Roman Empire

Sympathy for the Sovereign: Sovereignty, Sympathy, and the Colonial Relation in Edward
Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Author(s): Peter DeGabriele
Source: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 53, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp. 1-22
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41468161
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Sympathy for the Sovereign: Sovereignty, Sympathy,
and the Colonial Relation in Edward Gibbon's
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Peter DeGabriele
Mississippi State University
Edward Gibbon, in the fifth volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776-78), mocks the legend which claimed that the empress Irene's barbarous
blinding of her own son was marked by "a subsequent darkness of seventeen
days ... as if the sun, a globe of fire so vast and remote, could sympathise with
the atoms of a revolving planet/'1 While it is not, of course, surprising that an
enlightened enemy of superstition and erudite scholar like Gibbon would mock
such a legend, we should pay some attention to the way in which he does so.
Gibbon evokes, here, the concept of sympathy as a force that is supposed to bring
two distant bodies into a reciprocal relationship. His quasi-scientific language,
used to describe two bodies which are not capable of sympathy, ridicules the idea
that inanimate globes of fire or revolving atoms could ever respond to human
affairs. It is not only, however, on the physical nature of the bodies described that
Gibbon relies to make his point. The sun is described as 'Vast and remote/' and
it seems that, at least in part, it is its very distance, its removal from the sphere
of human affairs that makes the idea of it sympathizing with them so ridiculous.
Sympathy, then, is questioned not only in its inapplicability to geological masses,
but also in its reach, in its ability to stretch its combinatory powers over large dis-
tances. It is precisely this capacity of sympathy that gets called into question within
the realm of human affairs throughout The Decline and Fall In particular, Gibbon
questions the ability of sympathy to bridge the vast social gap between sovereign
and subject, and also between Imperial center and colonial periphery. In doing so,
he questions what had become a dominant theme in eighteenth-century political
philosophy at his time of writing: the replacement of the vertical bond with the
sovereign as the agent of social cohesion, by the horizontal force of sympathy.
Gibbon's skepticism about the power of sympathy is worth considering in
the current critical climate, as there have been many recent accounts of the pe-
riod that make the sympathetic social bond, or an analogous concept, central
The Eighteenth Century , vol. 53, no. 1 Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
2 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
to their study of the period

work, which spans intellectu
of political organization cohe
thought about sympathy and
concern to me here will be M
ity: Public , Private and the
Narratives of Enlightenment: C
both of which, from very dif
tion of a new political philos
away from the importance
McKeon, for his part, makes
what he calls an indefinitely
sovereign in the social bond
interest. O'Brien has a consid
she describes as a new mode of international relations characteristic of the
eighteenth-century, of which she sees Gibbon as a herald, shares with McKeon

a vision of the social bond that is no longer dependent upon the figure of the
sovereign. While neither McKeon nor O'Brien is particularly concerned with
the impact of this new form of the social bond on British Imperial endeavors,
this is the central subject of Lynn Festa's Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eigh-
teenth-Century Britain and France (2006) .3 Festa's reading of British Imperialism
is based upon the necessity of disciplining, through the discourse of sentimen-
tality, a sympathetic identification that threatens to overrun all boundaries.4 It
is precisely this attribution to the sympathetic, horizontal social bond of the
power not only to hold society together, but the potential to go too far and to
overcome even the vast distance between Briton and colonial that Gibbon's
history finds suspect.5 This should lead us to look again at accounts of the
social and political relation that minimize, or even eliminate, the importance
or necessity of a sovereign power and the necessary interruption of the sym-
pathetic economy it implies.
The significance of Gibbon, in this context, is that his history is a timely
reminder of the extent to which the sovereign and sovereign power persists
even in the face of stringent philosophical and political attempts to minimize
or eliminate its influence. J. G. A. Pocock reminds us that there was a tension in
the political and intellectual culture of the 1770s concerning, precisely, the role
of the sovereign within civil society. Despite various philosophical and political
attempts to move away from a reliance on the sovereign as constitutive of the
social bond, this period saw a debate in which questions regarding the author-
ity of the sovereign, the place of the King in parliament, and the relation of the
monarch to the colonies (especially those in North America), were becoming
more and more prominent. Indeed, Pocock describes the years between 1763
and 1783 "as both a crisis within the realm and, interrelatedly a crisis in the re-
lations between realm and empire," and this crisis, for Pocock, revolves largely
DEGABRIELE- SYMPATHY FOR THE SOVEREIGN 3
around the relation of the King, as personal sov

