by Judy Jones
from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.
from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Six volumes. Three thousand pages. A million and a quarter words. Accounting for fourteen hundred years (from “the Age of the Antonines,” in the first century A.D., to the stirrings of the Renaissance) in the lives of three continents, Britain to Palestine, including both halves of the Empire and all the nations that border on it, with special attention to the rise of Christianity and of Islam and to the eventual “fall” of Rome into the “superstitious” Middle Ages. Considered the greatest history ever written in the English language, a glorious melding of heavy-duty scholarship and high style.
Be that—be all that—as it may, there are really only three things you’ve got to keep in mind about The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. First, that Gibbon believed Christianity was the central destructive force in the collapse of Roman civilization. (Watch him excoriate it in the infamous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters.) By offering a lot of non-self-starters— “useless multitudes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity” is how he puts it—the promise of a life after death, Christianity undermined the rational pursuit of both virtue and reward, thereby weakening the Empire’s defenses against the barbarians, who took a more pragmatic, now-or-never approach to life. There were compounding factors, of course— imperial corruption, for instance—but it’s Christianity that Gibbon nabs, tries, and sends up the river.
Second, that the book really reads. Granted, it proved a bit much for some people, even at the time; as the then Duke of Gloucester remarked, “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?” For most everybody else, though, Decline and Fall is a great story told against a big backdrop, with a cast of characters who make ethnic sitcoms look subtle by comparison; a model of balance, precision, wit, and malice, veined with irony and spiced with innuendo. (Check out, especially, Gibbon’s footnotes, where, somebody once remarked, it was clear he lived out most of his sex life.) And if it’s sheer sonority you’re after, there’s at least as much of it here as in the speeches of Winston Churchill—himself a Gibbon freak.
Third, that there are implications. Gibbon believed that there existed a special connection between Rome at its height and his own England (which had, after all, just passed through its Augustan Age and which was about to enter its imperial heyday), and that everybody would surely like to see that connection analyzed, complete with it-can-happen-here overtones. Of course, it now seems clear—as far as ancient-modern analogies go—that the role Britain really played was Greece, leaving to America the somewhat thankless and totally grandiose role of Rome. Which is precisely why The Portable Gibbon deserves a place on the old bookshelf right next to Animal Farm and 1984. Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
Reader’s Digest, October 1955
Successive Occurrences of the War-and-Peace Cycle in Modern & Post-Modern Western History: Premonitory Wars (the Prelude), The General War, The Breathing-space, Supplementary Wars (the Epilogue), The General Peace—Overture and four Regular Cycles, 1494–1945
Title of chart, with column headings, A Study of History, Vol. 9
In London, in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War …, found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide.
from A Study of History, Vol. 10
The historian as vicar, out to provide a little comfort (admittedly, cold comfort), in the face of a couple of world wars, the demise of the doctrine of social progress, and a universe gone all relative and weak-in-the-knees. Toynbee sets out to solace his reader with his own special combination of cosmic rhythm, faith-of-our-fathers piety, and three-ring erudition. The one-volume abridgment of his twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–1961) is, evidently as a result, the only theory of history ever to hit the mass-market racks. And if you come away from the enterprise less reassured than filled with a sense of impending doom, there’s always the Durants.
History, per Toynbee, is not the great upward climb (as orchestrated by either God or Darwin) but a series of pulsations, pendulum swings, seasonal cycles, in which civilizations—of which our Western one is but the most recent of exactly twenty-one—rise, flourish, break down, and fall apart, the victims not only of external attacks, but also of internal failures of nerve. The basic mechanism in all this Toynbee calls “challenge and response,” and he proceeds to illustrate how, from Egyptian and Sumerian times down to the present, every civilization has gradually lost its ability to cope, inevitably succumbing to such unhappiness as the “time of troubles” and, finally, the “universal state,” which sounds good, but isn’t (Hitler was out to create ours). Toynbee’s system draws heavily on Spengler, but for the latter’s love of violence and pagan pessimism it substitutes mildness and the hope of religious salvation.
There’s a lot of Toynbee to be impressed by: sweep, scope, breadth of knowledge, wealth of detail, boldness, conviction, energy, the determination to see a pattern in the tea leaves. And a lot to roll your eyes at: didacticism, long-windedness, and the determination to see the same pattern in the tea leaves in the bottom of every cup in the tearoom. Professional historians bring additional charges: twisting of the evidence, procrustean-bed methodology, untestable conclusions, “pernicious determinism.” (They’re especially annoyed at how, along about Volume 9, Toynbee announces that it is religion, not civilization, that is “the serious business of the human race.”) And nobody, professional or passerby, knows quite how to behave when Toynbee takes time out from his system and lets fly with another of those trippy insights of his. Still, no other twentieth-century historian has known as much about as many different ages, peoples, and cultures; has made such a determined effort to see the forest even as he’s counting and recounting the trees; or has been able to make history seem like quite such a big deal. THE PARIS BUREAU
Frog historiography is a clubby affair. Even the radicals and the firebrands, once they’ve sat down at the old écritoire, start to behave as if they’re contributing to a single grand enterprise, consolidating a single grand reputation, both of which, in case you were wondering, begin with F. Still, what other country can boast fifteen years of revolution, another eleven of Napoleon, plus major shakeups in both 1830 and 1848 and a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870? With action like that, mon cher, you don’t have to send your best minds off to sift through the debris of ancient Rome just so they’ll have something to do.
