Edward Gibbon and the Civilizational Perspective
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 08 May 2024 is the 287th anniversary of the birth of Edward Gibbon (08 May 1737 to 16 January 1794), who was born on this date in 1737.
We have a record of both the beginning and the end of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which add a note of personal poignancy of that great monument of Enlightenment thought, since Gibbon supplied us with the lived experience bookends of the experience of writing his book. Here is how he described his initial inspiration:
“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire: and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work.”
On 27 June 1787, just shy of 23 years later, Gibbon finished his great project, and he memorialized the moment with a note that appears in his posthumously published autobiography:
“I have presumed to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”
Gibbon was living in Switzerland when he finished his book, for the simple reason that he could do his work remotely and the costs of living in Switzerland were cheaper than living as he would have lived in England. Thus Gibbon was able to enjoy the view of the lakes and mountains of Switzerland that he mentions in this passage.
Gibbon’s tale grew in the telling. When he first conceived the work, it was to describe the decline and fall of the city of Rome. Gibbon’s work grew to a narrative of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and, having come thus far, Gibbon then also narrated another thousand years of the ultimate failure of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had become Byzantium. In a letter to Sigmund Münz, Ferdinand Gregorovious said that he had returned to Gibbon’s original project, which Gibbon had effectively abandoned by expanding his work to a greater scope:
“This conception of medieval Rome as a city originated with me. I gave it a literary form and carried out Gibbon’s first idea; for it is well known that he had originally intended to write the history of the city of Rome during the middle ages.”
Gibbon’s book, once completed, comprehended well over a thousand years of history. Greater spans of history had been covered by others, but no one else brought historiographical unity of treatment to this longue durée account of an epoch of western civilization. The title of Gibbon’s book — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — is familiar to everyone with the merest passing acquaintance with history. Even the idea of a “decline and fall” has become something of a cultural meme. The idea of the “decline and fall” of a civilization is as familiar as the idea of the rise and fall of civilizations over historical time.
The eventual comprehensive form that Gibbons project took forced Gibbon to think from a civilizational perspective. Because of its comprehensive, civilizational scope covering more than a thousand years, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall narrates the histories of many peoples, many societies, and events of many different kinds, which means that some periods receive detailed attention while others are glossed over. Gibbon’s history lingers over events he finds most interesting while passing with barely a notice over events that do not stand up to his implicit standards of historical interest.
What are Gibbon’s implicit standards of historical interest? We find a clue to this late in the book when Gibbon skates over a great deal of material and acknowledges his reasons for doing so:
“…the events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities, undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.” (Chapter XLVI: Troubles In Persia. — Part I.)
By these criteria, historical interest for Gibbon is defined by events by which the fate of nations are materially changed, when hostilities are not mere repetitions, when they are undertaken with good cause, then are prosecuted with glory, and are terminated with great effect. This is what I mean by thinking on a civilizational scale, and from a civilizational perspective. By acknowledging that he was largely passing over events that do not meet his criteria of historical interest, Gibbon also implicitly acknowledges the possibilities of other histories that conform to other criteria of historical interest.
Georg Ostrogorsky, in his classic History of the Byzantine State, which goes into great detail on matters that Gibbon only touched upon in passing, cites several Enlightenment thinkers who shared Gibbon’s relative lack of interest in the Byzantine half of the empire:
“The seventeenth-century interest in Byzantium had had remarkable results, particularly in France. Byzantine studies, however, met with a most unfortunate setback in the eighteenth century. The enlightened age of rationalism was proud of its ‘reason’, its philosophical outlook and its religious scepticism, and it despised the history of the whole medieval period. It was particularly contemptuous of the conservative and religiously minded Byzantine Empire whose history was merely ‘a worthless collection of orations and miracles’ (Voltaire), ‘a tissue of rebellions, insurrections and treachery’ (Montesquieu), or at best only a tragic epilogue to the glory of Rome. And so Byzantine history was shown as the thousand years’ decline of the Roman Empire by Charles Lebeau in his Histoire du Bas Empire (Paris, 1757–86) and by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–88). Gibbon himself declared that his work described ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’.” (pages 6–7)
Different standards of historical interest suggest the possibility of not only different histories — which, of course, have been written, and many of them — but also different conceptions of history.
