of 1755.[7] In Grandson and Murten, where an alliance of Swiss cantons had defeated the armies of Charles of Burgundy (1476), he mused over the effect these wars had had on the history of Europe, while his stay in Bern prompted a lengthy reflection on how once military republics could consolidate their power. Gibbon’s decision to write about the rise of republican liberty (rather than about the decline of the Florentine republic, a topic which Gibbon had also at one point considered) coincides with his service as captain in the South Hampshire militia (1759-1762) and the republican fervour that seemed to have gripped parts of the English public during the Seven Years’ War. English patriots, Gibbon recalled, “complained that the sword had been stolen from the hands of the people […] and they applauded the happiness and independence of Switzerland which, in the midst of the great monarchies of Europe is sufficiently defended by a constitutional and effective militia.”[8] Perhaps the sudden veneration for the Swiss militias helped Gibbon overcome the boredom of having to march his regiment up and down the English coast. What seems more certain is that he saw a market for a study recounting the military exploits of small republics. Thus, in July 1762 he noted that the topic he preferred to all others was the history of the liberty of the Swiss: “From such a theme, so full of public spirit, of military glory, of examples of virtue, of lessons of government the dullest stranger would catch fire: what might not I hope, whose talents, whatsoever they may be, would be inflamed by the zeal of patriotism."[9]
In the autumn of 1767, after two years of preparations, Gibbon finally composed a draft of his history of the Swiss of which the first two chapters survive. Despite an encouraging response from David Hume, Gibbon soon dismissed the project, claiming that the distance from Swiss archives and his lack of German rendered the task impossible. Another reason was that after Britain’s commercial and military victory over France, patriotically-minded British readers would probably have been less interested in the exploits of republican militias now that trade and industry had revealed themselves to be the real sinews of a nation’s military power. In his Memoirs, Gibbon argued that the British republicans from the early 1760s “overlooked the modern changes in the art of war, and the insuperable difference of the government and manners”.[10] Wars were no longer won by virtuous “shepherds and husbandmen”, which is how Gibbon described the Swiss militias. What mattered most was technological advancement and the industrial and financial resources to sustain the enormous costs of modern warfare. Not surprisingly, in his General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, which Gibbon added to volume three of the Decline and Fall, the small republics play a negligible role in the history of modern liberty. The “two thousand three hundred walled towns” in Germany, Gibbon mentions, appear not as centres of civic culture, but serve their purpose solely as physical obstacles to potential invaders from the East.[11] Nor did the city republics seem to have any role in the development and spread of modern liberty. The gradual transformation of Europe’s old monarchies into modern quasi-republican states, “imbibed [with] the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation” was mainly due to the “the progress of knowledge and industry”.[12] In this Enlightenment narrative, the superiority of the West rested squarely on the commercial rivalry between moderate monarchies, not on any strong commitment to the common good associated with Europe’s small republics.
