erudition and the republic of letters 2 (2017) 431-458 brill.com/erl
J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion
B.W. Young Christ Church, Oxford [email protected]
Abstract
There are no parallels to the career of J.G.A. Pocock in Anglophone scholarship; the singularity of his intellectual trajectory is traced here through constant appeal to his enquiry into the intellectual environments in which Gibbon conceived and wrote his Decline and Fall; the present essay is an attempt at applying much the same interpretative principles at work in the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion both to Pocock and to this culminating study, interpreted as a summa of his practice as an intellectual histori- an. Pocock is an historian, not a philosopher, and this affects his conception of Enlight- enment, which he treats critically as an historian rather than reifying it in the manner of many philosophers. Pocock’s project is to undo the very idea of an ‘Enlightenment Project.’ Barbarism and Religion is not only a study of eight eenth-century conceptions of erudition and the Republic of Letters; it is a contemporary contribution to both.
Keywords
J.G.A. Pocock – Gibbon – Hobbes – Venturi – Oakeshott – historiography – historical theology – contextual scholarship … He was, we may suspect, a historian first and a philosopher second.1 ∵
1 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2016), 6: 132: hereinafter cited in the body of the text as br followed by volume and page number. An earlier version of this
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Few if any historians at work today can begin to match J.G.A. Pocock for sheer intellectual fertility; his contributions to the field of intellectual history are especially rich, encompassing many of its many subdivisions in a manner that renders such division redundant. Fundamentally, Pocock’s unique mastery of the history of historiography and the history of political thought has con- tinually demonstrated that any imagined boundaries supposedly subsisting between the two fields are entirely artificial, much more the product of specif- ic institutional contexts than of any purely scholarly demarcation.2 If Pocock belongs to a ‘Cambridge School’, it is one that unites the insights regarding the history of historiography pioneered by Herbert Butterfield (1900–79), his erst- while graduate supervisor, with the firmly historicised conception of political thought promoted in his turn by Peter Laslett (1915–2001), a research fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge slightly ahead of Pocock’s time there: in short, Pocock was the beneficiary of an immediate pre-history of such a Cambridge school of interpretation, identified by him as the ‘Laslettian moment.’3 And Pocock has proceeded well beyond the scholarship of both of his mentors, emphasising the role of religion in the evolution of political thought in a way that parallels the approach previously integrated in the history of historiogra- phy by But terfield, and similarly tracing its direct impact on political thought in a manner that deepens that originally discerned not only by Laslett (the secular son of a Baptist minister), but earlier in the twentieth century by J.N. Figgis (1866–1919), an Anglo-Catholic clergyman who was to exchange—in 1907—a fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge for membership of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the corner of the county in which Butterfield was born and still being educated as a young boy when Figgis moved away from Cambridge.4 In common with Laslett, Pocock surveys this history of the early modern European intellect from the perspective of an unbeliever, the son of a veteran of the First World War whose military experience had effectively (and perhaps
essay was given as a paper at a ‘Conceptions of Enlightenment’ colloquium sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities in September 2016, and subsequently to the J.R. Green Society at Jesus College, Oxford. I am grateful to my audiences on both occasions for asking stimulating questions of me. I am similarly in- debted to Noël Sugimura and Mishtooni Bose, who have commented critically on the essay. 2 Pocock, Political Thought and History: essays on theory and method (Cambridge, 2009). 3 Pocock, ‘A discourse on sovereignty: observations on the work in progress in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 377–428, at 381. 4 See also to essays by Mark Goldie: ‘J.N. Figgis and the history of political thought in Cam- bridge’, in Richard Mason ed., Cambridge Minds (Cambridge, 1994), 177–92, and ‘The cont ext of The Foundations’ in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations of Political Thought, 3–19.
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The great discovery which we constantly make and remake as histori- ans is that English political debate is recurrently subordinate to English political theology; and few of us know one-tenth of the theology available to competently trained divines and laymen among our predecessors.5
In making that statement, Pocock also displayed an intellectual modesty that determined him on securing a deeper knowledge of the theology known to such far from orthodox figures as Thomas Hobbes and Edward Gibbon, both of whom disparaged the orthodoxy of an Oxford in which they had been imperfectly educated, and an environment—between the periods of their own studies—in which, by contrast, John Locke had initially flourished before acquiring his own taste for heterodoxy. These are religiously musical elements that Pocock has learned to modulate in his turn in recreating the various climates in which that work makes the most sense, if paradoxically sometimes more to their successors than to their own contemporaries. Pocock is always duly attentive to paradox; not for him the interpretative urge to refine away difficulties when making coherent systems of thought that had rightly resisted the imposition of such coherence in order to flourish when orthodoxy would otherwise have rooted them out. Not for nothing has he proved the sharpest student of William Warburton, who sought to define and maintain orthodoxy by constant appeals to paradox. Ever attentive to argumentative style, Pocock noted that the greatest scholar of the early eighteenth century, Richard Bentley (as much as Warburton the most eccentric of the mid-eighteenth century), revelled seriously in paradox. (br, 1: 149–50).