Gibbon’s criteria that I quoted earlier for events that do not pass the threshold of materially chaing the fate of nations — “the same hostilities, undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect” — constitute an the “ebb-and-flow” conception of history as applied to civilizations. What do I mean by an “ebb-and-flow” conception of history as applied to civilizations? It is often implied that civilizations have histories, whereas societies below the proper threshold of history merely experience events as an “ebb-and-flow” without any pattern or directionality. These societies are not civilizations, properly speaking, and it is for this reason that they are rightly passed over with little or no mention.
This idea that only civilizations have a history, properly speaking, is given one form by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s criterion of “purposive movement” as definitive of history:
“…history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?”
This is from The Rise of Christian Europe (page 9) and Trevor-Roper made the same point in an interview. A 1992 paper by Finn Fuglestad, “The Trevor-Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History. An Essay,” takes up Trevor-Roper’s purposive movement criterion from the perspective of an Africanist. While much of this paper is taken up with some parochial concerns of African vs. European history, it has applications to Gibbon’s implicit criteria of the properly historical:
“I shall argue later that the very notion of ‘purposive-movement’ history is to my mind absurd. But first I wish to make it clear that I find any distinction between ‘barbarians’ and ‘non-barbrarians’ highly questionable. By accepting such a distinction one also accepts the establishment of a sort of hierarchy or ranking list between cultures and civilizations; that is, one transforms history into a sort of Championship or Olympic Games. The problem here is twofold: first, such a viewpoint of history hinders any attempt to understand and/or acquire insight into a society or civilization within the framework of its own values and notions. Second, once one begins to evaluate societies and civilizations the question becomes on which norms and values should such an evaluation be based? The answer is all too obvious: the norms and standards pertaining to the dominant culture or civilization of the time. And the dominant civilization has been for the last five hundred years or so — and still is, of course — that of the West. Finally, it is all too easy to dismiss phenomena one cannot make head or tail of — for instance, the past of cultures one has difficulty deciphering — by qualifying them as the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’.”
In the same paper, Fuglestad introduces the concept of what he calls “ebb-and-flow” history:
“…the contention that only ‘purposive-movement’ history is ‘real’ history needs to be rejected. I feel strongly that the only acceptable definition of history is that it is the study of the past, any past, including, for want of a better term, ‘ebb-and-flow’ history. Everything (or at least nearly everything) that has happened in the past ought to be of equal importance to the historian since it all partakes of the experience of mankind. It is this experience in all its diversity which we need to unravel and to comprehend as far as possible — if, that is, we want to understand ‘how we came to where we are’ and what and where we are not.”
What I am suggesting is that Gibbon implicitly made a distinction between history that is purposive movement, which rises to the level of historical interest worth narrating, and history that is an ebb-and-flow movement, which does not rise to the level of historical interest. However — and this is an important qualification — Gibbon allows that both forms of history can apply to civilizations. Gibbon chooses to narrate the purposive movement of civilization, and he largely passes over the ebb-and-flow of civilizations.
With Gibbon we can reasonably ask whether the criterion of purposive movement is precisely applicable, as Gibbon chose for his grand theme the decline and fall of Rome. Gibbon was not writing about the purposive movement of Roman history, unless we count the dissolution of a purposive movement as part of that purposive movement. I think this would be a reasonably way to construe history, that is, that a civilization in decline exhibits purposive movement, since as a civilization is failing it usually attempts a number of rearguard actions intended to retain and maintain the viability of its purposive movement, and these attempts are not at an end until the civilization itself is at an end. Certainly the decline and fall of a civilization is a material change in history, and we could make a finer distinction between purposive movement and material change.
