David Frum

It's the Machiavelli explanation.

What he thinks happened was that there was a decline in the civic virtue of the Roman people.

And this decline in civic virtue was the key culprit of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

What did he mean by civic virtue?

What he meant was a kind of self-denying, materially austere commitment to active citizenship, active participation in public life.

There was more of that early.

There was less of that later.

As that civic participation declined, so did the Roman Empire.

And many people who read his book in 1776 and after took from that reading a message that was in some ways very helpful to building modern societies, and we all should be active citizens, but also misleading.

because it created an idea that people are more virtuous at one period, less virtuous at another.

It made the story of the success or failure of societies very much a matter of individual behavior and less of institutional success.

Now again, Gibbon was in no way a naive person.

He understood the importance of institutions.

One of the big villains of his book is the rise of the Christian church, which in his telling diverts Roman attention from this worldly to other worldly activities, from being willing to work on behalf of the Commonwealth in the here and now

to looking for some kind of reward in heaven for being less willing to use weapons, to serve in the military, and more inclined to privatize their life.

And there's obviously some truth to this.

Christianity did change the way the Roman civilization worked.

But it's not clear that there was any less involvement in civic life, in Roman life, in the 400s or 500s than there was in the 100s when he begins his story.

But what he did introduce, and this is really the thing we need to be cautious of,

was a kind of biologization of history, an idea of decline and decadence.