lii New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

lii New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

by no means limited to historiography—has been profound, though it was to fall on deaf ears for

a century. Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725; New science), which has aptly been called a virtual Newton’s

Principia for history, espoused an erudite synthesis of the human past—including the non-

Western. Vico erected this edifice on a postulated series of cycles of progress and decline, dividing

the past into a series of recurring ages: of gods, of heroes, and of men (the historical age)—there

had been two such cycles (corso e ricorso) up to his own time. Each age was characterized by distinctive

modes of speech, thought, law, and government, and all unfolded against the imagined

horizon of an “Ideal Eternal History.” An admirer of Plato and Tacitus, of the empiricism of Francis

Bacon and the legal scholarship of the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, Vico’s application of philology

and jurisprudence to the study of the past both echoes the Renaissance humanists and presages

the work of later anthropologists, linguists, and comparative religion scholars. His ingenious insight

that myths were an expression of an earlier mode of consciousness and of a language rooted

in poetry, and that they needed to be understood metaphorically, was a powerful tool. It permitted

him to embrace the biblical account of man’s early history rather than dismiss or query it in

the manner of French skeptics such as Bayle. He also provided an apparent answer to Cartesian

skepticism in the notion that men can understand with certainty the things that they make, which

include nations and their history. For Vico, verum (truth) was equivalent to factum (that which

is made—or, we might add, done).

The anticlericalism that appears in Giannone would be taken up by one of the period’s most

well-known figures, Voltaire (the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), whose Essai

sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations was an overview and critique of several centuries’ worth of

institutions and customs, including those of non-Western civilizations such as the Chinese. Less

erudite than many other historians of the era, unsympathetically critical of the errors and folly of

past ages, and at times positively hostile to “pedantic” scholarship and “useless obscurities,” Voltaire

praised features in other civilizations while still arriving at the conclusion that Western culture

represented the triumph of human reason. He nevertheless contributed to public knowledge of

other past societies, often employing contemporary travel accounts as sources; and in Le siècle de

Louis XIV (1751) he offered a brilliant if uncritical analysis of civilization during the age of Louis

XIV, which he aspired to establish as a benchmark for reform in his own time. The notion that

there is a cumulative progress in human events had been a recurring theme in history for centuries,

though typically ascribed to a divine plan as in the Judeo-Christian eschatological view of

time. In the eighteenth century, progress as an organizing principle really came into its own, with

the most optimistic views being espoused by the likes of Voltaire and especially his Revolutionary-

era successor, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794). The latter, an ill-fated

aristocratic philosophe, left at his death the introduction to a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the

Progress of the Human Mind, a book that adumbrated a nine-stage history of humanity’s progress,

with a culminating tenth stage of reason and achievement to follow the Revolution.

In Britain, Enlightenment historiography took a rather different turn. William Robertson

(1721–1793) was influenced by Voltaire (though critical of the latter’s errors) in his History of

Charles V. His fellow Scot David Hume (1711–1776)—who was better known as a historian than

as a philosopher in his own time—tried to apply his own skeptical theory of causation (and an

admiration of ancient historians, especially Thucydides) to England’s past. Hume’s multivolume

History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James II struck a chord

with contemporary audiences, and he is also noteworthy for having developed a “sentimental” approach

to historical writing that he hoped would appeal to female readers, who found much of

historical writing dry and unappealing. The outstanding figure of British historiography during

the period, still read frequently today, was Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), whose The History of

the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) was a towering masterpiece synthesizing

enormous erudition in literary, numismatic, and other antiquarian sources (albeit often at secondhand)

with a philosophical and critical outlook. Gibbon was the late Enlightenment heir to two

thousand years of thinking about historical problems such as the relationship between empire and

liberty, virtue and power, citizenship and wealth, simplicity and luxury, and the nature and reasons

underlying historical decline, themes that can be traced back, in different forms, through

Renaissance humanists to post-Eusebian ecclesiastical history and beyond, back to Tacitus and

Sallust. Gibbon was just as much the beneficiary of a hundred more recent years of enlightened

history and erudition in the different modes of Tillemont, Muratori, Giannone, Voltaire, and

Robertson. Though he was by no means an anticlerical in the style of Voltaire, Gibbon has become

celebrated for his famous ascription of the fall of Rome to the triumph of “barbarism and

HISTORIOGRAPHY