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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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 433 understandably) rendered him an atheist in the H G Wells mode; not for Pocock the exercises in more or less explicit Christian apologetic that marked the ­contributions of Figgis and of Butterfield, both legatees of eighteenth-­century sectarianism, the former as a refugee from the Countess of Huntingdon’s Con- nexion, in which his father was a minister, the latter as a devout Methodist lay preacher. His own honestly avowed, but subtle, scepticism serves to make Pocock’s rehabilitation of theology as a vital and literally fundamental compo- nent of early modern intellectual history all the more powerful; his profound expository gift is a scholarly heuristic, not a historically-attentive mode of religiously-inflected exegesis. As he put it, responding to contributors to his own festschrift:

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 439 sense a meditation on the economic preconditions of modernity ev­ ery bit as profound as those made by critics of Enlightenment and its social­ systemati- sation. Pocock has never been content with merely fashionable ­nostrums; he is a sceptics’ sceptic, and this is why he is also consummately an historians’ historian. And hence something of the affinity Pocock feels with Gibbon, who P­ ocock insists was no deist but, along with Hume, a sceptic. But as he also goes on to observe: ‘Gibbon’s scepticism remained, and remains, much attacked and ­defended but seldom defined.’ (br, 5: 355). In large part, the greatest of the many achievements of Barbarism and Religion is in making exactly such an acute and persuasive account of Gibbon’s scepticism. And it is a form of scep- ticism in which the imperatives of historical enquiry tend to triumph over the dubious certainties of philosophy, a contest of the faculties traced by ­Pocock from the earliest proponents of ecclesiastical history—from E­ usebius ­onwards—to historians who used philosophy as vehicles of doubt, such as Bayle. It is at once a history traced by Pocock and, one suspects, a debate in which he too favours historical scepticism over the occasional certainties of infinitely disputable philosophy.16 The former claim is much easier to il- lustrate than is the latter, so to begin with the more difficult claim. Consid- er only Pocock’s iteration of a phrase drawn from Kant and much favoured by Isaiah Berlin (and controversially so).17 The first encounter of the phrase in Barbarism and Religion is paradigmatic as the reader is informed that ­Gibbon’s Essai sure l’étude de la literature was a study that was ‘philosophical and at the same time counter-philosophe … a pursuit less of general laws and causes than of the ironies and anomalies that followed the attempt to apply them to the crooked timber of humanity.’ (br, 1: 252). It is explicat- ed most directly, if subtly, in the following volume in relation to the same text:

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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442 Young with radical politics—MacIntyre was Dean of the School of Social Sciences at ­Essex University in the late 1960s—to reconciliation with the consola- tions of Catholicism.21 There are no such negotiations in Pocock, who never offers comfortable, but rather occasionally consolatory, history, and it is tell- ing that his second excursion at defining ‘Enlightenment’ should have taken place in a festschrift, published in 1985, for Franco Venturi, a fellow historian with whom he shared many more affinities than he experienced scholarly differences. Before detailing Pocock’s conception of Enlightenments, it is worth pausing for a very brief excursus on method; and since he himself is not preoccupied by method, this is appropriate, despite the fact that he has written illuminat- ingly about it. And what he has said about method naturally affects how he thinks historically, not least when it comes to the invocation of grand histori- cal categories, such as ‘Enlightenment.’ Again, plurality is of the essence, as ­unlike Skinner, Pocock is not concerned with language as such, but rather with languages. This is true both in terms of the many languages with which even a remotely competent student of the eighteenth century ought to be at least acquainted, but also of the nature of the discourses in which those languages participated. The best statement regarding method in Pocock is to be found in his essay, ‘The concept of a language and the métier d’historien: some con- siderations on practice,’ first published in 1987, and in his introduction to his collection, Virtue, Commerce and History, dating from 1985.22 The historian has to retrieve both langue and parole, and to be attentive to the shifting registers in which human life is experienced and described. ‘Meaning,’ consequently, is a deeply contested category, and once again, one sympathises with his desire to substitute its unitary diktat with ‘meanings.’ No less than for Isaiah Berlin, history, and especially intellectual history, has, for Pocock, to be rescued from its terrible simplifiers. The One must always give way to the Many, however reconstituted, and this is unusually demanding linguistically. We are put in mind here of Michael Oakeshott’s obsessive interest in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and Oakeshott himself is unexpectedly, and rather beautifully, woven into the text of Barbarism and Religion in a poetic evocation of the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian Trinity as being ‘perhaps played’ by Oakeshott’s ‘conversation of mankind.’ (br, 5: 304).23