5 Pocock, ‘Foundations and moments’ in Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton- Bleakley eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 37–49. See further, ‘Quentin Skinner: the history of politics and the politics of history’, in Political Thought and History, 123–42.
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But it is not a paradox that the sharpest eye for religious meaning in texts produced in both the early and the high Enlightenment belongs to a modern secular reader. Religious readers are often too interested in such texts to be entirely trusted as interpreters. The ‘religious turn’ is not without its more than merely intellectual dangers. Similarly, it has been a great achievement on Pocock’s part to remind modern, programmatically secular interpreters of intellectual history how peculiar are their own biases, considered histori- cally; no less securely, however, he has pointed to the many peculiarities of Christian theology, both in its ancient and in its modern varieties. Pocock is a historian, not a theologian manqué; as he cautioned in the ‘Advice to Read- ers’ in the fifth volume of Barbarism and Religion, which is directly concerned with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century appraisals of the history of the early Church:
Readers, Christian or non-believing, who may find themselves in analyses of thought they considered obsolete or false, are asked to remember that they are studying the history of a time when such thinking was offered and read seriously. In our time, when theism and atheism are again in direct collision, this warning seems necessary. (br, 5: xviii)
This was indeed necessary in a book published in 2010 in a way that few would have suspected when the first volume of the project had appeared as recently as in 1999. As he sadly observed later in volume five when writing of Gibbon’s revisionist account of early Christian martyrdom in chapter sixteen of the Decline and Fall, at the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘martyrdom itself has become a choice, and therefore a problem.’ (br, 5: 85) Pocock does not, however, believe that secular readers need ‘trigger- warnings’ as such; rather he is concerned as an intellectual historian to take seriously all the beliefs that have informed the minds of human beings, and in this he reminds us that the Enlightened thinker is not necessarily as enlightened as he has the potential to be, even in an era of recrudescent bigot- ry, both religious and irreligious. Above all, when discussing religion one must not repeat ‘the Enlightened (and Voltairean) error of supposing that what is rejected need not be studied.’ (br, 5: 3) Both Pocock and Laslett took a discriminatingly secular turn in their studies, but one which sought to do full justice to the religion and the theology that more than merely informed the political thought of early modern Europe. In this re- spect, both men stand some distance from the resolutely secularist direction in which Quentin Skinner has subsequently taken study of the period; by con- trast, John Dunn’s ground-breaking study of The Political Thought of John Locke
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(1969) took forward what Laslett had initiated in understanding the specifical- ly theological nature of Locke’s politics. The limitations of Skinner’s secularism have been cogently, if somewhat relentlessly, examined in a collection of es- says edited by Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, Seeing things their way: intellectual history and the return of religion (2009), but this was in its own way a species of history as apologetic; and Pocock implies wariness about the potential consequences of this generational shift regarding religion, more notable in America than in Britain, as he fleetingly observes that ‘most histo- rians, until recently’ were ‘agnostic and post-Christian.’ (br, 5: 313) Pocock has always attended to the voice of religion in the education of humanity without himself believing in any of its many varieties, and in this way his contribution to the field is to be compared most directly with that of Sir Noel Malcolm, who has done more to instantiate the centrality of religion in Hobbes’s thought than any other scholar since Pocock imaginatively and systematically rescued the philosopher’s eschatology from the enormous condescension displayed by historians of political thought. Posterity is a necessarily moving target; who would now dare to produce an edition of Leviathan without books three and four, as had commonly been the case before Pocock’s seminal essay on ‘Time, history and eschatology in the thought of Thomas Hobbes’ appeared in But- terfield’s festschrift, in 1970?6 Understandably, therefore, it seems to be almost a matter of regret for Pocock when he notes that Gibbon never evinced the slightest interest in Hobbes, either as a theologian or as a decidedly unconven- tional ecclesiastical historian. (br, 5: 283; 6: 112) Pocock’s interest in religion is not, therefore, in any sense, a form of apolo- getic; he is a sceptic in religion as well as in politics, and in this respect some distance from Butterfield, the leading Christian apologist in twentieth-century British historiography. But he did imbibe from Butterfield the duty to be atten- tive to the particularity of the past, whatever the imperatives of the present. It is impossible to imagine Pocock writing an essay on ‘What is living and what is dead in the political theory of John Locke’, as did John Dunn as long ago as 1986, thereby revising slightly his theologically-literate study of Locke’s politi- cal thought, an indication of the simultaneity of interests that gradually gave way in Dunn’s studies to a historically-informed version of political theory .7 Similarly, it is doubtful that Pocock would readily accept Quentin Skinner’s question-begging separation between the antiquarian and the politically
6 The essay was subsequently reprinted in Politics, Language and Time: essays on political thought and history (New York, 1971), 148–201. 7 ‘John Dunn, ‘What is living and what is dead in the political theory of John Locke?’ in Inter- preting Political Responsibility: essays 1981–1989 (Princeton, nj, 1989), 9–25.
