Customer Reviews (2)

Gibbon
After reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, what a delight to read about Gibbon in a mere 111 pages (harmonious with Gibbons under five foot stature). A short treatment about such a large subject as Gibbon and his work could have been a problem, but Burrow pulls it off.After an opening mini biography of Gibbons life, the remainder of the book is an overview of 'Decline and Fall': chapter titles include "Rome", "Christianity", "Barbarism" and "Civilization". The best chapter is "Civilization", it can be read as a standalone essay about Western history, it is full of fascinating ideas and insights. The last chapter "A possession in perpetuity" ties together some loose ends and has an interesting discussion on the nature of art and immortality. Any book of this nature has to rely heavily on quotes and because Gibbons writing is so powerful he can steal the show, but Burrow more than holds his own, the cadence between Burrow and Gibbon is sheer pleasure. Yet, as Burrow says:

"To present a vast historical work like the 'Decline and Fall' as I have done, chiefly in terms of its organizing concepts and the explanations it offers, is necessarily to travesty it: to reveal the bones is to make hard, angular, dry and summary what in the experience of reading is enjoyed as flexible, rich and leisurely."(p.80)

The "bones" revealed by Burrow include Gibbon's stylistic device of black/white polarities underlying his arguments: Liberty/servility, vigor/enervation, manliness/effeminacy, simplicity/luxury, fanaticism/moderation, superstition/reason, theology/morality, asceticism/nature, unsocial/social and of course barbarism/civilization. This is not to say Gibbons has reduced history into a child-like "good vs bad" view, he does show ambiguity in human action, but his style or technique is to create polarities and then play off between those positions. This is an excellent work of historiography and intellectual history, I highly recommend it for anyone who has read Gibbon to better understand his context and ideas, Burrow treats Gibbon with a great deal of sympathy and the reader comes away with an even deeper appreciation and passion for the man and his work.

A masterful introduction to the life and work
This is one of the finest volumes in the ' Past Masters' series. Burrow tells Gibbon's story and outlines the major themes of 'The Decline and Fall' with concision and clarity .He sets Gibbon in the context of his time and shows how his Augustan eighteen century values effect his judgment of the second- century Roman height of development, and the decline from it. Gibbon sees the decline and fall as a movement away from Roman independence, hardiness, military self- sufficiency and virtue to social indolence brought by prolonged prosperity and luxury. The measured and balanced tolerant religions of paganism are weakened and defeated by the enthusiastic superstition of Christianity. The civilized West is overrun by those of the barbaric East. Burrow does a wonderful job presenting Gibbon's biography, the background and preparation leading up to the writing of his great masterpiece. He shows too how Gibbon's great style however it aligns itself in support of Roman social virtue contains a subtlety and elaborative greatness that enables it to capture the positive qualities of Rome's barbarian opponents. Burrow shows how Gibbon's masterful style of antithesis and balance, work to give his account a kind of aesthetic and moral subtlety and ambiguity.
This is a very good introduction to one of the greatest of all classics of historical writing. ... Read more

Product Description
On the publication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall in 1776, there arose a controversy that rapidly became broader than a dispute about an individual writer. Gibbon replied to his critics in the rhetorically brilliant Vindication in 1779, and then withdrew from the fray.

But the debate continued long after that. Gibbon's adversaries were more substantial figures than he was willing to concede, and it is Gibbon's account of the dispute that has for the most part conditioned the work of later commentators. This comprehensive selection from the writings of Gibbon's adversaries allows the reader to judge the critics for themselves, and so enter into one of the most important literary disputes of the eighteenth century. ... Read more

Product Description
This book studies the complementary features of the thought ofDavid Hume and Edward Gibbon in the complete range of itsconfrontation with eighteenth-century Christianity. The ten chaptersexplore the iconoclasm of these two philosophical historians --Hume as the premier philosopher, Gibbon as the consummate historian-- as they labored to `naturalize' the study of Christianity,particularly with attention to its social and political dimensions. Noother work deals as comprehensively or thoroughly with the attempt ofphilosophical history's challenge to Christianity. Belief in miraclesand the afterlife, the dimensions of fanaticism and superstition, andthe nature of religious persecution were the themes that occupied Humeand Gibbon in the making of their critique of Christianity. This bookmakes a valuable contribution to scholarship in a number of fieldsincluding the history of ideas, religious studies, and philosophy. Itwill be of interest to philosophers of religion, historians of ideas,eighteenth-century intellectual historians, scholars of the ScottishEnlightenment, and Hume and Gibbon scholars. ... Read more

Product Description
This fourth volume in John Pocock's great sequence on Barbarism and Religion focuses on the idea of barbarism. Barbarism was central to the history of western historiography, to the history of the enlightenment, and to Edward Gibbon himself. As a concept it was deeply problematic to enlightened historians seeking to understand their own civil societies in the light of exposure to newly-discovered civilizations hitherto beyond the reach of history.The troubled relationship between philosophy and history is addressed directly in this fourth volume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Work
Pocock is one of the great writers of history. In his history of histories he unlocks riddles and quandaries of the many Enlightenments that underlie Gibbon. ... Read more

Product Description
'Barbarism and Religion'--Edward Gibbon's own phrase--is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. In this third volume in the sequence, The First Decline and Fall, John Pocock offers an historical introduction to the first fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work, arguing that Decline and Fall is a phenomenon of 'ancient' history. Having set out classical and Christian histories side by side, and considering Enlightened historiography as the partial escape from both, Pocock finally turns his incisive lens on Gibbon's text itself. J.G.A Pocockis a prize-winning historian of political, including historical, thought and discourse. He has been active since 1984 in founding and directing the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, for which he edited The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993).His work has focused on the early modern period, but he is active also in the history of New Zealand, where he comes from.Other books he has written include Barbarism and Religion, I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon; II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985), and Machiavellian Monument (Princeton, 1975). ... Read more