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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444 Young on the Radical Enlightenment.26 It is more than merely symbolic that Pocock’s revisionist account of an English experience of Enlightenment in the Venturi festschrift follows directly on from an essay by Jacob. Pocock’s essay is, even by his intellectually demanding standards, unusually compressed, setting out a research programme that he had already initiated in essays on Burke and on the clerical economist Josiah Tucker, republished in ­Virtue, Commerce and History, and which continued into the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion. Before opening up the riches of this twenty-­ seven page ­essay, it is necessary to turn to Franco Venturi’s conception of the ­Enlightenment, more especially his contention that England did not experi- ence the Enlightenment he explored elsewhere in Europe.27 Very few ­English names occur­ in Venturi’s studies on Enlightenment: he develops aspects of Hazard’s programme in discussion of the deism of Matthew Tindal, the ­Irishman John Toland, and others including, more tentatively that problem- atic ­Anglican divine,­ Conyers Middleton, as well as noticing Richard Bentley’s orthodox ­assault on Anthony Collins; and similarly he gestures at the varieties of ­Republicanism proposed by the Anglo-Irish Robert Molesworth.28 All of this is at once ­tentative and conventional, as is his surely questionable claim that Voltaire initiated in historiography what Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon would complete; and the possibility of a more international form of radical politics is positively noticed in English terms only once, through the Francophile John Wilkes’s friendship with d’Holbach.29 Locke appears a mere three times, and Newton only once.30 Margaret Jacob would take care of that last omission, but Venturi believed there was very little to be missed about England’s contribu- tion to Enlightenment, which was for him, at its very best, unintentionally ­initiatory, or at worst, submissively passive. For Venturi only four English commentators are of wider interpreta- tive ­moment, and they are Jeremy Bentham, Richard Price (actually Welsh), ­Thomas Paine, and William Godwin, thinkers who hit their stride in the late 1780s and 1790s, although only Bentham maintained his thereafter. Bentham recurs, due to his purely advisory involvement with Russian penology, and here Venturi’s Russian experience is to the fore, rather more than his ­perspective

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 445 on Bentham and an English Enlightenment.31 He scants—in fact does not ­mention—Price’s status as an Arian Dissenting minister, and Paine and ­Godwin are implicitly­ in this radical pantheon entirely for political, and not at all for religious, ends. Lacking in that quartet is a name usually paired with that of Price, Joseph Priestley, a figure who united the sceptical Gibbon and the devoutly politique Burke (who does not appear in Venturi’s account) with High Church divines in their denunciation of Priestley’s radical Unitarian politico- theology. It is a telling omission. Pocock corrects all of this, and in doing so points to what seems to be a problem with Venturi, namely that there is an implicit genealogy at work here, as he looks forward to a transformation from Enlightenment philosophes into the later nineteenth-century revolutionary intelligentsia (something he shares, perhaps, with Isaiah Berlin);32 and while Pocock is explicit that the English Enlightenment entailed, or was a necessary product of, Britain’s adjustment­ into the modern world, he is wary of making too much of such intellectual or sociological trajectories. And just as he contends that England’s experi- ence of Enlightenment was unique, so was what followed, as a footnote to Ben Knight’s work on the nineteenth-century clerisy sponsored by Coleridge alludes to a shift from a clergy to a clerisy, but a clerisy that was itself, well into the ­nineteenth century, often, and sometimes predominantly, clerical, both in terms of personnel and purpose. 1800, however, remains the chronological threshold that Pocock will only rarely cross, and readers have to deduce from his writings rather more than do those of Venturi what was eventually to follow the era of Europe’s Enlightenment.33 The intellectual history of the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain is still being opened up, but there is good reason to believe that there is interpretative mileage in the contention that what it witnesses is a subtle change from clergy to clerisy, although, if anything, ­commerce, and indeed industry, became increasingly important over those two epochs. The pioneer here remains Basil Willey (1897–1978), King Edward vii Professor of English Literature at Cambridge when Pocock was a graduate student and then a research fellow, before making his way via Durham and Canterbury, New Zealand to the States, first at Washington Univ­ ersity, St Louis and then, for far the greater part of his career, at Johns Hopkins University.