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relevant, as made in Liberty Before Liberalism.8 One should already begin to detect distance from the often-invoked ‘Cambridge School’ with which P ocock is usually, if often lazily, associated; his interpretative imperatives are not always those either of Dunn or of Skinner, but are in some ways closer to those of Michael Oakeshott to whose festschrift he contributed an essay gravid with implications for global history and for the conceptualisation of time as a cat- egory of thought and experience. ‘Time, Institutions and Actions’ developed ideas in 1968 that were first elaborated in 1964 in an exploratory article entitled ‘Ritual, language, and power: an essay on the apparent political meanings of ancient Chinese philosophy’, a piece that manifestly constituted a contribu- tion to scholarship that was pioneering in its combination of intellectual histo- ry and of anthropologically acute cultural history.9 Both essays were concerned with conceptions of time, and time is of the essence of much that Pocock has written about, from the relationship between historical and legal time in his first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), to the study for which he remains best known, The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975, the era of that great modern Machiavel, Henry Kissinger. And lest any readers remain inclined to fall for the old canard that Pocock’s knotty prose is impenetrable, consider his lapidary statement in a bicentennial essay of 1976: ‘The Nixon administration was immolated on altars originally built by the Old Whigs; and the knives were still sharp.’10 Reflection on that bicentenary initiated the enquiries that were to result in his richly-contoured study of the many landscapes in which to read Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which appeared in 1776. 1776 was an annus mirabilis in British intellectual history, witnessing the appearance of that initiating volume alongside the first publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, both texts read on his deathbed by that greatest of eighteenth-century critics, David Hume.11 Contextual studies are best understood by reading them in their own contexts, and Pocock’s work on Gibbon is best interpreted by placing its origins in the immediate wake of the publication of The Machiavellian Moment, a study that is itself appropriately best read in Pocock’s own very particular
8 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), 101–20. 9 Reproduced respectively in Politics, Language and Time, 233–72 and 42–79. 10 Pocock, ‘1776: The revolution against Parliament’ in Virtue, Commerce, and History: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1981), 73–88, at 83. 11 Pocock, ‘Hume and the American Revolution: the dying thoughts of a North Briton’ in Virtue, commerce, and history, 125–41.
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Atlantic setting. Gibbon appears twice and fleetingly in The Machiavellian Moment , first in the company of James Harrington, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson, and secondly—and presciently—in a footnote concern- ing Machiavelli’s cogitations regarding the relationship between time and a religiously-charged ideal of eternity: ‘This Machiavelli says is brought about by changes of religion and of language: a concept which in some respects an- ticipates Gibbon’s “triumph of barbarism and religion.”’12 In the second of the two essays he devoted to the celebration of the bicentenary of the originating volume of Gibbon’s history, Pocock announced his intention to ‘complete a full-length study, to be entitled Barbarism and Religion: civil history in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’: depending on how expansive one’s view is of a ‘full-length study’, it was to be fully thirteen years before that study began to appear, and thirty before it was completed: if indeed, it has been completed.13 Later, in The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, the first volume of Barbarism and Religion, Pocock would complete the symmetry when noting of Gibbon’s studies in the Hampshire militia: ‘There is a Machiavellian moment—that is, a moment of republican doubt as to the movement of history—implicit in Gibbon’s new set of interests’ (br, 1: 128). And the Machiavellian moment would recur elsewhere in the series; in the second volume, Narratives of Civil Government, it includes not only Gibbon but also Montesquieu (br, 2: 376), and in the third volume of the series, The First Decline and Fall, it is the first volume of the Decline and Fall which is seen as most engaged with a Machiavellian moment (br, 3: 259, 267). In the fourth instalment of the series, daringly and reflexively entitled Barbarians, Savages and Empires, Pocock again referred to ‘the Machiavellian dialectic of the Decline and Fall.’ (br, 4: 63). And most unexpectedly, perhaps, is the transformation revealed in the fifth volume (Religion: the first triumph) of Christian enthusiasm into virtù ‘of a kind both ecclesiastical and Machiavellian’ so that ‘it may not be too much to say we are in the presence of a Machiavellian moment.’ (br, 5: 275). Machiavelli does not appear at all in the sixth and final volume of the series, the title of which tells one why: Barbarism: triumph in the West. With the rise of Catholic western and Orthodox eastern Europe, any possibility of a Machiavellian moment had passed.
12 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political thought in the Atlantic Republican tradition (Princeton, 1975), 211, 217n. 13 Pocock, ‘Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and the world view of the Late Enlightenment’ in Virtue, Commerce, and History, 143–56, at 143 note. This expands an essay, also originally published in 1977, ‘Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as civic humanist and philo- sophical historian’ in G.W. Bowersock and John Clive eds., Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass, 1977).
