Edward Gibbon is the rare historian whose impact went far beyond his profession to leave an indelible impression upon Western thought. This is entirely due to his most famous work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which as Roy Porter notes in the introduction to this book, remains so well known today that “people who cannot name any other work of history can rattle off the phrase Decline and Fall.” Yet to reduce Gibbon’s classic to a mere phrase glosses over his complex thinking about the past and the forces that drive history. Porter demonstrates this in a compact study that describes Gibbon’s historical vision, how he developed it, and the ways it was reflected in his foremost work.

Porter begins his analysis by summarizing the state of historical thought in Gibbon’s time. As he explains, it was a historically minded age that benefited from the efforts that had been invested over the previous century in gathering texts and facts. Yet this material typically was presented without any real effort at interpretation, which resulted in a paradox: a land “saturated in history” but without works of insightful social analysis. As a child, the precocious Gibbon benefited from this saturation through an early immersion in many of these texts. The books kindled a passion for learning, which was refined both at Oxford University and an extended stay in Lausanne. It was during his time in Switzerland that Gibbon both honed his linguistic abilities and gained greater exposure to the Enlightenment ideas then current in Europe. It was a period that would equip him well for his greatest project.

Upon his return to England in 1765 Gibbon embarked upon a career as a writer. Though he wrote widely about both literature and history, Porter understandably focuses his examination of Gibbon’s ideas on the Decline and Fall. After taking a chapter to summarize the book, he elaborates on Gibbon’s thinking in three chapters that address the key themes within it: power, religion, and civilization in the face of barbarism. Through them he details the ways in which Gibbon analyzed the history of imperial Rome through the lens of Enlightenment thinking, seeing with it the flaws of Christianity and an important object lesson about the loss of liberty to despotism. Porter is frank about the flaws of Gibbon’s book, including its slighting of Islamic writings and its anti-Byzantine bias. Yet he also pays tribute to the many strengths of his work, making it clear how Gibbon’s fine prose style and his perceptive arguments contributed both to the book’s success and its endurance as a work of historical literature down to the present day.

In examining Gibbon’s work, Porter demonstrates his own gifts as a historian and writer. Though he occasionally indulges himself with a flowery phrase, this never gets in the way of his analysis of Gibbon’s thinking. Because of this, his book makes for an admirable study of Gibbon as a “philosophical historian” who both embodied and transcended his age. Readers would be well advised to have a copy of Decline and Fall handy while they read it, though, because while it’s perfectly possible to enjoy Porter’s book without it, most will want to read (or re-read) Gibbon’s monumental study for themselves once they’re through with it. ( )