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People
The great national historian of France is Jules Michelet (1798–1874), who liked to think of himself as a child of the Revolution and of the masses who made it; who singlehandedly “resurrected” medieval France (complete with Jeanne d’Arc), intuiting and emoting what he couldn’t piece together from the archives; and who bit by bit extended the story through his own day, becoming more and more bitter, and more and more biased, as he went along. His L’Histoire de France, in six volumes, is kind of like a magic-carpet ride (he’d bought Montesquieu’s old theory that geography and climate determine, among other things, form of government, and he insists on detailing every last hectare of La Belle France), kind of like a D. W. Griffith movie (he’d fortified himself with Vico’s belief that it was the man in the street who made history), and—at its best—kind of like a salmon swimming upstream, trying to get back to the essence of what was by ignoring, as much as possible, the overwhelmingness of what is. He won’t
shut up, but the man has heart.
Not so most of his colleagues, who tend to be of an aggressively theoretical, even clinical turn of mind. There’s Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), the grand-nephew of the acid-tongued duke who’d skewered Louis XIV and his court, who distinguished between “critical” and “organic” phases of civilization; who plumped for the reorganization of society under a governing elite of scientists, financiers, and industrialists, with artists in place of clergymen; and who had a big influence on Marx and on John Stuart Mill. There’s his disciple, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), arrogant, dogmatic, and a bit crazy, who divided history into three stages—the theological, in which God’s will was how people explained things away, lasting until Martin Luther made the world safe for atheism; the metaphysical, in which natural laws accounted for everything, lasting from Luther until the French Revolution and the rise of the machine; and the scientific, in which you reject sweeping generalizations, unquestioned assumptions, and wishful thinking in general for the elegance of the observable fact and the verifiable law, meant to go on forever. Comte called this “scientific,” eyes-on-the-road attitude positivism, and he promoted it nonstop; he also came up with the word for and the discipline of sociology, the study of man in society.
And there’s that second-half-of-the-century duo, Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892), each devoted to cleaning out as many national bureau drawers as possible. Taine, a disciple of Comte, thought of history as “mechanics applied to psychology” and believed that if you assembled enough facts, and then were very, very on the ball, you’d be able to come up with all the laws that operated on them. He really wasn’t that interested in counting and measuring, but that didn’t stop Taine from feeding all of history, plus literature and art, into his fact processor, then setting it on “mince”; from announcing that culture is a matter of race, milieu, and moment, which together determine something called la faculté maîtresse; or from positing that vice and virtue are no less chemically analyzable than sulfuric acid and sugar. Renan, who was less pedantic than Taine and who wrote better besides, yoked science and religion, raison and sensibilité, attempting to explain, among other things, Christ’s Resurrection without resorting to words like “divinity” and “miracle.”
Are we forgetting anybody? Well, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), of course, who was more political thinker than historian, and who had the good sense to get out of France for a few years. Having set up shop in America, he drew a line between liberty and democracy, worried aloud about “the tyranny of the majority” and the distrust of excellence, and predicted, just as Comte was telling everybody about positivism for the second or third time, that, within a century, the United States would have a hundred million people and would, along with Russia, be one of the world’s two leading powers.
Then there are Braudel and Foucault; we’ll get to them in a minute. ROLE MODELS
A century’s worth of them for the historians of tomorrow.
JACOB BURCKHARDT (1818–1897): The master craftsman. And still seminal after all these years. True, his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy ignored economics, scanted the peasants, and kicked the Middle Ages while they were down, but it also came up with the understanding of the period we call “Renaissance”—of man just turning modern, learning to function as an individual, painting pictures and practicing statecraft and knowing that he’s painting pictures and practicing statecraft—that scholars have been going on ever since. A cool, collected Swiss, with no particular ax to grind, Burckhardt took the Italy of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and distilled and bottled it, Borgias, condottieri, Michelangelo, and all.
BENEDETTO CROCE (1866–1952): The godfather. Exercised something like a benevolent intellectual dictatorship over Italy for half a century, during which he told Italians what to read and what not to read in literature, philosophy, and history. (Some of them still haven’t gotten over it.) Transcendental, intuitive, and just this side of mystical, Croce wanted to defend history against the incursions of science—and to give it a nudge in the direction of fellow-feeling. Or, as he put it in his History: Its Theory and Practice, “The deed of which the history is told must vibrate in the soul of the historian.” Himself equally the historian of aesthetic theories and of Italy, especially Naples; a fervent anti-Fascist before and throughout the War; with the shrewdest, sweetest (think Jiminy Cricket) kind of common sense: Croce is hard to resist. And even harder to read.