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Moments abound in Barbarism and Religion, sometimes more seriously, perhaps, than at others. There is a ‘Sallustian moment’ (br, 3: 37, 147, 188), and a temporally problematic ‘proto-humanist and proto-republican moment’ in Otto of Freising (br, 3: 125). Gibbon’s preoccupation with that supposedly happiest of epochs in human history becomes his ‘Antonine moment’, which is subsequently accorded its own chapter, as in the conclusion to the third volume of Barbarism and Religion is the altogether more experientially com- plicated ‘Constantinean moment’. (br, 3: 379, 419–47, 489–500). And contest- ing this final regnal moment is a neglected figure in the creation of late antique history, Zosimus, celebrated passingly as having enjoyed a ‘Zosiman moment’ against Constantine as a military ruler. (br, 3: 298–300, 464) The ‘moment’ is a heuristic conceit of great interpretative power, fruitfully drawing on Pocock’s profound withdrawal into historiographical reflection in the 1970s. The ‘ecology’ of Pocock’s experience of the 1970s is as worthy of attention as was that of Gibbon from the 1760s into the 1780s.14 Scholars of Pocock’s generation, particularly but not only those teaching in American universities, witnessed the first wave of the conscious politicisation of the academy in the 1960s, but as the generation that was itself educated in the heady atmosphere of 1968 slowly begins to retire, the immediate results of that initial radicalisa- tion of the academy will only gradually become apparent, save to say that a rather different genealogy of capitalism from the one they have frequently pro- moted had begun to be charted almost as a direct result of their disavowal of a wider post-war consensus. Pocock is an admirer of Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal, a ground-breaking study by Edward and Lilian Bloom that appeared in 1971 and a book that nowhere evokes the idea of Enlightenment but which per- tinently (and appropriately) details Addison’s critique of ‘Enthusiasm’ as well as pioneering due consideration of his celebration of commerce. It is worth pausing here to consider the intellectual situation in which the Blooms’ book appeared, in 1971, ahead of Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, which left the stocks in 1977; the noisy contentions over capitalism of the 1960s were gradually giving way in the minds of older scholars to the dispassionate exploration of the historical origins of capitalism as a social and a moral en- tity, a pivotal reorientation in thinking that would go on to inform the work of Thomas Horne and E.J. Hundert on Bernard Mandeville.15 Pocock’s history of commerce was developed in the immediate wake of such work, and is in this
14 On this idea of an ‘ecology’ of the Decline and Fall, see br, 1: 10. Elsewhere in the series, he refers to ‘the ideological and rhetorical climate’ of the same work: br, 4: 313. 15 See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph (Princeton, nj, 1977); Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard
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Mandeville (London, 1978); E.J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the discovery of society (Cambridge, 1994). 16 He acknowledges that Gibbon’s ‘philosophical scepticism’ is ‘ultimately Leclercian and Lockean’ (br, vi: 127). But the priority of his scepticism remains historical rather than philosophical. 17 See T.J. Reed, ‘Sympathy and empathy: Isaiah’s dilemma, or how he let the Enlightenment down’, in Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson eds., Isaiah Berlin and the Enlighten- ment (Oxford, 2016), 113–20. Reed corrects the translation of ‘aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden’ favoured by Berlin to ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing entirely straight can be made.’ (at 117).
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The defence of erudition that Gibbon sought to construct in the Essai was a defence of civil history against natural; a defence of ‘the imagination and the judgment’ that rendered intelligible and sympathetic what Kant (and Isaiah Berlin) were to call ‘the crooked timber of humanity’—the dense, enigmatic and in the Tacitean sense arcane texture of human conduct in the contexts of actual history. (br, 2: 23).
This is an elucidation of the phrase that is at once dense, difficult, demanding, and definitive. Pocock’s appeal to Tacitus, Gibbon’s historian-philosopher, makes great sense here, as later in the same volume is his claim that Hume— according to Pocock (and as is surely the case) ‘the only philosopher to have been not merely a good, but a great historian’ (and hence conspicuously unlike Berlin?)—‘liked noting that the timbers of humanity were as crooked in the timber of humanity in the history of manners as in that of statecraft.’ (br, 2: 284, 249). In his final, and in every sense culminating, use of the phrase, Pocock resolves a series of historiographical puzzles—not least Momigliano’s contention that in Gibbon one witnesses a unique fusion of the érudit and the philosophe—by stating, elegantly and simply, that: ‘What Kant was to call the “crooked timber of humanity”, never to be quite straightened by philosophy, was the subject of history and the theme of the historian.’ (br, 4: 177). In the context of Pocock’s vocation as an intellectual historian—and in implied con- trast with that of Berlin as a self-styled historian of ideas—this could be read as a personal credo. Naturally, and consistently, it is a rhythm that Pocock also works out histori- cally. He takes evident, if restrained, pleasure in insisting that Gibbon was not a philosophe (br, 1: 255) much as he offers an implied critique of Adam Smith’s tendency to treat history as a heuristic discipline rather than an end in itself. (br, 2: 329). Of course, central to his continuing discussion of what he identi- fies as the ‘Enlightened’ narrative is a balance between history and philosophy, but he also notes that within the complex structures of the Decline and Fall this is adopted (and adapted) as a metanarrative. (br, 2: 371). Similarly, in another evocation of the Kantian phrase, Tacitus and later Gibbon are interpreted, à la Momigliano, as seeking to absorb philosophy into history and, by implication, as not putting history merely into the service of philosophy:
Narrative—the Tacitean relation of the arcana of the crooked tim- ber -and erudition—the ironies discoverable in the documented record of society and culture—entered into a debate with philosophy and re- vealed human nature in its knotted grain, the facts about it such that only imagination and judgment could bring them to a settlement. (br, 2: 159).