British sovereignty, and to his realm and colonie
that Britain had left Stuart absolutism behind
ited monarchy, the problem of the role of the
balanced system was once again becoming a m
take up the extent to which Gibbon's Decline a
problems: the relation of the sovereign to the
to its colonial territories. In the first place, we
fundamental disjunction between the happines
jects, a caesura at the center of political society
make the social field into a representative sp
shared and represented. Secondly, Gibbon, in a
way into the eighteenth century, presents us w
junction between empire and its colonial territ
between these two disjunctions and the signific
to any attempt to minimize the role of sovere
the social bond. Finally, we will see that the st
Gibbon describes places him at odds with the
and with its turn to commerce as a way to c
of civil society as well as goods and wealth, a
characteristic of the "modern" variety of civi
he makes central to Gibbon's historical practic
HAPPINESS AND THE SOVEREIGN
McKeon claims that the eighteenth-century moved toward the constr

an " indefinitely inclusive" public sphere based upon a devolution of
ism whereby the prerogatives of the absolute sovereign were devolv
the individual. "Modernity," he writes, "involves the systematic mult
and authorization of private entities" which combine in the "indefini
siveness of the virtual realm of the public," making redundant the abs
ereign and replacing his interest with the public interest.8 This accou
devolution of absolutism implies that eighteenth-century social and
thought moved away from a conception of the social bond as based u
between sovereign and subject and toward that of a horizontal link
subjects whose interests interact in the indefinitely inclusive public
much of the political philosophy of the period this trend can be ob
the attempt to find a way to make private property, and the pleasure
faction it conveys, part of the broader public sphere. The most thoro
philosophical solution to this problem is David Hume's concept of sy
as he developed it in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). At the sa
as producing a theory of the origin of society that did away with th
ian necessity of an original moment of compact between sovereign an
and thus making the sovereig

plained how sympathetic com
prietor receives from his prop
of the sovereign and the con
even the most private inter
two essentially related move
emergence of feeling as the
political thought."10 Similarly
to develop the possibility of
positions unavoidably compar
range of an inclusive public sp
sovereign bond, but by a hor
must be able to make social r
vate ones. As we will see, desp
Gibbon is skeptical about the
an inequality in private pleas
bon provides a timely challe
make us reconsider the exten
decisively move from a conc
power, to one based on an in
For Hume, happiness is som
idea of a purely private pleas
self, is dangerous to the cohe
a subject's interest away from
ing a fundamental inequality
the humble. In order to reco
from his own private proper
invokes the figure of the m
the minds of men are mirror
which a rich man receives f
holder, causes a pleasure and
and sympathiz'd with, encre
then, has a "secondary satisf
he acquires by them." Impor
once more reflected become[s
beholder." The possessor of r
third rebound of the origina
the images and reflections, b
Hume, any inequality occasi
series of reflections that m
cal. This flattening out of t
people is essential for the con
distinctions, in which the so
subjects, in favor of a horizontal social bond in

sentiment, if still radically unequal in material
ing of happiness is essential to Hume's project
the necessity of the sovereign to the constitut
interest to be, theoretically, equal. The other-d
rally draws humans into social communion wit
compact with a sovereign power.
Sympathy, and its close relatives sentiment
ceived much critical attention over the last twe
tive critics of these peculiarly eighteenth-cen
to point out the limits of sympathetic or senti
gies of a politics of equality. While Hume's acc
the potential to radically reduce differences of
der and to make a generalized sympathy the
subjectivity, it can also be read as a mystificatio
that persist in the eighteenth-century political s
sage I have quoted, in which sympathy masks
of great property and his poorer admirer and
of property, entrenches the material fact that p
both Markman Ellis and Peter Hulme have con
tion to Britain's colonial territories, and espec
inhabited those territories, the rhetoric of sym
British responsibility toward races or culture
thy, or to justify a political quietism with reg
such as the Atlantic slave trade.14 Both these
the colonial territories were sites of the comp
the one hand, Gibbon is, like these contempora
as a force of equality in the political sphere. A
bon's problem is not primarily with the uneven
and sentimentality or with its ideological tend
sympathy as a force of feeling to bridge the g
While my analysis will move toward a consid
sympathy when applied to the colonial periph
begins, with the situation of the sovereign at th
Gibbon's presentation of happiness and sover
is in stark contrast to Hume's description of
pleasures of the possessor of riches and those
in mutual ongoing reflection. The sovereign, a
ject to a surplus of happiness which he must
record of the difficulty, even impossibility, of
sovereign's happiness is consistent with that o
a "devolution of absolutism," in which the ab
is devolved on to the private individual, who
with other equally absolute pr

