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.The everyday experience of life, and a little reflection on one sself and the objects which surround us on every side, should suffice to furnishthe simplest among us with the necessary ideas of the law of nature, and the truefoundation of all our obligations.]t xSuch formulae were to strike the next century as profoundly anti-historicist, because they depicted the laws of the mind, which producedideas, as simple, unchanging, and having no history.Giarrizzo, how-ever, seized upon Barbeyrac s il ne faut pas sortir de soi-même as astarting-point for historicism, since if everything was done by the humanmind it was done by that mind where it happened to be and as theconditions of its time and place obliged or allowed it to operate. Laconversione alla storia was therefore a European process, in whichGibbon at Lausanne took part through the reading of the great worksmentioned in the Memoirs and by Giarrizzo; and the latter came close tot u A, p.234, Memoir C.t v Giarrizzo, 1954, p.35.t w Quoted by Giarrizzo, 1954, pp.32 3.It is from Barbeyrac s preface to his translation ofPufendorf s De jure naturae et gentium (Le droit de la nature et des gens, Amsterdam, 1734).t x Translation JGAP. The re-education of young Gibbon 85claiming that Gibbon had become a philosophe disciple of Montesquieut yby the time he left Lausanne in 1758.A generation after Giarrizzo,David Womersley began investigating the thesis that Gibbon began theDecline and Fall in a spirit of pragmatic, philosophic historiography , inframing which the philosophes saw Montesquieu as their leader, but thenmoved on to a more complex vision.u pThere is substance to this interpretation.The move from methodiz-ation to historicization can be seen taking place, though the reader ofthe Memoirs is enjoined that no conversione alla storia was needed inGibbon s case, and Giarrizzo recognised the tension between narrativeand philosophy in Gibbon s mind.u ¹ To what extent it was necessary topass through a phase of belief in a fixed human nature governed byunvarying causal laws is a further question.As for the role of Montes-quieu, Gibbon s Lausanne papers display his presence in essays onSallust and Caesar;u ² but here it is the Considérations sur les causes de lagrandeur des romains et de leur décadence that we encounter, and the stronglinks between the Considérations and the Decline and Fall must turn ourthoughts towards historiography before philosophy.The evidence forMontesquieu s importance in shaping Gibbon s work at Lausanne isstrong but internal, and rests largely on two important essays completedafter his departure.The Essai sur l étude de la littérature, begun in 1758 andpublished in 1762, is strongly Montesquieuan in argument and muchmore so in style as the Memoirs self-critically observeu ³ and the samemay be said for the Lettre sur le gouvernement de Berne, which Giarrizzodated to 1758, but may be more probably assigned to Gibbon s secondsojourn at Lausanne in 1763 4.u t The question to be resolved is that ofhow far Montesquieu s role was decisive in drawing Gibbon into amainstream of European intellectual history running through En-lightenment to historicism.Here we have to do with a paradigm: a fixed and authoritative set ofassumptions which have identified Enlightenment with a sequence ofgreat texts, whose history consists in their serial relations with oneanother, so that it becomes the history of The Enlightenment and allmeanings of the term are to be found within it.Even the social andcultural contexts within which this process is said to have taken place aret y Giarrizzo, 1954, p.35: da ora in poi egli farà di Montesquieu la luce dei suoi problemi.u p Womersley, 1988, e.g.p.5; cf.Womersley, i, e.g.p.lxvi.u ¹ Giarrizzo, 1954, pp.41, 66, 69.u ² MW, iv, pp.399 434; Giarrizzo, 1954, pp.65 70; YEG, pp.89 94.u ³ Memoirs, p.103 (A, pp.172 3, Memoir B).u t Giarrizzo, 1954, p.35 and n.67; YEG, pp.187 9. 86 England and Switzerland, 1737 1763defined and constrained by being grouped around it, so that it con-ditions them as much as they do it.This paradigm is not purely aninvention, inasmuch as it was invented by the actors in the process andnot only by historians after them, so that the activities we call En-lightenment need only to be redefined as the invention of Enlighten-ment.The texts constituting the sequence, and the activities contextualto their production, can to a large degree be located in and aroundParis, in the course of the reconstruction after 1714 of the great intellec-tual and artistic institutions which had empowered Louis XIV s Franceto claim, and come close to exercising, cultural as well as politicalhegemony in western and central Europe [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]