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History complicates philosophy. A footnote reference to a passing comment in the Memoirs likewise reveals in Gibbon ‘an account of superstition more historical and less philosophical than Hume’s.’ (br, 4: 138 note)18 At its best, both for Gibbon and manifestly for Pocock, history and philosophy are mutually informative in shaping what is still, above all else, an hist orical en- terprise. In his appreciation of the Platonising complications of the Church Fa- thers and its impact on the early Church, Gibbon drew on philosophy but even more on the ecclesiastical history of both the consciously heterodox Conyers Middleton and the peculiarly orthodox William W arburton. (br, 5: 237) More technically, and writing of how and why Beausobre’s history of Manichaeism has fallen into neglect, Pocock adventured that, ‘Perhaps the reason for the modern indifference is that such a historiography is still seen as incidental to the history of philosophy, as written by philosophers.’ (br, 4: 143). Pocock has doubts about such a quasi-historical enterprise, and with good reason, not least because of the effect on the history of a concept central to his work on Gibbon, the idea promoted in what philosophers insist on calling ‘the Enlight enment Project.’ (br, 1: 251). As Pocock argues throughout Barbarism and Religion, there is no single Enlightenment, but rather a series of Enlightenments, many of which had a religious character. In this respect he offers a decisive challenge to Peter Gay’s claim that the Enlightenment constituted a revival of paganism (br, 3: 79–80), agreeing with many younger scholars, contra Gay and other sec- ular celebrants, that there was an Enlightenment ‘with a history of its own’ that Gibbon did not know of: a Catholic Enlightenment. (br, 4: 89; 6: 80) It is no coincidence that it is a historian who insists on a plural experience of Enlightenment, rather than seeking to identify a singular unitary category for the term.19 Historians, after all, are more typically nominalists than real- ists, or to evoke a more homely image pioneered by J.H. Hexter, more often by disposition splitters than lumpers, and only a philosopher could have cre- ated that entirely imaginary bugbear, ‘the Enlightenment Project.’20 Alasdair MacIntyre’s regrettably influential piece of shorthand first adumbrated in After Virtue (1981) is in many ways the result of his defection from Marxism and his consequent reception by Aristotelian virtue theory, a transition from highly-theorised sociology to rejuvenated Scholasticism, from disillusion
18 Thus reinforcing his caustic injunction that, ‘The Memoirs are to be read with caution, but to be read.’ (br, 2: 398). 19 See B.W. Young, ‘Preludes and postludes to Gibbon: variations on an impromptu by J.G.A. Pocock’, History of European Ideas 35 (2009), 418–32. 20 J.H. Hexter, ‘The Historical Method of Christopher Hill’ in On Historians: a scrutiny of some modern practitioners (London, 1979), 227–51.
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21 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory (London, 1981), 35–75, and passim. 22 Pocock, ‘The concept of a language and the métier d’historien: some considerations on practice,’ in Political Thought and History, 87–105; ‘Introduction: the state of the art’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History, 1–34. 23 See Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in On History and other essays (Oxford, 1983), 179–210.
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It is refreshing thereby to be reminded of the humanistic implications of historical and linguistic inquiry in the wake of the infinite complexities of poststructuralism, which it would be hard to get on the back of a postcard, as it were, be it of Plato teaching or otherwise.24 To invoke a favoured Heg elian metaphor of Pocock’s, the Owl of Minerva has got rather dizzy of late, as dusk has tended to prevail over daylight. This was the gravamen of his under- appreciated inaugurating series of Isaiah Berlin Lectures, delivered at Oxford back in 1997, a detailing of the difficulties facing a sceptical liberal humanist in the decentred politics of the academy, to invoke a phrase redolent of those deeply contested years, the legacy of which continues to be felt. ‘Conceptions of the Enlightenment’ were among the many casualties of the culture wars. Negative conceptions were increasingly de rigueur, and Foucault could be made all too readily to collide with MacIntyre as ‘the Enlightenment Project’ was fashionably derided as an illusory technology of modern statist instru- mentality, a species of secular rationality.25 There is no appeal to any such theoretical models in Pocock’s first engage- ments with the idea of an English Enlightenment. Instead, it is with unme- diated historical experience, particularly in politics and religion that he is invariably concerned, and his debts are largely to other historians, as are his occasional contentions. In his first account, he traces an English experience of Hazard’s Crisis of the European Mind, as the ‘Enthusiasm’ of the Civil War sects developed a dynamic in the Interregnum which only began to be syst ematically undone at the Restoration, both by Presbyterians, hoping for a comprehen- sive religious settlement, as well as by the Restored Church of England, which quickly outpaced Presbyterian attempts at Comprehension. The story he has to tell of the quenching of the spiritual and political anarchy that ‘enthusi- asm’ threatened to the social and political order is presented as a counter to the narrative favoured by the Marxisant Christopher Hill, although he choos- es not to elaborate on an earlier alternative to such explanations as this was offered by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s seminal, if brilliantly sketchy, account of ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment.’ And just as Trevor-Roper’s interpreta- tion can accommodate Scotland and Presbyterianism as well as England and Anglicanism, so does Pocock’s interpretation of what he calls a conservative, clerical, and commercial Enlightenment. It is an account that draws on, as well as subtly contests, the more Hill-inspired trajectory of Margaret Jacob’s work
24 Jacques Derrida, The Post-Card: from Socrates to Freud and beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987). 25 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rabinow ed., Essential Works of Foucault 1954–81, 1: Ethics: subjectivity and truth (Harmondsworth, 2000), 303–19.