the persistent presence of a ra
see, this happiness is not simp
those less fortunate than the so
the doctrine of sympathy and t
presents it, it is a happiness wh
communication. In Gibbon's hi
disruption in the coherence of
both Hume, in his theory of s
creation of an indefinitely inc
different ways, with the condit
the conditions that Gibbon out
fundamentally different to th
pursuing Gibbon's analysis of R
he is allegorizing the condition
stead to outline a structural mo
and public that is replicated wh
porary European colonialism. W
straightforwardly apply what
Europe, but that we should atten
bon outlines and to its persiste
different points in his work.
Toward the beginning of The
"if a man were called to fix the
the condition of the human r
without hesitation, name that
accession of Commodus" (1.103
human race, though, is so stra
the only period of history in w
object of government" (1.102).
Rome at this time was that th
with their own happiness. The
form distribution of felicity n
in this period of felicity, and ev
kind of disjunction between th
bon insists the five emperors of
says these monarchs were "ove
that inseparably waited on the
the exquisite delight of behol
the authors" (1.103). There is th
whose reward for modest virt
ness of others. Indeed, as absol
quality of virtue is allowed on
for civic virtue by being fundamentally unequal to th

historical moment most nearly approaching universal
there is a structural inequality between the happiness o
a surplus happiness which falls to the lot of the maste
no third reflection of the "over-paid" pleasure and ther
pleasure that no-one can share with the sovereign.
Importantly, this non-reflective and non-reciprocal h
the sovereign a peculiar interruption to his pleasure. Gib
structure of this age of happiness as a government "of
successive emperors whose characters and authority c
respect" (1.103). The subjects of these emperors cannot
to the absolute authority of their masters who in turn
sidering themselves as the accountable ministers of th
the image of liberty" (1.103). The characteristic of the
that they present themselves as the guardians of liberty
wielding an absolute dominion which is fatal to both. T
with Augustus and aims "to deceive the people by an im
the armies by an image of civil government" (1.96). G
idea" of this system as "an absolute monarchy disguised
monwealth" (1.93). He makes it quite clear that the fel
people of Rome is not dependent on the system itself,
sovereign. The four great emperors must, Gibbon says,
interrupted by a reflection "on the instability of that h
on the character of a single man" (1.105). The "ideal restr
senate," Gibbon tells us, "could never correct the vices of
The happiness of the Romans is thus not a general rule
quence of the peculiar character and tastes of their sover
The final lines of chapter three complete Gibbon's d
rial system of government and further imply the acc
the happiness of the people and the sovereign. Gibbon
of the exiled enemy of state of a modern tyrant and tha
exile from a modern state "escaping from the narrow lim
minions, would easily obtain, in a happier climate, a s
tune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint
of revenge" (1.106-7). There is an outside to the power
dominion in which to take refuge. By contrast, "the po
the world, and when that empire fell into the hands
world became a safe and dreary prison for his enem
despotism, whether he was condemned to drag his gil
senate, or to wear out a life of exile on the barren rock
banks of the Danube, expected his fate in silent despai
between the illustrious senator and the disgraced, fre
zero. All Romans are equally exiled, equally at home a
Given that the power of th