We also could make a distinction between narrow and wide conceptions of what constitutes purposive movement in history, with the narrow conception being applicable to what Spengler calls high cultures prior to their entering into the stage of civilizational decadence and ultimate dissolution. The wide conception of purposive movement, on the other hand, would be the entire history of a civilization, from its earliest inception, when its purposive movement is still inchoate, to its final extinction, as its purposive movement grinds down to a standstill.
If Gibbon had implicitly held the narrow conception of purposive movement in history, he would likely have taken up Livy’s theme of the origins of Rome. The failure and collapse of Rome was, after all, counter to the purposes of the Romans, and happened in the teeth of all efforts to save the empire. But if we look at Roman civilization from the outside, from this perspective we can see the decline and fall of Rome as coincident with the purposive movement of the growth of Christianity and the expansion of northern European peoples into the Mediterranean Basin. All of these historical movements are integrated in actual history and bound up in each other. We could tell this story as a sequence of overlapping and intersecting historical movements. Gibbon chose to make all of this a part of the grand purposive movement, in the wider sense I mentioned, of the decline and fall of Rome. And within this grand purposive movement of Roman history, Gibbon was willing to treat ebb-and-flow history brusquely, even when it was the ebb-and-flow of civilization, which could also be understood as periods of stagnation.
Gibbon, obviously, doesn’t use the language of either purposive movement or ebb-and-flow history. Both of these are ideas from the twentieth century that I am reading into Gibbon as a way to understand what he found to be of historical interest, that is to say, worth narrating. We can defuse some of the disagreements of what is of proper historical interest, that is, the scope of history, or what we might call proper historicity, by making appropriate distinctions, as I have been suggesting here. Better yet, beyond a mere distinction between purposive movement and ebb and flow history, we could formulate a taxonomy of histories that would include both of these, perhaps with these two constituting the end points of a continuum of histories that stretch from purposive movement at one end to ebb-and-flow at the other end.
A taxonomy of histories is already implicitly known to us. Since the late twentieth century, micro-history has played an increasing role in historiography. Few question the value of, and many recognize the insights gained by, the detailed examination of a given village, or a particular life in the past that happens to be well documented — and most lives in the past were not well documented. John Romer’s book and television series Ancient Lives brought to life the ordinary events in the lives of individuals who lived thousands of years ago. I don’t believe that Romer was aiming at micro-history, but there is a significant overlap between archaeology and micro-history. The evidence of the past uncovered by archaeology often documents the lives of humble people, though the fantastic finds of tombs filled with gold and jewels may receive far more attention. Archaeologists have largely embraced this historical miniaturism and they now sift the remains of earlier excavations, in which only treasures were sought, to find the small clues that allow for the reconstruction of the lives of ordinary people in the distant past.
Compared with this historical miniaturism, Gibbon presents a grand sweep of history, from the height of the empire to its final dissolution in 1453 AD with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. This is what I called Gibbon’s civilizational perspective. We can identify even grander sweeps of history that have appeared since Gibbon’s time, especially in what has come to be called speculative philosophy of history as exemplified by Spengler and Toynbee. As we saw in the episode on Toynbee, he doesn’t limit himself to the decline and fall of one civilization, but maps out the panorama of the rise and fall of multiple civilizations over historical time. One could argue that this speculative philosophy of history passes a threshold that Gibbon did not cross, and for this reason we can call Gibbon’s work history, while the other work we could deny as being any kind of history. But we recognize, even in so saying, that Spengler and Toynbee have become stalking horses, and there are many other attempts to draw a larger historical picture than Gibbon, as in contemporary big history.
We could argue that micro-history falls below the threshold of proper historicity, and ought correctly to be understood as historical sociology. And we could argue, as above, that Toynbee is philosophy of history, or meta-history, and therefore not within the scope of proper historicity. Or we could accept that history ranges across the spectrum, but what distinguishes Gibbon’s history is that is the history of a civilization — or, at least, part of the history of a civilization. It isn’t the micro-history of one Roman city — though it might have been that if Gibbon had stuck with his original plan, later taken over by Gregorovius, of writing the history only of the city of Rome. And it isn’t an attempt at universal history, whether the universal history of Bossuet before Gibbon or the universal history of Toynbee after Gibbon. It is, as I said, a civilizational history.