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26 Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the problem of Enlightenment’ in Perez Zagorin ed., Culture and Politics: from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980). 27 See John Robertson, ‘Franco Venturi’s Enlightenment’, Past and Present 135 (1992), 183–206. 28 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), 52–5, 63, 67–8. 29 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 128, 132. 30 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 2, 51–2, 57.
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31 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, 101, 114, 132. 32 See Derek Offord, ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Russian Intelligentsia’ in Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, 187–202. 33 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce: the conservative Enlightenment in England’ in Raffaele Ajello, E. Cortese, and V. Piano Moratari eds., L’Età dei Lumi: studi storici sul settecento Europe in onore di Franco Venturi (2 vols., Naples, 1985), i. 523–62, at 561.
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Any mention of the peculiarity of English experience in the present climate raises spectres of ‘Brexit’, and academic hands are inevitably raised in collec- tive horror; and Pocock is indeed a sceptic about the European project, and always has been, but his is the perspective of a New Zealander who has lived in the United States for over fifty years rather than that of an insular opponent of all things ‘European.’ He is quite explicit about this in his essay on ‘Clergy and Commerce’—but for ‘peculiarity’ read ‘particularity’, and this is altogether truer of what he goes on to say. Equally, he was explicit about the parallels with, as well as the differences between, the Scottish Enlightenment and its English analogue, drawing on the work of Nicholas Phillipson and a young John Robertson as he did so, rather more than from that of their elders, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Duncan Forbes. Pocock is a model of scholarly generosity, in common with the best of intellectual pioneers. So rich is his account that, rather than offer a précis of it, it is better to isolate some telling moments in the argument. To begin with Pocock’s direct commentary on Venturi’s repudiation of an English Enlightenment, even of one avowedly sans philosophes, and hence for Venturi (who also contributed to Butterfield’s festschrift), expressly no Enlightenment. There is, as already mentioned, a rejection of teleology or genealogy (Foucauldian or otherwise), as Pocock declares of Bentham that he had no English progenitors, and was a ‘mutant’ in its intellectual history.34 In the 1980s, there was much to be said for such a view, although subsequent work on Bentham’s juvenile experience of Oxford (only slightly less negative than that recalled by Gibbon) reveals that he early began to think negatively about theology, having been obliged, on matriculation at The Queen’s College, to subscribe to the deeply theological, and intellectually compromised and com- promising, Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England: much hinges on this and it helps rather than hinders Pocock’s account of England’s clerical Enlight- enment. Bentham’s opposition to what he called ‘Church of Englandism’ was lifelong, and his disciple James Mill, a renegade from the Presbyterian ministry, extended this critique to all state churches, and indeed, to all churches and religions, Hinduism very much included in his History of British India, memo- rably described by William Thomas, as ‘a monument to English philistinism.’35 Whither Bentham went is more difficult to explain, although Utilitarianism had many clerical as well as secular proponents, with its theological origins locatable in the work of John Gay at Cambridge in the 1730s. When consid- ering directly Christian Utilitarianism, William Paley comes immediately to
34 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 561. 35 William Thomas, Mill (Oxford, 1985), 68.
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36 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 539. 37 See Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony La Vopa eds., Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino, ca, 1998).
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38 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 542, 547. 39 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 558.