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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446 Young

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 447 mind, and one wonders briefly why Paley does not figure in Venturi’s idealised ­portrayal of England’s experience of the 1790s, but then one realises quickly that this is entirely because Paley was not in any sense a revolutionary, but was, rather, that rara avis, a popular theologian, and it would be hard to contend that he was not enlightened. Pocock has a forerunner in much of this interpretation of the period in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, and not only in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1876, but also in the long- gestated and deeply problematical, The English Utilitarians, which appeared towards the end of his life, in 1900. Stephen’s exposition is without much of the explanatory apparatus of Pocock, and he wrote before the widespread adoption of the category of ‘Enlightenment,’ but parallels are not hard to find, especially when one adds his posthumously-published volume, English Litera- ture and Society in the eighteenth century, an unjustly neglected study when positioned in the light of the subsequent work of such literary historians as Willey. The registers are different, as Pocock acknowledges, but Stephen and Pocock look on as two outside observers of the complex presence of theology in a consciously modernising culture, the one as a Victorian agnostic, the other as a modern sceptic. (br, 5: 221) Pocock also shares with Stephen an abiding interest in literature, and piv- otal to his account of the Ciceronian politeness of eighteenth-century England is Joseph Addison, a devout Christian ‘who has a good claim to be considered a central figure of enlightenment in England.’ Aspects of Pocock’s case for an English experience of Enlightenment are familiar and largely uncontentious, but less so in both respects is his insistence on the potency of theology in ­England’s Enlightenment. Addison matters here, but so in a more subdued way does Dr Johnson, characterised without a hint of intellectual condescension by Pocock as ‘a convinced and evangelical Christian who could never have been called a philosophe.’36 But equally, he could never have been called an ‘enthusi- ast’ (succinctly and powerfully identified in a later essay by Pocock as being the ‘anti-self of Enlightenment’), unlike his fellow Oxford High Churchman, John Wesley, although of late some scholars have found traces of Enlightenment in Wesley’s writings, and his most modern biographer, Henry D. Rack, entitled his study of the founder of Methodism, Reasonable Enthusiast.37 Leslie Stephen would have had little patience with this. As a disabused legatee of Evangelical- ism, albeit of a most liberal kind, he too typified it as the anti-type of r­ational

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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448 Young theology, seeing in it the root cause of the differing trajectories of ­English and continental thought from the final quarter of the eighteenth century­ into the mid-nineteenth century, and in this regard, he is once again at one with Pocock’s interpretation of eighteenth-century thought and e­xperience. ­Reiteration of the word ‘experience’ is necessary, as Pocock’s is an experiential as well as an abstract definition of Enlightenment: his essays always carefully imbricate the life of the mind in its social context, and no less than is the case with Habermas, the commercial imperatives of modernity are at the core of Pocock’s conception of an English Enlightenment. Once again, history prevails over philosophy as Pocock reminds his reader that, ‘the history of philosophy itself forms part of the history of religion, and to pursue it is to return to the problem of the Enlightenment as the growth of a post-Christian view of the universe.’ In his own way, this was why Stephen pioneered what he called ‘the history of opinion’ in this country; and here ­Pocock’s enterprise is distinct from that of his predecessor. Pocock continues in his essay to survey ‘the crucial problem of every Enlightenment, the relation of manners to religion.’38 At this juncture in global history, this constitutes a lesson we need once again to learn, and it is, perhaps, a fundamental reason why so many scholars address the problematic of Enlightenment so urgently in our culture, or rather cultures. (Religion is once again conjoined with capi- talism in this global variant of ‘Enlightenment’; and do any of us possess the intellectual and cultural resources to understand this, let alone confront it?) So, to return to the consolations as well as the disillusions of historical study, Pocock sets up a series of contexts in which the English did indeed experience their own variant of Enlightenment. It was one that pioneered deism (and let it be remembered that Paine was no atheist philosophe, but a promoter, in his Age of Reason, published in two volumes in 1794 and 1795, of artisanal deism, removing it from its secure place as a gentlemanly alternative to Christian- ity: his place in Venturi’s quartet is perhaps questionable, beyond its purely ­political standing). Alongside deism, however, and part of the reason for its development, was a debate on the nature of the Trinity. And this matters, fun- damentally, as a means of enforcing theological orthodoxy of a kind rooted in Platonism, both that of the early Church and that promoted by the Cambridge Platonists, and particularly by Ralph Cudworth. England’s ‘Arminian Enlight- enment’ was also for Pocock the ‘Magisterial Enlightenment’ that served ‘an Erastian church and a Whig polity.’39 A clerical, conservative, and commercial Enlightenment might not sound particularly invigorating, but it is what the

