John Pocock

Virtue, Commerce, and History

A quarrel of the ancients and moderns ensued: to some it seemed that the rise of commerce had spelled the end of virtue, as formerly free arms-bearing citizens had become content to pay mercenaries to defend them and absolute monarchs to govern them, the better to enjoy the wealth, leisure, and cultivation which commerce made possible. To these ancients—Thomas Jefferson among them—Europe under the enlightened monarchies was like Gibbon's age of the Antonines, enjoying an interlude of prosperity and politeness under the protection of a military establishment which law and liberty no longer controlled, and which must sooner or later become tyrannous and degenerate. But there were moderns—Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, and Gibbon—who conceded that virtue had rested upon a foundation of arms and agriculture, but insisted that it had been so inhumanly harsh and restrictive as hardly to deserve the name; hence, they said—and Jefferson agreed—the nightmare Utopias of Lycurgus' laws or Plato's republic. The rise of commerce and culture had been worth the loss of virtue which it had entailed; it had vastly enhanced the human capacity for production and consumption, exchange, interdependence, and sympathy, and on this foundation there might be erected new ethical systems which displayed how man's love of himself might be converted into love of his fellow social beings. But the ancient image of virtue was never overthrown or abandoned, and in consequence it had to be recognized that the virtue of commercial and cultivated man was never complete, his freedom and independence never devoid of the elements of corruption. No theory of human progress could be constructed which did not carry the negative implication that progress was at the same time decay, that culture entailed some loss of freedom and virtue, that what multiplied human capacities also fractured the unity of human personality. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had not restored this unity, but had learned to live, resignedly or hopefully, with personalities sundered by history. They were already finding themselves cast in the role of Faust to the Mephistopheles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Gibbon, in this analysis, emerges as a modern, and one relatively untroubled by the accusing finger of Rousseau; Lausanne was at a safe distance from Geneva. That is, he accepts the thesis that the Decline and Fall was ultimately due to the expansion of the empire, the professionalization of the armies, the institution of the principate, and the decay of virtue, but while he agrees that commerce, politeness, and luxury grew up behind the shield of the principate and the legions, he will not accept that luxury is to be considered a major cause of the Decline. There were more radical contemporaries who held that it was the affluent society which paid mercenaries to defend it, so that wealth was a cause of the loss of virtue; in their view of Roman history, the rise of the mercenary legions went together with the rise of the equites and the publicani, and they started from Sallust rather than from Tacitus. Gibbon—though he had written an essay about the dubious financial dealings of the tyrannicide hero Brutus—resisted this interpretation. He was regularly at pains to point out that it was despotism, not luxury, which corroded the ability of ancient society to defend itself, and that the relation between despotism and luxury was not a simple one. When he paused, in the chapter which recounts Alaric's sack of Rome, to review the last stage in the history of the senatorial aristocracy, he made or strongly implied two striking points: the first, that the luxury of the senators was the effect of their liying in an economy of conspicuous consumption, not of profitable exchange; the second, that if we look back into the primitive age of republican virtue, we find that the warrior yeoman was regularly plunged into debt because he preferred going off with the legions and seizing the lands of others to peaceably increasing by industry the yield of his own farm. Virgil's Georgics—Gibbon had written in his youth—were written at Augustus' instance to persuade the soldier-farmer to civilize himself. We can infer from this that Gibbon was awake to the modern argument—found in Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, and others—that ancient virtue was warlike because it was economically primitive, and that a productive market economy had no need of virtue in this sense and would not be corrupted by its disappearance.

An implication would be that eighteenth-century commercial Europe was not threatened, like Rome, by corruption from within. Gibbon in 1781 had some personal motivation for presenting this argument. The author, possibly Charles James Fox, of some satiric verses on Gibbon's dual role as historian of the Roman empire and parliamentary placeman under the North administration had written: 'His book well describes / How corruption and bribes / O'erthrew the great empire of Rome; / And his writings declare / A degen'racy there / Which his conduct exhibits at home.' The revolt of the American provinces, as a matter of historical correctness, faced Britain with a Social War rather than a Decline and Fall, and came about precisely because the institutions of British liberty had not merged in those of imperial government; but it would not have been surprising if Gibbon had been at pains to destroy the very fashionable, almost radical-chic, parallel between contemporary Britain or Europe and Sallustian or Tacitean Rome. We have found that he had the means of doing so. But his historical intellect was a good deal stronger than its ideological promptings, and when we reach the 'General Observations' at the end of Volume Three, we find this theme present indeed, but played down almost to vanishing point. Gibbon does indeed stress that the late empire was a military despotism which had destroyed its own capacity to replace and renew its virtue, whereas modern Europe is, he says, a great republic, composed of diverse states which by emulation maintain each other's military virtue—though he also says that the advanced technology of war has rendered this virtue neither possible nor necessary—correct each other's forms of government, and by trade and competition strengthen each other's economies. In this peaceable and progressive society, military and political virtue are, in a way which recalls Montesquieu, kept at a level of moderate but not essential importance, and there is no need to worry too much about their necessary imperfection. But what renders the 'General Observations' puzzling and disappointing to most readers is, one suspects, that this theme is dealt with in terms far less of internal decay than of the extreme improbability of barbarian assault from without. Gibbon elects to consider how Europe would stand up to a new nomad invasion, though he prefaces his observations with the admission that the Russians and the Chinese have reduced the nomads to a species verging on extinction. American critics like to believe that he did this in order to avert his eyes from the painful spectacles of Saratoga and Yorktown; but it is hard to find that the British cared enough about America to experience its loss as a trauma, and this emphasis on the nomads can be explained—the explanation will be partly ideological—in terms of Gibbon's developing ideas on the sociology of barbarism.

Theorists in search of a modern equivalent for ancient virtue had already placed themselves on a road which, for Anglophones at any rate, led from John Locke to Adam Smith. The mind formulated its ideas in response to the sensations and objects encountered in experience; as men advanced in productive capacity through the successive stages of history, they enlarged their own minds by multiplying the objects to which they responded: In chapter nine of The Decline and Fall, Gibbon reviewed Tacitus' De moribus Germanorum in the light of this body of theory. The Germans were savages, he said, possessed of neither money nor letters, the media of exchange which multiplied and preserved the objects nourishing the mind, and this was the case because their social condition was preagricultural. They neither labored nor produced, and were consequently totally incapable of contemplation and almost incapable of action. Self-awareness was an existential burden of which they could discharge themselves only by violence; war was their only activity, and honor—which was a fierce sense of personal though hardly of civil liberty—as near as they got to virtue. If honor and liberty are precivil characteristics, Gibbon is devoid of serious nostalgia for the primitive virtues; he would have rather liked to believe in the authenticity of Ossian, but he knew too well what Hume would have to say on the subject and his own thesis commanded him to believe that virtue was civil and could exist only when the barbarian had been socialized into productive capacity and cooperative labor.