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English (and the Scots to some degree) experienced, and its legacy has not been exactly without value. It is not perhaps revolutionary, although as Burke argued against both Price and Priestley, it perpetuates the evolving values of a preservative revolution, that of 1688; and even Gordon Brown was more than happy to defend this, as a self-identified modern equivalent of Adam Smith, as can be seen in his admiring preface to Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Roads to Modernity .40 Without making too much of such parallels, Smith noted that Burke was the only politician who understood his political economy; but Smith resisted the purpose of his Snell Exhibition at Balliol, and never did become an Episcopalian clergyman, and theology was less of an interest to him than it was to the pious layman, Burke. Theology is integral to England’s experience of Enlightenment, and not merely incidental. In this respect, parallels could be made with some of the German states even more readily than they can with France, although now that Jansenism has returned centre-stage as an explanatory element of the background to the French Revolution, what John Robertson has regretted as ‘premature secularisation’ must also include France. In short, England’s Enlightenment might seem less peculiar if what had used to be called the ‘religious turn’ is allowed within the purview of Enlightenment scholarship. Resistant though many scholars are to the very idea of what is now called the Catholic Enlightenment, I can see no a priori objections to it: Joseph ii was a Jansenist, and it is surely hard to refuse to accord to him and his reforms the status of Enlightenment. His practical reforms of the Church in the Habsburg lands—his assault on the monasteries and a culture of Baroque into Rococo religious consumption very much included—were firmly secured in Jansenist theology.41 Theology concerns the accords between this world and the next, and is absolutely not based on their separation; that is instead to turn to mysticism and to enthusiasm, and both are anti-selves of Enlightenment. Non-Jurors and High Churchmen had more in common in this respect with such enthusiasts as William Blake than they would have cared to acknowledge. Eschatology is the rub, of course, and as Pocock showed in his essay on Hobbes, the author of Leviathan had tried to contain its subversive potential by adopting the hetero- doxy of mortalism—that is the notion of the ‘sleep of the soul’ between death and a General Resurrection—a teaching briefly favoured by Luther and revived, as it were, by a number of enlightened divines in eighteenth-century England. Mortalism, however, was more powerful as an antidote to Purgatory than it was
40 Gordon Brown, ‘Introduction’ to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American Enlightenments (London, 2008), ix–xiii. 41 See Derek Beales, Joseph ii, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987–2009).
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42 See B.W. Young, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: politics and heresy in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994), 64–81. 43 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 555, 561–62. 44 John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cam- bridge, 2005), 280–8. 45 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The originality of Machiavelli’ in Against the Current: essays in the history of ideas (London, 1981), 25–79, at 62. For an appreciative reading of this essay, see Ritchie Robertson, ‘Berlin, Machiavelli, and the Enlightenment’, in Isaiah Berlin and the Enlight- enment, 137–50.
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46 See Daniel Waterland, A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, as laid down in Scripture and antiquity (London, 1737), 3–4.
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47 Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: gender and politics in the thought of Nicollo Machiavelli (Chicago, 1984); Christine Fauré, ‘Rights or Virtues: women and the repub- lic’, Catharine Larrère, ‘Women, republicanism and the growth of commerce’, and Judith A. Vega, ‘Feminist republicanism and the political perception of gender’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner eds., Republicanism: a shared European heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), 2: 125–37, 139–56, 157–74. Pocock defends Gibbon against feminist misinterpretation, but again noting that modern criticism might still affect a valid judge- ment of his reasoning. (br, 3: 459).
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48 See Mordechai Feingold, ‘Oriental Studies’ in Nicholas Tyacke ed., The History of the University of Oxford: the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1997), 449–504; and William J.
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Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, religion and politics in England, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015).
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What matters, above all else, to Pocock is intelligence, and the criti- cal celebration of intelligence, and hence his intense suspicion of a lasting Rousseauvian cult: ‘The religion of nature, in the eighteenth century as in the twenty-first, was bound sooner or later to lead to a dislike of human in- telligence and the uses to which it was put.’ (br, 4: 316) Ritual castigations of Eurocentrism are then inevitable as he observes of the European historical imagination that ‘we are still not acquainted with any other imagination of history that had developed comparable complexity’ (br, 4: 331); but elsewhere in Barbarism and Religion, he is decidedly circumspect about the limitations of a Eurocentric vision. It is a paradox of very recent vintage that critiques of Eurocentric limitations are held as being incompatible with Euroscepticism, when in fact they might well be of its essence. Pocock provides his readers with food for thought on exactly this deeply controversial, if intellectually in- vigorating, point. He reminds us very early that ‘Enlightened history remained Eurocentric, but it looked beyond Europe.’ (br, 1: 113) There is another moment of self-identification when he approvingly notices that Gibbon ‘preferred a Europe of commerce to a Europe unified by empire.’ (br, 1: 214) (Free trade within the eu brings with it a degree of ‘liberal’ authoritarianism that would have been recognisable to Louis xiv and thence to Voltaire, his critical pan- egyrist). Pocock is critical of the utilisation of a ‘cosmopolitan’ ideal as con- trasted with a ‘national’ experience of Enlightenment, as promoted among others by Karen O’Brien and John Robertson, preferring to see dialectic at play here and elsewhere in multivalent conceptions of Enlightenment. (br, 1: 302 note) As an early exponent of the Three Kingdoms thesis of British history, Pocock has more than earned the right to notice that: ‘The concept of Europe has too often been allowed to degenerate into a verbal device for denying that English or British history possess any autonomy, or may be explained in terms they have set for themselves.’ (br, 3: 295)49 Extrapolating from the details of ‘the Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon’, Pocock deduces that: ‘English church- manship and English Enlightenment are part of the history of Europe.’ His is not an argument adverting exceptionalism, as he regrets that ‘Europhiles and Europhobes at present share a bad habit of placing ‘England’ and ‘Europe’ in a zero-sum relation, so that any attention to the one entails a diminution of the other.’ (br, 1: 307, 308) What Pocock worried over in 1999 has become endemic, and contests over ‘Brexit’ now look like yet another vista of Arnold’s infinitely extendable space ‘where ignorant armies clash by night.’ The alert reader will
49 See Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: essays in British history (Cambridge, 2005) and his own contributions to a volume he edited with the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993).