38 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 542, 547. 39 Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 558.

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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 449

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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450 Young to the muddled notions of an ‘intermediate state’ current in ­Anglican theology, but this did not prevent its being deeply controversial when debated in the 1750s.42 By contrast, religious radicals such as Priestley blended eschatology with millennial speculation, and here again one sees why Gibbon dismissed him as a sort of rational enthusiast. As Pocock points out, Priestley was seen as posing an immediate threat in a way that Spinozist pantheism did not; panthe- ism would return, however, tamed and Anglicized by Coleridge, the sponsor of a new clerisy. The pantheistic republic was altogether more select than was the millennium of Joseph Priestley.43 As Pocock has proved, the idea of an enlightened divine is not contradictory, and nor strictly speaking was it either for Voltaire or Rousseau, both of whom engaged with the contentious Bishop Warburton; and the operative word is engaged. They did not dismiss him, although with his customary inattention to detail, Voltaire misidentified his see in his Dictionary. Similarly, Warburton was influential both in classical and in biblical research in eighteenth-century German-speaking states, and John Robertson devoted considerable attention to him in The Case for the Enlightenment.44 And Warburton’s case against de- ism was an eschatological one: the central claim of the decidedly heterodox Divine Legation of Moses, incomplete but published initially as two volumes in 1738 and 1741, was that Moses, unlike all other founder-lawgivers, had not declared the life to come to the Israelites because God’s direct, not quite daily, interposition in their affairs made it superfluous as an inducement to morality. Needless to say, Warburton acquired many critics in making this unorthodox case for orthodoxy, but it offers a comment on two of Pocock’s other inter- ventions in scholarship. First, and more obviously, it is a way of closing down the socio-political consequences of eschatology that Hobbes had sought to de- molish through mortalist doctrine; equally, it made Moses distinctive from the founder-lawgivers discussed in Machiavelli’s Discorsi, although at this point it is well to remember a mischievous footnote to Isaiah Berlin’s essay on ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, where he pointedly thanked Hugh Trevor-Roper for suggesting that Moses was probably as mythical a figure as were all the other founder-lawgivers in Machiavelli’s dubious pantheon.45 Centaurs (an image of