Gibbon gives us the civilizational perspective on Rome and what we might call Roman-adjacent civilizations. Micro-history occurs on a scale below that of civilizational history, but it is still history. And the whole of human history is more than civilizational history, but it is still history. In my episode on Gregorovius I called this historical space between micro-history and big history meso-history, since it occurs somewhere near the middle of the scale of objects that might be of historical interest. Even within meso-history we can make distinctions of greater or lesser scope. Gibbon’s history branching through several closely related civilizations is near the higher end of the scale of meso-history, while Gregorovius’ history of Rome, being a little less comprehensive, is lower down the scale.
The meta-historical scale above the scope of Gibbon’s history verges on philosophy of history, as we see in the works of Spengler and Toynbee. Meso-history maybe philosophical as well. We saw in yesterday’s episode on Hume that the Enlightenment historians were sometimes called philosophical historians. We also can find warnings about reading any philosophy of history into Gibbon. For example, Paul Cartledge wrote: “Unhappily for those intellectual historians of today who wish to reconstruct or invent an elaborate Gibbonian ‘philosophy of history,’ Gibbon was not a systematic thinker.” It is true that Gibbon was not a systematic thinker, and the philosophy of history we would find in his work would not be a systematic philosophy of history.
We can also find claims that all history involves a philosophy of history. William Paton Ker wrote: “There is an implicit philosophy of history in every modern historian, even when like Gibbon or Macaulay he may seem for the time to have no interest beyond the narrative.” In my episode on Philosophy of History before Augustine I discussed the view of Hayden White that every history is predicated upon a philosophy of history, whether or not this philosophy is ever made explicit.
Gibbon was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers, and he brought his Enlightenment perspective to his civilizational history of Rome. In my episode of yesterday on Hume I said that Hume’s philosophy, also an artifact of the Enlightenment, implied a deflationary philosophy of history, and I quoted Gibbon on the role of miracles. In Gibbon’s essentially naturalistic narrative, even if guardedly naturalistic, he does exemplify the deflationary ideal by eliminating appeals to supernatural causes.
Insofar as Gibbon’s naturalism converges on our naturalism, we read him like a contemporary who shares much of our conceptual framework. For his reason, it is often difficult to see the problems with a perspective that we share with the author. As I mentioned in my episode on Marx, we don’t necessarily want to completely think our way into an author’s conceptual framework, as this eliminates any critical distance between ourselves and the work. But Gibbon has been around long enough for his critics to have seen the shortcomings of his work, at least, the shortcomings by their lights. Mark T. Gilderhus in History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction (p. 39) wrote of the later response to Gibbon:
“Critics such as Robin G. Collingwood in the twentieth century attacked Enlightenment historians on the grounds that their insensitivity in effect violated the integrity of history. More specifically, they failed to empathize properly with the historical actors or comprehend their behavior accurately on their own terms. Rather, Enlightenment scholars indulged in exposés, reviling the past to obliterate and overcome it. Consequently, Collingwood denounced their writing as an enterprise gone fundamentally wrong. They had failed to carry out the historian’s primary task, that is, to elucidate the past, not merely to condemn it.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Enlightenment history was fundamentally wrong, but its perspective does incorporate limitations and blindspots, as does any distinctive perspective. A history on the civilizational scale, like Gibbon’s, is not going to be focused on reenacting the thoughts of historical agents, which was Collingwood’s focus. This smacks too much of historical miniaturism. And Collingwood, on the other hand, isn’t going to be forced into making the kind of abstract conceptual distinctions among kinds of history that I have attributed to Gibbon. Enlightenment historiography is highly abstract, even artificial, and for that reason, distant and often unsympathetic, but by taking this grand civilizational perspective, it reveals dimensions of history that are not shown in as sharp relief by the methods of reenactment, historical sociology, or microhistory.