of the empire" (1.89), the wo
emperor's domestic domains
distinction between publicity
zens to shelter themselves fr
political space, it would seem
on the side of the public, it is
from the time of Augustus,
throne with darkness [and]
darkness around the throne
which Gibbon says he assum
afterwards laid aside," reserv
secrecy, or mystery which re
This space of the sovereign
damentally and structurally
already seen that in a virtuou
pleasure consists in seeing his
an emperor from indulging
Aurelius Antoninus, indulges
no incidental benefit on the
Gibbon describes his situation
lain out in his palace "dissolv
war" (1.116). This private in
happiness completely from t
removed from the concerns o
Gibbon thus presents us wi
hypocrisy of Augustus; the v
Commodus. In all these cases
which does not coincide wit
lute sovereigns cannot guaran
the public interest are one and
plus happiness of the Antoni
from the concerns of civil s
of hypocrisy that will persis
sovereign to subject. The sov
that his virtue is "in the last
whereas Pocock argues that t
publican analysis of Imperial
joined, what I hope to show i
and the public has consequen
canism, or by the liberal ideo
interest of the sovereign as fu
economy of civic virtue and
sections of this article I will argue that the sovereign

of the coherence of the public sphere, never disap
even when he discusses eighteenth-century Europe.
ALIENATED SENSE AND EMULATION
If a philosophy of sympathy asks the subject to feel the happiness o

indeed, if, in Hume's words, it asks the subject "to receive by comm
[the] inclinations and sentiments of others," then it must place high
the ability of the subject to feel his or her own inclinations, sentiment
piness.17 As The Decline and Fall proceeds, this is precisely what Gibb
sis of Roman sovereignty calls into question. For Gibbon, the isolate
of the sovereign does not simply disjoin him from the happiness o
jects, but also interrupts his own pleasures and, ultimately, alienates
his own senses.18 Theodosius the Younger, Gibbon tells us, was "bo
purple" and thus supplied with an education suitable to his position
of the Roman world (11.265). However, despite the fact that "a regula
study was judiciously instituted; of the military exercises of riding,
ing with the bow; of the liberal studies of grammar, rhetoric, and p
Theodosius was unable to learn anything of "the arts of governmen
His sister Pulcheria "taught him to maintain a grave and majestic de
to walk to hold his robes; to seat himself on his throne, in a manner
a great prince; to abstain from laughter ... in a word to represent w
and dignity the external figure of a Roman emperor" (11.264-65). Th
required of Theodosius by these lessons is quite distinct from the "em
friendship" which also formed part of the more liberal aspect of hi
(11.265). As a soldier or rhetorician Theodosius has peers to emulate;
he is without peer.
Gibbon implies that the lack of emulation is a structural aspect
eignty. He says that "the unfortunate prince who is born in the pu
remain a stranger to the voice of truth" (11.265). By giving truth a sen
ity Gibbon produces a strange ambiguity. On the one hand, truth
immediately apprehensible and strike one with the certainty of a se
tion. On the other hand, it is possible to become a stranger to truth, to
or to misrecognize its voice. Further, it is exactly the person who s
the power to communicate truth and to lend it the weight of author
necessarily a stranger to it. Theodosius as sovereign is alienated from
senses, and thus from any epistemological certainty. He is "separate
world by an impenetrable veil" (11.265) which dampens his senses an
gulf between his "idle amusements, and unprofitable studies" and th
injustice, most repugnant to his character, [which] were frequently
in his name" (11.265). The sovereign's structural alienation from his
displays the limits of the application of an epistemology based on
that of Hume) to the science o

tion, sovereignty is predicated
It is important to emphasiz
is opposed to the community
in the education of the empe
bon seems to draw between t
that of eighteenth-century Eu
When discussing, in the third
says that such a tyrant "who
or in his people, would soon
of his equals, the dread of pr
prehension of his enemies" (1
which the tyrant might feel
who keep the extremes of ty
with peers, equals with whom
implies lessening the importan
the sovereign, if we follow th
term; it no longer represents
with other interests, but becom
a broader civilized and cosmo
For Karen O'Brien, this is in
which allows emulation betwe
community capable of impro
argues that Gibbon's history
on building a cosmopolitan c
trine of the balance of power
serve general peace and the c
inserts Gibbon in a tradition
to the ideal of Europe as a ha
much of her reading of The De
vationson the Decline of the
constructed a vision of mode
Roman Empire because it relie
ity of emulation is based on "
mutually compatible interests
We should already be cautiou
tinction between Gibbon's pr
tion of modern Europe, if we
the exile in the modern wor
exile from the ancient, saying
the protection of another sov
implies emulation, and not si
each other's traits that the har
the availability of a space guaranteed by anothe