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50 Coincidentally, Shovell’s Huguenot secretary was drowned with him, and he was the father of John Jortin, a clerical historian whose influence on Gibbon is traced in Barbarism and Religion: (br, 5: 243, 246–48, 261–68). 51 Tuck contributed to Pocock’s festschrift: ‘The civil religion of Thomas Hobbes’, in Political Discourse in early modern Britain, 120–38. It is a theme of some moment in Barbarism and Religion. 52 Istvan Hont, ‘The rhapsody of public debt: David Hume and voluntary state bankruptcy’ in Political Discourse in early modern Britain, 321–48. The essay was reprinted in Hont’s seminal volume, Jealousy of Trade: international competition and the nation state in histori- cal perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), a book in which a compelling sense of historical
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(Hume would have been wryly amused to be accounted any sort of prophet). Philosophers and poets, from Plato to Pound, have been critical of ‘tokens of exchange’, but always to no avail. (br, 4: 40) (In a similar parallel, he compares Gibbon’s suspicion of Byzantium with Yeats’s idealisation of it). (br, 6: 19) Dif- ference applies to the apparently shared as it does to the obviously ‘other’, ‘as we now ask why the history of liberal capitalism is not being repeated in China.’ (br, 6: 20) As with Gibbon, so with Pocock, the contemporary collides with the ancient in unexpected and challenging ways: eunuchs were ‘the vampires or zombies of the pre-modern imagination’, and much more troublingly, the cir- cumcelliones were ‘a terrorist jacquerie of mountain peasants with many of the characteristics of a modern Taliban.’ As in a painting, the past begins to ‘bleed’ into the present, sometimes, as with the example of the circumcelliones—‘the suicide bombers of late antiquity’—all too literally. (br, 6: 58, 84, 382) Barbarism and Enlightenment is an extraordinary achievement, and one can say of Pocock what J.H. Elliott has said of Hugh Trevor-Roper (a frequent interlocutor in its pages), namely that we will not see his like again.53 Pocock is also, for all his occasional monumentality of style, an allusively personal author, and as with Gibbon, so with Pocock, the style of Barbarism and Religion like that of the Decline and Fall, is ‘the product of a powerful inte- rior monologue.’ (br, 2: 387) Pocock notes that for Montesquieu, ‘The function of ancient history was to problematise modernity.’ (br, 3: 349). It is not too much to say that for Pocock, the function of history, ancient and modern, as explored in the many contours of Barbarism and Religion, is to problematise post-modernity in a post-Christian culture. Pocock’s all-embracing and deeply stimulating exploration of early modern to modern erudition and the life of the mind in the Republic of Letters is of great moment in relation to what looks increasingly, and dangerously, like a post-modern condition in which erudition and the Republic of Letters are alike marginalised, and to no small degree, self-marginalised. He draws though all six volumes on the scholarship and polemic of two millennia, witnessing the differences between, and oc- casional collusions of, civil and ecclesiastical history. He redresses the many wrongs done to Gibbon’s ‘Jansenist mule’, Tillemont, and puts a philosophe- historien, such as Voltaire, circumspectly and judiciously into his proper place. A continuous debate with the halting imperatives of postmodernity suffuses all six volumes, sometimes obviously, sometimes by implication. Early modern
urgency bleeding into current circumstance parallels that which powerfully informs Barbarism and Religion. 53 J.H. Elliott, ‘The “General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”’, in Blair Worden ed., Hugh Trevor-Roper: the historian (London, 2016), 45–53.
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Scepticism, and the forms of authority which it attacked, rested in that clerical culture, on erudition and the interpretation of texts; but there was a point at which scepticism became more than doubt—a way of life, and even a way of, or substituting, for religion itself. (br, 1: 63).
In our all too proudly ignorant era, looking backwards might well ultimately prove to be a way of living forwards. ‘Antiquarianism’, or at least erudition, nec- essarily has much to teach us if our modern Republic of Letters is to hope to survive. Pocock and Gibbon have proved eminently worthy interlocutors, and Barbarism and Religion repays attentive reading in a way reminiscent of that invariably due to the Decline and Fall. The reading of both works is a liberal education.
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