David Frum

I've listened to a lot of them, and I strongly recommend the audiobook.

It is a fascinating way to spend time, but it's a lot.

Either way, whether you read the six volumes or listen to the 126 hours.

But I've dug deeply enough into the book to have absorbed its message for our time.

And that's what I want to talk about today.

Because this book remains, or this series of books, remains not only a tremendous monument of history, not only a great milestone in intellectual development, it continues to shape discourse in our own time in ways that are powerful, but also sometimes a little misleading.

So let me explain what I mean, why this book is so relevant, and why I'm talking about it today.

Edward Gibbon was a man of the Enlightenment.

He was a secularist.

He was someone who had what we would call a broadly liberal, that the word would not have been used that way in his time, but a broadly liberal view of politics.

He was a man of great tolerance.

He was an easygoing man, the opposite of a persecutor, the opposite of an advocate of any kind of arbitrary or absolute authority.

So in that sense, a very modern figure.

But in another way, as an historian, he was quite an old-fashioned figure, a backward-looking figure.

His book written in 1776 or begun in 1776, the last volume was published a dozen years later in 1788, is very much under the imprint of the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli, who lived 250 years before Edward Gibbon, and through Machiavelli to the classical literary tradition of the Romans and the Greeks.

When Gibbon is explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he, again, is a very modern man.

He uses not only literary evidence, he uses coins and inscriptions and all the techniques that were made available by archaeology as it existed in his time.

And many of his ideas, as I say, are very strikingly modern.

But his central explanation of what happened to the Roman Empire

is backward looking.