can subsist and find means of revenge. The sove
can emulate each other but two masters who c
essay will challenge O'Brien's reading of Gibbon
of international relations and his promotion o
cially insofar as this emulation is based upon a
of sovereign power and insofar as it ignores t
colonial relation.
John Robertson, making a similar argument to O'Brien about Gibbon's as-

surance of the stability of modern Europe, says that this assurance is based
upon "the conviction that the threat of universal monarchy had disappeared."21
In place of the attempt to dominate the world through a territorial empire
under the sway of a single sovereign, the modern European states sweetened
the manners of the world through the benevolent influences of commerce and
trade. This vision of the dominance of trade and emulation in the absence of
the absolutist threat, however, does not account for the challenge posed to these
concepts by empire and colonial relations. Gibbon's history is never simply
about modern Western Europe and it does not end only with a narrative about
the rise of the balance of states. Indeed, one of the remnants of the structure of
sovereignty Gibbon describes, in which the interest of sovereign and subject
bear no essential relation to each other, is the connection between domestic
and colonial power. Importantly, in this respect, the "General Observations,"
on which O'Brien heavily relies, were written before the rest of The Decline and
Fall (Pocock estimates their composition in 1772-74), and thus before the loss of
the American colonies and the spectacular loss in confidence about the stability
and benevolence of the British Empire.22 In his brief descriptions of the modern
maritime and mercantile empire of Britain, Gibbon does not provide us with
a vision of healthy emulation, but of an absolute disjunction of interests be-
tween colonizer and colonized. Absolutism is not devolved from sovereign to
individual, but the sovereign relation, which is absolute only in the fundamen-
tal disjunction of interest between sovereign and subject, is displaced into the
relation between the domestic and the colonial. This is important, as it draws
our attention to the fact that absolutism is always a mode of relation and not,
as McKeon implies, a property of some person. The absolute sovereign is not
absolute on his own terms and in his own person (indeed, Gibbon shows us
that an absolute sovereign may not know his own senses), but in his relation
with his subjects. Sovereignty is always a relation, a relation of absolute in-
equality, and so it cannot be devolved into a public inclusive of all interests. It
can only be displaced. When Gibbon describes colonial relations, he shows that
the world is not simply made up of emulating European states, but of imperial
powers and colonial territories whose interests do not and cannot coincide.
COLONIAL DOMINATION
At very few, but very significant points, Gibbon provides us with h

the remnants of the Roman Empire, remnants which fail to be en
system of emulation or to be entirely reconciled to the commercial
modern Europe. The narrative I will discuss is a marginal curiosity
text of Gibbon's monumental history, but I will turn to it as it repr
of the few points, especially in the body of the text and not the fo
which Gibbon explicitly discusses the contemporary world. In this v
description of the modern maritime and mercantile empire of Brit
does not provide us with a vision of healthy emulation, but of an a
junction of interests between colonizer and colonized. The blind do
characteristic of the sovereign relation is not devolved on to the ind
displaced into the relation between the domestic and the colonial.
that the problem of absolutism is not just a problem with a particu
system of government, but the problem of containing an ineradicabl
sovereign domination in any system of laws, or in any relation of sy
sentimentality.
In the final chapter of the fourth volume of The Decline and Fall
traces some of the heretical sects of Christianity all the way from th
until the eighteenth century, and his narrative of these isolated sects
with the re-establishment of "contact" with modern Europe. It is th
of this "contact," which, I argue, Gibbon conceives as a failure of co
mirrors the failure of the sympathetic social bond, on which I will
cause these outposts of the Roman Empire also become outposts of t
of modern Europe, it forces us to think of modern Europe as more tha
lar, balanced system of states and to examine the relations which Eu
with its colonial territories and trading partners. It shows us that the
create an indefinitely inclusive public, or to think the world as enlight
mutually beneficial commerce, is complicated by Europe's colonial
Pocock calls Gibbon a "modern" for whom "the rise of commerce and culture
had been worth the loss of virtue which it had entailed; it had vastly enhanced
the human capacity for production and consumption, exchange and indepen-
dence, and sympathy, and on this foundation there might be erected new ethi-
cal systems which displayed how man's love of himself might be converted
into love of his fellow beings."23 It is the link between commerce and culture,
exchange and sympathy, self-interest and ethical values, that Gibbon's descrip-
tion of colonial endeavors calls into question. Whereas Pocock attributes to
Gibbon a confidence that commerce involves an exchange of cultural improve-
ment as well as an exchange of goods, Gibbon's description of the commercial
interaction between the remnants of Ancient Rome and modern Europe should
deeply unsettle this confidence.
In this chapter of The Decline and Fall Gibbon discusses peoples and cultures
DEGABRIELE- SYMPATHY FOR THE SOVEREIGN 1 3
who do not fall neatly into the distinction Poco