By 1776 when the first volume of Decline and Fall was published, Gibbon seemed to have given up on his earlier interest in the history of the late-medieval republics’ struggle for liberty. But there was another part of the story that he kept coming back to and which eventually found its way into the Decline and Fall. This was the topic of how liberty, once gained, could be preserved. This is something Gibbon would have encountered in Montesquieu’s Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, which he read closely during his first stay in Lausanne. In chapter nine, Montesquieu had singled out the Roman Social War (91-88 BC) as one of the key moments in the Roman republic’s path towards empire. As Montesquieu had explained, the alliances that Rome had forged with the Italian peoples had become strained once Rome had grown too big to be recognised as a neutral arbiter and guardian of peace. In the decades prior to the outbreak of the Social War, Rome and its allies had come to a common agreement, whereby, in exchange for local autonomy, Rome’s allies relinquished the right to declare war and peace and participated in Rome’s war efforts. However, the vastly uneven distribution of the spoils of war between Rome and her allies – notably, the increasingly unequal access to the ager publicus, together with the closing of Roman citizenship - widened the gulf between those who enjoyed all of the political and social benefits that came with membership of the Roman universitas and those who were excluded. The accumulated privileges that came with Roman citizenship, Montesquieu claimed, became a major cause for the decline of the republic: “when this right meant universal sovereignty, and that man was nothing in this world if he was not a Roman citizen and everything if he was, the peoples of Italy decided to perish or become Romans.”[13]
The ultimate decline of Rome was hastened when after three years of civil war Rome finally allowed all Italian peoples to become Roman citizens. At the same time as this move strengthened the peninsula, it also weakened Rome itself because the republic ceased to be animated by the same spirit of equality or united in its rejection of all forms of tyranny. With the arrival of different peoples into the city and the mixing of various cultures and religions, citizenship effectively became “a chimerical thing”. As a consequence, the republic took on a different meaning, not just with regard to its citizenship, but, more fundamentally, in respect of how the republic was governed. This transformation was accompanied by a shift from what Montesquieu called ‘good laws’ to ‘suitable laws’.[14] While good laws had allowed Rome to gain strength and conquer its neighbours, suitable laws allowed it to maintain its power.
It was at this point that Montesquieu had alerted his readers to the existence of a republic in the midst of Europe that perfectly illustrated the challenges Rome had faced during its transition from city republic to empire.
There exists in the world at this moment a republic that hardly anyone knows about, and that – in secrecy and silence – increases its strength every day. Certainly, if it ever attains the greatness for which its wisdom destines it, it will necessarily change its laws. And this will not be the work of a legislator but of corruption itself.[15]
To make sure that his readers understood what republic he was referring to, Montesquieu added a footnote which read : “The canton of Bern”. It is worth recalling Montesquieu’s comparison between the republic of Rome before the Social War and eighteenth-century Bern because it had an impact on Gibbon : this is how he came to read Bern’s relation to the Vaud. To the young historian, Bern was a living example of the problems Rome was facing in the first century BC. Already during his first visit to the city in October 1755 Gibbon commented on the way Bern treated its allies and vassal territories. After repeating, in part verbatim, the passage from Montesquieu on the Italian peoples’ resolve to fight for Roman citizenship or perish, Gibbon concluded : “the Bernese have read the history, why have they not realised that the same causes produce the same effects?”[16] So far, the advantages of a Pax Bernensis seem to outweigh the vassals’ exclusion from political life, something that Gibbon believed had less to do with Bern’s legal or political institutions than with the moral disposition of the ruling elite – a quality, he later claimed, the Genovese aristocracy was sorely missing.[17]
Comparing the canton of Bern to Rome prior to the outbreak of the Social War became a staple item in the political literature Bernese writers produced during the Seven Years War. Here, Bern was repeatedly portrayed as a superior version of Rome, not only, as Rudolf Tschifeli claimed, because during its initial phase it had expanded even faster than Rome, but, more importantly, because Bern had then managed to consolidate its power before tensions between the sovereign city and the peoples it had conquered became a cause for instability. Following Rome’s example, “far from destroying the vanquished enemy, the first principle of reconciliation was that he became a supporter, a co-defender, a citizen of the state. The remaining fortresses became [as in Rome] open houses of the republic”.[18] The Swiss historian Johannes Müller, whom contemporaries sometimes described as a German equivalent to Gibbon, summarised this debate in his essay on Bern’s constitution (1781), when arguing that “the Bernese [unlike the Romans] preserved the state, because they were wise enough to content themselves with what they had acquired. They lay down their victorious arms without forgetting how to use them.”[19]
During the 1760s, Gibbon seemed in two minds about the advantages of Bernese rule. In a lengthy entry in his journal for 1st November 1763 where he commented on the Abbé Vertot’s Histoire des revolutions de la république romaine he took issue with the French historian’s account of the alliance that the Italic peoples had formed and the reasons which allegedly incited them to break with Rome.[20] Not only had the allies who demanded entry into Roman citizenship violated ancient treaties that they themselves had agreed upon, they also misrepresented Rome’s interests and its right to exist as an independent republic: “the Italians forgot to act with prudence when taking up arms [against Rome], they also forgot justice.”[21] Instead, they should have trusted Rome’s policy of granting citizenship to the most talented families amongst its allies thereby keeping open a path to gradual promotion. Here, Gibbon insisted that he had first-hand knowledge of the benefits of such a process: “I am writing in the Pays de Vaud”.[22] Knowing how Roman liberty, once “Italy itself had become one single city ”, had turned into “a form of fiction”, Gibbon felt obliged to take “position against the allies”.[23]
Only a few months later, in April 1764, when preparing for his departure from Lausanne, Gibbon struck a rather different tone: " Today, I see a badly built city in the midst of a pleasant country that enjoys peace and tranquility and which mistakes them for freedom."[24] This, of course, was a central message of his Lettre sur le Gouvernement de Berne from 1764, in which an anonymous Swedish traveller chastised the Vaudois elite for mistaking Berne’s policy of non-interference as political liberty.