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 451 contradictory intellectual impulses and energies much favoured by Gibbon) abound in the history of scholarship, modern as well as early modern. (br, 6: 149, 181) Pocock is himself a sort of scholarly and intellectual centaur, a historian vigorously alert to a whole series of languages and discourses, from com- mon law to theology, and this makes him an ideal student of the complexity of Enlightenment(s). At least one enlightened divine, Daniel Waterland who wrote against both Tindal and Mandeville, pointed out in a treatise on the Eucharist, that the proofs and authorities promoted in study of the law held, mutatis mutandis, for theology; in the celebration of the Eucharist this world and the next were, in the truest sense, in Holy Communion.46 Time, consid- ered both theologically and historically, is a complicated phenomenon, and its treatment is of the essence in Pocock’s sense of history and in the reflection on that history that is primarily the province of the student of historiography. In terms of what he has taught many of us about the plurality and complexity of any proper conception of Enlightenment, properly excluding the definite ­article, he is not, however, so much a strange as a special centaur: he is the Chiron of Anglophone intellectual history. There is much to observe beyond his elucidation of a series of Enlighten- ments in the rich argumentative structures that bind together Barbarism and Religion. Outcrops of the Isaiah Berlin lecture series are observable in Pocock’s frequent references to identity politics, gender, postmodernity, and post-­colonialism, and all are never less than thoughtful. Indeed, there is much scholarly wisdom in these moments of current reflection. Much that Pocock has to say, again in common with aspects of Oakeshott, might be conserva- tive by disposition, but he is never reactionary. Not for nothing is he obliquely critical of Leo Strauss and Straussians when discussing William Warburton’s notion of a double doctrine. (br, 5: 206, 234). Gender is pondered on many occasions: Catherine Macaulay is ‘less a feminist than a patriot’, disregarding gender in her historical writings, and herself expressing little, if any, interest in women’s history as such. (br, 1: 119; 2: 175, 256). By contrast, male historians did discuss gender: David Hume’s discussion of Mary, Queen of Scots, P­ ocock assures us, was not ‘sexist’; he understood the gendered nature of ­history bet- ter than many of his eighteenth-century contemporaries (br, 2: 233, 185) More predictably, perhaps, Voltaire was fascinated by what he considered to be ‘strong women’, and Pocock conjectures that in a Europe ruled in many places by ‘strong’ empresses this ought to come as no surprise; hence the appeal to

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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452 Young eighteenth-century authorities of such ancient prototypes as Zenobia and Cleopatra. (br, 2: 74; 3: 478) More complicatedly, Gibbon observed that history might combine ­masculine with feminine virtues. According to Pocock, ‘he does not mean to marginalise them but to invest them with a centrally important function.’ Well-meant though Gibbon’s intentions in this latter respect were, however, Pocock admits that he ‘can be charged with too rigorous a separation between the faculties and between those who severally exercise them.’ And this is not an anachronistic judgement; it is one Pocock notes Gibbon having made against d’Alembert. (br, 1: 120, 253–54). Likewise, Pocock is fascinated enough by a disagreement between Gibbon and Madame Necker regarding women as to consider it ‘an exchange which might be explored in greater depth.’ (br, 3: 472) Gibbon’s reading of Tacitus’s de moribus Germanorum constitutes ‘thought loaded with g­ ender’ with its appeals to fortuna and virtus; for Gibbon,­ ‘the study of savagery is never far removed from that of effeminacy.’ (br, 4: 79) Gibbon inherited such gendered language from Tacitus, especially in his treatment of patriarchy and of the Augustan principate in the Annales. (br, 3: 28) As Hannah Fenichel Pitkin­ observed in her study of Machiavelli over thirty years ago, and as Christine­ Fauré, Catharine Larrère, and Judith A. Vega argued more widely over a decade ago, the language of republicanism is deeply masculine, something Pocock accepts when he discusses the American adop- tion in the 1780s of ‘so primarily masculine a central value as that of classical citizenship.’47 (br, 2: 257) The pivotal role of women in religion is something that Gibbon made much of, and it is in turn something noticed by Pocock. (br, 2: 181) Pocock is also ­sensitive, as in his own way was Gibbon, to the fact that the accounts of ­martyrdom, particularly those of women, made by predominantly male ­chroniclers in the early church ‘descended at times towards a pornography of holiness.’ (br, 5: 34) Ultimately, he registers his impatience with ‘Gibbon’s mildly if tiresomely sexist jokes.’ (br, 6: 90) Pocock is insensitive neither to gen- der in his own understanding of history nor to that which informed Gibbon­ ’s