" inhabitants of the Old World and ancient history
the most part the New Worlds with which Europ
of its modern history/'24 For Pocock these two
most important peoples who "were marginal to
count of it.25 However, in chapter XLVII of The
with a different type of marginal presence: pe
Roman roots and are strongly linked to the Ro
the ken of European modernity. This is importan
fact that the recent critical work on the relation
pathy focuses almost exclusively on that catego
savages. This criticism perceptively uncovers th
doctrines of sympathy and the way it justifies th
lonial territories.26 As we will see, however, Gib
neither "savage" nor "barbarian" means that his
forces of sympathy and commerce proceeds diff
ics. Rather than expose the mystifying tendenc
application of its rhetoric to Europe's others, G
without sympathy, of an encounter with othern
out having any meaningful effect on the subjectiv
rial self or colonial other.
Gibbon begins his narratives of the Christian sects that survived the fall of
Rome with an account of the Nestorians. He writes that "as early as the reign of
Justinian, it became difficult to find a church of the Nestorians within the limits
of the Roman empire" (11.980). The Nestorians, though, proved practically that
the Romans were not masters of the globe, and "beyond [the] limits [of the
Roman empire] they had discovered a new world" (11.980). Gibbon treats at
greatest length the Nestorian settlement on the spice coast of Malabar, argu-
ing that they maintained, within India, a distinct racial, cultural, and religious
identity. That the Nestorians practiced a form of Christianity, however, did not
make them part of a European or pan-Christian community. "Their religion
would have rendered them the firmest and most cordial allies of the Portu-
guese, but the inquisitors soon discerned in the Christians of St. Thomas the
unpardonable guilt of heresy and schism
world had left them in ignorance of the improvements or corrup

sand years; and their conformity with the faith and practice of t
would equally disappoint the prejudices of a papist or a prote
The Nestorians of Malabar are, for Gibbon, in a state of arres
(and this holds even though that "development" is ironically q
sible corruption), which means that they are neither contemp
panions of Europe.
The Jesuits, indeed, maintained some relation to the Malaba
persecuting, torturing and subduing them for 60 years. When
empire was shaken by the cou

Catholics were expelled and t
writing] freely professed on t
rival of the "trading compani
the Christians of Malabar fr
count of the Nestorians by sa
contempt, the Christians of
and silent indifference of the
Portuguese, the Dutch, and t
form an antagonistic relation
main outside any relation wit
calling them "brethren"), whe
nistic dialectical negation of t
Nestorians are a refuse of hist
Europe, nor of that of their ad
trade with, and colonization o
Gibbon's representation of
quences for thinking about t
ceived of its imperial relation
activity partly by distinguis
Roman model, and that of th
Empire was imagined as a terr
lowed by the Spanish and Po
maritime trading empire. Inst
empire of trade was supposed
gentle influence of commerc
the British empire suffered c
the Seven Years War (1756-63)
activity, she contends, the do
from an image of a mutually
the imperial relation. Festa ar
was to simultaneously create
ters of empire and their colon
police the boundaries of the
make with the victims of emp
tions and ensuring that there
Britain and colonial subjects. W
English relations with the Ma
ing them from the violent op
ability of trade and commerc
the bonds of sentiment, the
trading nations and Malabar p
sentimentality is important i
fications between colonizer and colonized, to set li