PIETER GEYL (1887–1966): The voice of reason. In Holland, the crossroads of Europe, where tolerance and sturdy ankles are a way of life, men make a point of taking the long and balanced view, of assessing what their larger, more ambitious neighbors are up to. Of course, Geyl can’t refrain from invoking, in the same breath with Michelet, Ranke, and Macaulay, a Dutch historian named Groen van Prinsterer, but at least he quotes Agatha Christie, too. Measured, penetrating, the upholder of the standards of historical scholarship, with a style someone once likened to a “douche of cold water,” Geyl rolled his eyes and delivered four lectures at the mention of Toynbee’s name.
FERNAND BRAUDEL (1902–1985): Had the common touch. Heir to the so called Annales school of French historiography—which said, “Enough, already, with the kings and the popes and the generals; let’s see what the rest of us used to be up to,” and which tried to bring to history some of the methods of the social sciences. In the end Braudel cared less about, say, the Peace of Westphalia than about the fact that wolves were attacking Parisians well into the 1400s; that tea is popular only in countries where there are no vineyards; and that even rich people ate with their hands until the late eighteenth century, which, coincidentally, is also when the idea of privacy was invented. If anthropology is your idea of history, if you like minute observation against a sweeping backdrop, and if you don’t care if you ever hear another theory of history in your life, then Braudel—either his two-volume The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II or his three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century—is for you.
A. J. P. TAYLOR (1906–1990): A smart Alistair Cooke. Dubbed “the pyrotechnician of history,” presumably because of his ability to hold millions of Brits spellbound while lecturing on various complex historical issues of the last few hundred years, and on the telly no less. Then there are his (at last count) twenty-six books, including English History: 1914–1945, sometimes said to be his masterpiece; The Trouble Makers, about dissent and foreign policy; and The Origins of the Second World War, a scandal in its day inasmuch as it portrayed Hitler as a traditional German statesman rather than a ravening warmonger, and laid a lot of blame at the doorsteps of Britain and France. All of which suffices to make him the most widely known British historian since Macaulay Industry gossip: Even with the popularity and the productivity, Taylor in 1957 lost out on Oxford’s Regius Professorship of Modern History to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the other British historian of our times, nicknamed “the sleuth of Oxford,” who’d been one of the front-liners in the attack on Taylor’s Origins. You can bet Taylor cackled to himself, though, when Trevor-Roper made the mistake, in 1983, of certifying as genuine the sixty Hitler diaries for which Stern and Newsweek had paid a forger several million dollars.
ISAIAH BERLIN (1909–): Mister—make that Sir—Sagacity. Born in Latvia, raised in England, and canonized at Oxford, he’s all for choices (the harder the better) and “the painful conflicts and perplexities of the disordered freedom of the world beyond the [prison] walls.” Once just another philosopher, now a historian “of ideas,” of thinking about thinking, Berlin is a thorough-going liberal, a dyed-in-the-wool pluralist, and a fearless crusader against determinism and “historical inevitability” (he rolls his eyes at the mention of Toynbee’s name but is above discussing him as an individual case). Naturally, he’s also a champion of the intellectual underdog, the thinker (Vico is his favorite) who is out of synch with, because ahead of, his time. Caution: While he’s been positioned as “the don who
can’t write a dull essay,” be on your guard against sentences as long as freight trains and the creepily casual dropping of the biggest names of the last couple of millennia, Plato to Pasternak and Newton to Nijinsky.
BARBARA TUCHMAN (1912–1989): Twenty-twenty hindsight. Not only does Tuchman see both doom and folly everywhere—in France’s wrongheaded strategy during the opening days of World War I in The Guns of August; in the primed-to-explode energies of fin-de-siècle Europe and America in The Proud Tower; in the chaos of the disaster-ridden fourteenth century in A Distant Mirror—she can’t wait to rub everybody’s nose in it. Though she’s a pretty good storyteller (she’s been compared with Gibbon in terms of clarity and conviction) with a knowledge of how to excite public—as opposed to merely academic—outrage and debate on behalf of her field, Tuchman’s character-is-fate expositions of morality can get on a person’s nerves. A bigger problem (but don’t let on we’re the ones who told you): She usually doesn’t wind up proving, after seven hundred or so pages, the thesis she posited with such elegance way back in chapter one.
RICHARD HOFSTADTER (1916–1970): Good buddy. The first major American historian who didn’t come from either a small town in the Midwest or a long line of Bostonians, Hofstadter’s the product of New York City, and he never stopped thinking in the cultural and political—and faintly radical—terms he learned there. Interested in such contemporary phenomena as the New Deal, McCarthyism, paranoia, the plight of the American intellectual, and Barry Goldwater; easygoing and personable (he wore clip-on bow ties and hitched up his trousers a lot); willing to admit that the picture he’d painted was subject to change without official notice (“I offer trial models of historical interpretation”): Hofstadter wrote to figure out what he really thought—and to share it with you, bro.
