Product Description

The second volume in the acclaimed sequence of Barbarism and Religion explores the historiography of Enlightenment. John Pocock investigates a series of major authors who wrote Enlightened histories on a grand narrative scale, were known to Edward Gibbon and were important in the latter’s own work: Giannone, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, Ferguson and Adam Smith. With his recognition that the subject of the Decline and Fall demanded treatment of both the patristic as well as the papal church, Edward Gibbon’s intellectual trajectory is both similar but at points crucially distinct from the dominant Latin ‘Enlightened narrative’ these writers developed. This volume is also informed by the perception that the interaction of philosophy, erudition and narrative is central to the development of enlightened historiography: once again John Pocock shows how the Decline and Fall is both akin to but distinct from the historiographical context within which Gibbon wrote his great work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #411257 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 440 pages

Review
‘Pocock manages to place Gibbon within these larger cosmopolitan movements without diminishing the historian’s extraordinary accomplishment.’ Tim Breen, New York Times Review of Books

‘Pocock the historian of political thought has not been altogether useless to Pocock the historian of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.’ Peter Burke, European Legacy

‘… the grandeur of Pocock’s conception amazes, but it is often the asides and apercus that linger longest in the mind.’ David Armitage, Lingua Franca

‘Thus we come back to the English Protestant Enlightenment and the point from which John Pocock set out on his magnificent tour de force.’ Nicholas Tyacke, Times Literary Supplement