We do not hear among you of those sentences without trial, without crime, without accuser, which tear a citizen from the midst of his family. We never see the sovereign. We rarely feel it. However, if liberty consists in being subject only to laws whose object is the common good of society, you are not free.[25]
Despite early nineteenth-century Vaudois commentators who read Gibbon’s text as a justification for the liberation of the Vaud from Bernese yoke, Gibbon clearly advocated the enjoyment of peace and tranquility over a perilous and uncertain fight for political liberty. The Vaudois were no Samnites, nor, unlike Rome, was Bern committed to further territorial expansion. Tellingly, in chapter two of the Decline and Fall, where Gibbon mentions the Social War, his sympathies clearly lay with the senate of Rome who “preferred the chance of arms to an ignominious concession” to its allies. Like Montesquieu, he considered the subsequent admission of the Italian peoples into Roman citizenship as a key step towards “the ruin of public freedom” and empire. After that, citizenship was no longer exclusively linked to a city, but rather to a shared legal system and a common language.
When in 1783 Gibbon returned once more to Lausanne, where he was to remain until a few months before his death in 1794, the canton of Bern seemed to finally have escaped the sceptre of Rome. “[T]he country, the people, the manners, the language were congenial to my taste”, Gibbon wrote in his Memoirs. The Lausanne he found after a twenty-year absence was a place that seemed to have reached the level of general happiness and cultural refinement that could be attained under republican rule. This was not Rome under the Antonines, but a society of educated rentiers, “seldom disturbed by the pursuits of avarice or ambition”, and almost entirely occupied with domestic affairs. Whatever misgivings Gibbon might have previously expressed regarding Bern’s treatment of its vassal territories, with the revolutionary rumblings in France and Geneva getting closer, Gibbon declared himself a firm supporter of the republican aristocracy of Bern as the best possible guardian of social peace:
While the Aristocracy of Bern protects the happiness, it is superfluous to enquire whether it be founded in the rights, of man: the oeconomy of the state is liberally supplied without the aid of taxes; and the magistrates must reign with prudence and equity, since they are unarmed in the midst of an armed nation.[26]
In this respect, the advantages of Bernese rule, Gibbon wrote to his friend, Catherine de Charrière de Sévery in autumn 1787, were perhaps even preferable to the “stormy liberty” of British politics. Lausanne had something unique that could not be found anywhere else, “a gentle and simple society, politeness combined with simple manners”.[27] His praise of small, late medieval, common-law republics presents an interesting development from the General Observations, where his hope for the advancement of a civilized Europe had rested squarely on commercial, moderate monarchies. With the French Revolution, these new states looked increasingly fragile. By the early 1790s, Gibbon feared that the canton of Bern, too, which he, following Edmund Burke, called the last bastion of liberty on the Continent, could be infected by “the arts, of the blackest daemon in hell, the daemon democracy”, turning the otherwise peace-loving peasants in the Vaud into modern day Samnites.[28] If Bern helped Gibbon’s historical imagination towards a better understanding some of the challenges Rome had faced in dealing with its Italian allies, revolutionary France – Gibbon called the French the “new Romans”[29] – provided quite a different spectacle, that of a capital turning into an “independent Republic” set to dominate all other provinces.[30]
Endnotes
[1] Edward Gibbon, Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome. His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764, ed. G. Bonnard, London : Thomas Nelson, 1961, p.78-9.
