Science and skepticism

Two new challenges confronted the study of history in the 17th century. One was generated by the successes of natural science, claimed by its proponents to be the best—or even the only—producer of truth. Science created a new picture of the world, discrediting all past conceptions. As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night/ Then God said: ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” These successes inspired the hope that similar laws would be found for social and historical phenomena and that the same scientific methods could be applied to every subject, including politics, economics, and even literature.

The other challenge lay in the relativism and skepticism generated within historical discourse itself. In his Histoire des histoires et l’idée de l’histoire accompli (1599; “History of Histories and the Idea of History Accomplished”), Lancelot Voisin La Popelinière (1540–1608) asked: if history shows the ceaseless mutations of human culture, what keeps history itself from being more than a mode of perception of any particular culture, of no more permanent value than any other changeable cultural artifact? Thus, the unmasking of forgeries could lead to suspicions about every relic of the past. In a similar vein, the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin claimed that almost all the Latin and Greek classics and most of the works of the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. Jerome, were written by a group of medieval Italian scholars, who then forged all the manuscripts purporting to be earlier. Hardouin, it must be said, pushed historical criticism past the boundaries of sanity.

The most influential philosopher of the 17th century, René Descartes, included history in his catalogue of dubious sciences. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes asserted that, although histories exalt the mind,

even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of romances.

According to Descartes, history is doubtful because it is selective. Unlike the sciences, which are based on mathematics, history cannot yield knowledge.

One attempt to rescue the truth-claims of history, which ironically lent support to skepticism, was the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary”), by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), one of the most widely read works of the 18th century. The articles in Bayle’s dictionary, enlivened by learned and often witty marginalia, established what was known about the subject but often undermined religious and political orthodoxies. These sallies were far more memorable than the often trivial facts provided in the work.

Montesquieu and Voltaire

The leading historians of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Voltaire (1694–1778), responded in different ways to the scientific impulse. In De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of Laws), Montesquieu explored the natural order that he believed underlay polities as well as economies. Despite lacking information about many cultures, he systematically applied a comparative method of analysis. Climate and soil, he believed, are the deepest level of causality. The size of the territory to be governed also determines what kind of government it can have (republics have to be small; large countries like Russia require despotism). Montesquieu’s preferred form of government was constitutional monarchy, which existed in France before Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) and in England during Montesquieu’s day. Among his many readers were the Founding Fathers of the United States, who embraced Montesquieu’s idea of balanced government and indeed created one exquisitely contrived to allow each branch to check the others.

Voltaire’s temperament was more skeptical. “History,” he declared, “is a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” He nevertheless spent much of his life playing those tricks, producing L’Histoire de Charles XII (1731; “History of Charles XII”), on the Swedish monarch, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; “The Century of Louis XIV”), and Essai sur les moeurs (1756; “Essay on Morals”). In an article on history for the Encyclopédie, edited by the philosopher Denis Diderot, Voltaire noted that the modern historian requires not only precise facts and dates but also attention to customs, commerce, finance, agriculture, and population. This was the program that the Essai tried to fulfill. It starts not with Adam or the Greek poet Homer but with the ancient Chinese, and it also treats Indian, Persian, and Arab civilizations. Voltaire’s Essai was the first attempt to make the genre of “universal history” truly universal, not just in covering the globe—or at least the high cultures—but also in studying every aspect of human life. In this respect Voltaire is the father of the “total histories” and the “histories of everyday life” that blossomed in the second half of the 20th century.

Voltaire was curious about everything—but not tolerant of everything. Like most philosophes (the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment), he considered the Middle Ages an epoch of unbroken superstition and barbarism. Even the age of Louis XIV exhibited “a history of human stupidity.” Like Machiavelli, he believed that one could learn from history—but only what not to do. Thus, a statesman reading a history of the reign of Charles XII should be “cured of the folly of war.”

Although Voltaire was interested in other cultures, he believed that reason had made headway only in the Europe of his own day. It was left to thinkers of the next generation, including the baron l’Aulne Turgot (1727–81) and the marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), to construe history as gradually but inevitably moving toward the elimination of bigotry, superstition, and ignorance. Condorcet rhapsodized: “How welcome to the philosopher is this picture of the human race, freed from all its chains, released from the domination of chance and from that of the enemies of progress, advancing with a firm and sure step on the path of truth, virtue, and happiness.”

Edward Gibbon

Science contributed not only its ambitions but also its concepts to historiography. The philosopher David Hume (1711–76) took from it the sober empiricism and distrust of grand schemes that informed his History of England (1754–62). The greatest of the Enlightenment historians—and probably the only one still read today—Edward Gibbon (1737–94), managed to bring together in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) the erudition of the 17th century and the philosophy of the 18th. Gibbon borrowed rather than contributed to historical erudition, for he was not a great archival researcher. “It would be unreasonable,” he said, “to expect that the historian should peruse enormous volumes, with the uncertain hope of extracting a few interesting lines.” The influence of Enlightenment thought is indicated particularly in Gibbon’s wit and in his skeptical view of religion. “To the believer,” he wrote, “all religions are equally true, to the philosopher, all religions are equally false, and to the magistrate, all religions are equally useful.”

Gibbon’s great work gives no elaborate account of the causes of the decline and fall—because the causes, he thought, were obvious. Borrowing an image from physics, he wrote:

the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

The Enlightenment has been condemned as “unhistorical.” It did lack sympathy, and thus full understanding, of some cultures and periods. Hume’s view that human nature was essentially the same in the Roman Empire and in 18th-century Britain now seems wrong. No technical advances in historiography were made by the philosophes. On the other hand, history was widely read, and the brilliant writing of Voltaire and Gibbon helped to create something like a mass public for historical works. Finally, the Enlightenment expanded the historical world, in principle at least, almost to the limits recognized today—and it never shrank again.