[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. v About 1768 hismanuscript essays became predominantly English,w and by 1776 he hadachieved that English prose style which many have loved and somehated, and which was to carry him through six volumes of the Decline andFall.The history of its formation eludes us, because it occurred in theprivacy of an interior monologue; it accompanies both the history ofGibbon s historiography, erudition and philosophy, and the history ofhis decisive, if never quite final, acceptance of an Englishidentity.Thereis a history one among several of the Decline and Fall situated in thehistory of English historiography.It is therefore desirable to re-assess Gibbon s place in that culture towhich he now returned, but in which Franco Venturi regarded him asboth solitary and something of an exile.When Venturi spoke at Cam-bridge in 1969, at the outset of his series of works on European En-lightenment, he was preoccupied with liberating the history of thatmovement from both a narrowly Marxist interpretation stressing therole of the bourgeoisie , and a German interpretation which centralisedand privileged the processes in that culture collectively known as dieAufklärung.x From this liberation emerged Venturi s great work on theSettecento Riformatore, a study in Enlightenment concerned with concur-rent developments in France, the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, andeastern Europe.For this reformation a price was to be paid, and to hisfewy Cambridge hearers Venturi said:Power and philosophy seek each other, converge and diverge, according to thecircumstances.Their struggles and agreements dominated republican Europe,just as they dominated monarchical Europe.They ruled over the Mediter-ranean, just as they ruled over eastern and central Europe.v Letters, i, p.222 (25 October 1767).w Sheffield s datings are examined by Ghosh, 1983, 1991.x See Robertson, 1992, for a close consideration of Venturi s achievement.y A personal recollection. 294 EpilogueOnly one country was absent from this array of Enlightened thinkers in thesixties and seventies, and that was England.The fact remains that no partides philosophes was formed in London, and so could not claim to guidesociety.The struggles which did take place (one has only to recall Wilkes andliberty ) are not those of a nascent intelligentsia.Even the English giant of theEnlightenment, Gibbon, was not only closely linked with continental culturebut remained an isolated figure in his own country, a solitary figure.One hasto wait until the eighties and nineties to find men such as Bentham, Price,Godwin and Paine.In England the rhythm was different.¹pAs historians know but do not always remember the problem withany exceptionalist thesis is less the exception which it claims (since everyculture or moment is unique if closely enough examined) than the rulewhich it establishes: the set of general characteristics, belonging to someclass of phenomena, from which some Sonderweg is said to depart.InVenturi s case this consisted in the relations between power andphilosophy, and was manifest in the presence of a party of philosophesclaiming to guide society on the roads laid down in the settecento rifor-matore.Their activities, and the responses to them, both constitutedEnlightenment and dominated or ruled the history of Europe ingeneral.Venturi made this assumption, and further assumed that Gib-bon was a philosophe in this sense; and because he could find no class ofEnglish philosophes whose enterprises and activities had accompaniedthose ascribed or imputed to Gibbon, he was led we might sayobliged to conclude that Gibbon was solitary and isolated in his owncountry, where there was no history of Enlightenment in which he couldtake part.Venturi s account of a Europe-wide movement of philosophes, theirwritings and ideas, and their associations with one another, need in noway be challenged; he has left us a great portrait of who they were andwhat they were doing and attempting.Nor should we challenge hisstatement that England played no part in this movement till it hadalmost run its course, and that there were till then no philosophes inEngland.We may even shorten his list of those who finally appeared;perhaps only Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals atheist, bureau-cratic, possessed of an instrumental rationality that made them ready tocodify England s laws and reconstruct its institutions fit his specifica-tions and count as philosophes; and even then, the philosophy thatregarded the Rights of Man as nonsense on stilts is far enough removedfrom that preceding 1789.The thesis that in England there were no¹p Venturi, 1971, p.132
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]