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 453 thinking on the matter. The same is true in his consideration of race, a sensitive field in consideration of the Enlightenment. It is a subject that dominates vol- umes five and six of Barbarism and Religion, both of which analyse the deeply sensitive notions of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism.’ Equally, it is recurrent in the preceding volumes in the series, so acutely aware is Pocock of its centrality in modern understandings of an age of empire as much it as it was one of revolu- tions. In the wake of post-colonial studies, ‘Enlightenment’ has become more equivocal a concept than it was in the celebratory epoch of Peter Gay. Voltaire, a hero to Gay but not to Pocock, is seen as a proponent of racial theory in his approach to Asia; the sage of Ferney’s rancid anti-Semitism is also seen, in terms of the history of the religion he repudiated, as an aspect of his own com- plicated self-hatred. (br, 2: 112, 135) As Pocock demonstrates, it was difficult for Christians to be anti-Semitic, given Jesus’s lineage, but it was possible for them to be anti-Judaic; unusually, the deist Voltaire was both. (br, 2: 358, 427; 4: 21) Pocock regretfully accepts that there are ‘ominous signs in Gibbon’s mind’ that ‘the Jews are self-excluded from the histories of other peoples.’ (br, 3: 427) Gibbon’s imputation of a taste for gambling and a tendency to alcoholism to the Germans otherwise approvingly described by Tacitus, troubles Pocock as seeming to suggest that such traits are common to all tribal cultures, some- thing which Gibbon would come to have in common with contemporary racial slurs against Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. (br, 4: 81) Likewise, Pocock is troubled by Gibbon’s reference to the “purity of Roman blood” in the first volume of the Decline and Fall, although he observes that the phrase has ‘an ominous ring to us, which we need not impute to him.’ (br, 4: 21) Modern sensitivity equally demands sensitivity on our part to the mores of the past; but it has its limits, as when Pocock reveals his troubled reaction to the fact that it had not occurred to Gibbon ‘to grant Africans a role in their own his- tory.’ (br, 6: 246) Even critics of colonialism, such as Raynal and Diderot, came dangerously close to imputing rather too much to skin colour, even (perhaps especially) when claiming to be doing quite otherwise. (br, 4: 304) Modern self-congratulation is apt to assume that ‘global history’ is a recent phenomenon. As Pocock demonstrates, this is simply not true. Eighteenth- century historians were undoubtedly Eurocentric, but they also looked ­beyond Europe; the Decline and Fall is a history of Eurasia and the stadial sequence of conjectural history similarly embraced Eurasia. (br, 1: 113; 3: 467; 4: 14) ­Gibbon was ‘both an Anglican and an orientalist manqué’ (br, 4: 26); his leading ­English predecessor in Oriental studies, Edward Pococke, was also an ­Anglican ­divine as were many contemporary scholars in his field.48 In fact, Gibbon had

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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454 Young described a ‘discovery of Eurasia’ in what Pocock insists is a ‘correct sense’, namely ‘the discovery that something existed by people who had not known that it did.’ (br, 4: 3; 4: 272, note) Surely this is unexceptionable revisionism, even if it—correctly—extends to criticism of Martin Bernal, of whom Louis de Beaufort was an eighteenth-century predecessor. (br, 2: 356; 3: 365) What is more, Pocock goes on to observe of much eighteenth-century historiography with a supposedly global reach and universal ambition, that it is a surprise that it involves ‘the virtual omission from Enlightened philosophy of the alluvial city empires of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.’ (br, 4: 7) The second tetral- ogy of the Decline and Fall effectively constitutes a ‘global history’. (br, 6: 8) It is one that also demands a proper calibration of what is meant by ‘orientalist’, or rather ‘Byzantinist’. (br, 6: 27) Where Gibbon was genuinely exploratory, the philosophes were occasion- ally rather more opportunistic. Voltaire’s treatment of China is critically exam- ined, not least when he uses the sympathies towards Confucianism expressed by Matteo Ricci and his successors as an opportunity to berate the Society of Jesus and its ‘Confuciophilia’. (br, 2: 74, 99–100; 4: 103) The allegedly liberat- ing nature of the jointly-written Histoire de deux Indes, in which Raynal and Diderot were centrally involved, is subject to severe scrutiny by Pocock, as he declares reflexively that ‘the concepts Europeans have used to relegate and re- press others have been at the same time those they have used to understand even to criticise themselves’; it is, therefore, with a concomitant degree of scepticism that Pocock adverts to ‘our bimillennial demand for a literature of anti-imperialism.’ (br, 4: 165, 223) The Histoire de deux Indes might well not be able to satisfy that demand, for ‘post-modern readers’ might equally render Raynal and Diderot both colonialist and post-colonialist, and Pocock is alert to the element of European fantasy at work in the Histoire as the philosophes ‘oppose history to nature—a step Gibbon was never interested in taking.’(br, 4: 232, 233, 253) And nor, one suspects, is Pocock. History once again trumps philosophy. Reflexivity is the order of the day in his examination of the Histoire as both ‘identifying, and at the same time, continuing, the paradox that the most arrogant of civilisations is at the same time most radically given to criti- cism of itself.’ Diderot and Raynal ineluctably become our contemporaries in ‘the censorious and resentful world that we ourselves inhabit.’ Postcolonial cri- tiques have, accordingly, to be attentive to the fact that ‘the history European philosophers told of their civilisation was at least as self-condemnatory as it was self-congratulatory.’(br, 4: 238, 239, 247) Readers are left to draw their own conclusions as to what this might mean about postcolonial theories.

Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, religion and politics in England, 1648–1715 ­(Cambridge, 2015).

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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 455

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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456 Young also duly ponder the lessons attendant on the dust jacket of The Enlighten- ments of Edward Gibbon, which reproduces a capriccio by the itinerant artists Sebastiani and Marco Ricci, displaying an allegorical tomb for Sir Clowdisley Shovell, whose drowning off the Scilly Isles in turn did much to encourage a means to measure longitude.50 There is a genuine nostalgia when Pocock observes Gianonne adhering to ‘what was until our own time the general faith of Europe: that each people generates its sovereignty out of its history, and can no more part with it than it can with its identity.’ (br, 2: 56) Once again, he points out how peculiar are our own prejudices, particularly when they are adduced against those attributed to the past. His is a Burkean argument. There is no space for self-congratulation in Barbarism and Religion; history is never a false comforter. Political affiliation is seen as undermining the necessity of historical distance when he notices the ‘mistrust’ of Europhile historians for the particular national contexts of aspects of what he persuasively argues were a plurality of Enlightenments. (br, 2: 65, 159; 4: 206) There is a note of suspicion congruent with what ­Pocock observes about postcolonial perspectives on historiography, when ‘we see the “Enlight- ened narrative” moving into the narrative of Europe as a world empir­ e.’ Allied to this is his noticing that, after 1776 and all that, the Enlightened narr­ ative is becoming a ‘Eurocentric history of the human race.’ (br, 2: 317, 375) The Euro— now having a sorry effect on the Italian economy—had its forerunner in the solidus. (br, 3: 291) (It was, incidentally, the effect of the Euro on the Greek economy that led the art historian T.J. Clark and the intellectual ­historian Richard Tuck, both very much men of the Left, to vote for Brexit; it was issues of sovereignty that led Tuck’s fellow Hobbes scholar, Sir Noel ­Malcolm—by disposition closer to Pocock—to vote in the same way).51 Commerce and Enlightenment are inseparable in the English experience, and political economy shadows the argument of Barbarism and Religion at sev- eral points. In common with the late Istvan Hont, Pocock sees Hume’s essa­ y ‘On Public Credit’ as the philosopher’s ‘prophecy of our own times.’ (br, 2: 197)52

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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J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 457

(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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458 Young and ­Enlightenment ­historiography is no longer seen as a prelude to German ­historicism but as being distinctive from it; what he calls the ‘mighty shadows’ of Figgis, Croce, and Meinecke quietly haunt the volumes, as does the lesser but still important presence of Butterfield. (br, 1: 57, 84) The mitigations of Provi- dence in history—believed in by Butterfield, scoffed at by Trevor-Roper—are carefully delineated in their varied ancient and even Enlightenment modes by Pocock.(br, 4: 200; 5: 171, 174–78) And most importantly as we conclude the intricate argument of Barbarism and Religion, is the central observation that Gibbon’s scepticism did not mean, as his Christian contemporaries and twenty-first-century atheist historians have tended to presume, that the secret cause of the decline and fall was attributable entirely to the rise of Christianity. (br, 6: 36) As Barbarism and Religion has demonstrated, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is an altogether more complex history than such a preponderantly self- serving reading would imply. Barbarism and Religion might well look forward pessimistically, in some sense, as we need once again learn to embrace a lesson appreciated by Bayle, Gibbon, and Burke very much included:

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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