[2] Ibid., p,127.
[3] Ibid., 127-8.
[4] Ibid., p.227.
[5] Edward Gibbon, ‘La lettre de Gibbon sur le gouvernement de Berne’, dans Miscellanea Gibboniana, ed. G.R. de Beer, G. Bonnard, L. Junod, Lausanne : Librairie de l’Université, 1952, p.109-141. ON Gibbon’s Lausanne and Swiss context, see B. Kapossy and B. Lovis, eds., Gibbon et Lausanne. Le Pays de Vaud à la rencontre des Lumières européennes, Gollion : Infolio, 2022.
[6] Memoirs, p.140-1.
[7] Edward Gibbon, ‘Journal du voyage en Suisse (1755)’, in Miscellanea Gibboniana, p. 5-84.
[8] Memoirs, p.108-9.
[9] Ibid., p.122.
[10] Ibid., p. 108.
[11] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley, vol.2., London : Penguin Classics, 1995, p. 512.
[12] Ibid., p. 513.
[13] Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, Lausanne : Marc-Michel Bousquet, 1749, p. 104.
[14] Ibid., p.108.
[15] Ibid., p. 109.
[16] Gibbon, Journal du voyage en Suisse, p.57.
[17] Edward Gibbon, Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome, p.79. "The Bernese constitutions might be more defective, but its administration is wiser and more moderate than that of Genova. Perhaps this difference is due more to manners than laws."
[18] Patriotische Reden, gehalten vor dem hochlöblichen Stande der Stadt Bern, Bern: Beat Ludwig Walthard, 1773 , p.27.
[19] Johannes Müller, Essais historiques, Berlin : G.J. Decker, 1781, p.72.
[20] Edward Gibbon, Le Journal de Gibbon à Lausanne 17 août 1763-19 avril 1764, ed. G. Bonnard, Lausanne : Librairie de l’Université de Lausanne, 1945, p.122-30.
[21] Ibid., p.128.
[22] Ibid., p.127.
[23] Ibid., p.126.
[24] Ibid., p.263. See also his comment on Chambery which Gibbon visited later that month on his trip to Italy: “Chamberry est la capitale de la Savoye. Les rues sont larges et bien percées, mais les maisons baties sur des arcades plutôt commodes que belles, me paroissent très laides. Il n’y pas un seul edifice qui merite l’attention d’un Etranger. On dit cependant que la ville est remplie de Noblesse et qu’on y vit très agréablement. Combien de rapports avec Lausanne. " Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome. His Journal from 20 April to 2 October, ed. Georges Bonnard, Londres: Thomas Nelson, 1961, p.2.
[25] Edward Gibbon, 'Gibbon's Letter on the Government of Berne', in Miscellanea Gibboniana, p.125.
[26] Memoirs, p.185.
[27] Edward Gibbon to Catherine de Sévery, mid-September 1787, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, 1784-1794, Jane Elizabeth Norton (éd.), London: Cassel and Company, 1956, vol.3, p. 71.
[28] Edward Gibbon to Lady Elizabeth Foster, 8 November 1792, ibid., p.288. edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, described the republic of Bern as " one of the happiest, the most prosperous, and the best governed countries upon earth ". London : J. Dodsley, 1790, p. 226.
[29] Edward Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, 27 October 1792, Ibid., p.283.
[30] Edward Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, 9 September 1789, Ibid., p.165.

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