Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
Epic-Making
By P.N. Furbank
Barbarism and Religion Volume 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government
by J.G.A. Pocock
Cambridge University Press, 761 pp., $90.00
In 1957 J.G.A. Pocock published The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, an illuminating, and in some ways groundbreaking, investigation of seventeenth-century English historiography. It argued that Whiggish political theory before the advent of John Locke was essentially historical in character. Its exponents (for instance James Tyrrell as late as his General History of England in 1697) held that English common law had subsisted, fundamentally unchanged, from an immemorial past, far antedating the Norman Conquest, and that it enshrined an ancient constitution of a parliamentary, or quasi-parliamentary, kind. As a theory, this had done great service for the opponents of James I, and again for the Levellers; but as historical scholarship developed, and the nature of feudalism came to be better understood, it became something of an embarrassment. Hence the extreme effectiveness of Locke's approach, which, breaking with previous tradition, based its arguments entirely on reason and 'natural rights.'
Review, 4426 words
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