which takes place, Gibbon gives us a picture of th
a sympathetic bond never occurs. It is not a matter
relation between colonizing self and colonial othe
happens.
If anything, Gibbon's depiction of a non-contact between Europe and these
Christian remnants of Rome becomes even starker in his final example of the
remnants of Rome. Like the Nestorians of India, who maintained their reli-
gion throughout a period of many centuries without contact with Europe, the
church of Abyssinia remained an island of Christianity in the African continent
until it was also rediscovered by the Portuguese. Gibbon says that after being
founded as a Christian colony by the empress Theodora in the sixth century
CE, the Aethiopans, " encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their reli-
gion, . . . slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they
were forgotten" (11.999). Before describing the contact of the Aethiopians with
modern Europe it is important to reflect on the condition of their founding.
While Justinian was an orthodox emperor, his wife Theodora (whom Justin-
ian had promoted to an equal share of the sovereignty of the Empire), "had
listened to the Monophysite preachers" (11.971). By this difference in faith, "the
capital, the palace, the nuptial bed, were torn by spiritual discord" (11.971). In a
descending series, Gibbon traces the discord of Empire from the city, or polis, to
the site of the pleasure of the sovereigns. The sovereigns' alienation from their
own pleasure, the rift in the Imperial nuptial bed, produces a rift in the public
sphere of the Empire. Instead of the public sphere absorbing the pleasure of the
sovereign as yet another competing interest, the sovereign pleasure disrupts
the political sphere. Gibbon qualifies the purported disagreement between the
sovereigns, however, with a rumor saying that "so doubtful was the sincerity of
the royal consorts, that their seeming disagreement was imputed by many to a
secret and mischievous confederacy against the religion and happiness of their
people" (11.971). Whether the sovereigns are in confederacy or disagreement
remains unverifiable, even to the Enlightened historian, and all that remains
is a possible and unverifiable disjunction between the happiness of the sover-
eign (the character of which remains secret and mysterious), and the happiness
of the people. This is not what Mullan refers to as "intelligible contradiction"
between competing interests and viewpoints, but is instead a fundamentally
unreadable disjunction. The rumor elicits a skepticism that a sovereign's hap-
piness will ever be in the interest of the people and makes whatever goes on in
the sovereign nuptial bed appear essentially mischievous. The significance of
the sovereign's bedroom to the political sphere is inscrutable, the site of a mys-
terious pleasure (or unpleasure) which has no definite relation to the pleasure
or happiness of the people.
The Abyssinian Christians, then, are a product of the discord of the nuptial
bed, a child of the Empress who the orthodox Emperor would not acknow-
ledge. The Portuguese, who "a

year slumber in the early six
Sea, as if they had descended t
The scene Gibbon sets here is ak
expect that the worldly Portu
from the seemingly savage ear
trinal disputes, and indeed Gib
situation, . . . had almost relap
is, of course, jarred a little by
another planet, a fact which m
makes it unclear which society
the satire. Unsurprisingly, the
are told that the Abyssinians,
the rational project of impor
Their fierce attachment to the
their European counterparts
and after one hundred years o
were expelled. The Portuguese
lens of the Abyssinians, nor d
and enter into commerce wit
fourth volume with the word
ever shut against the arts, th
The potentially satirical dialec
and experience never takes pl
claims is central to Gibbon's s
a principle of understanding.2
the Abyssinians too much a p
ages. We are left again with a
encounter with a civilization s
perfectly rational Houyhnhnm
either society. If the fall of R
lation, the Roman legacy also
again be part of the same wor
At the end of The Age of Lo
satirical situation when recoun
to convince the philosophical
Jesuits involve themselves on
sophical temper of the Chines
Jesuits become an object of ri
Gibbon ends with a non-relati
found skepticism about the abi
either satiric dialogue or emu
the limits of satire as a genre c
to constitute the use of irony as a tool of histor

ascribed to Gibbon's irony by several critics.32 T
of history and sees something about its character
The reader is thus produced as a subject of kno
example from Gibbon, irony does not produce k
taches itself from the genres of historiography an
At the periphery of empire, then, the problem
to focus is not the contact between different cu
heady encounter with the other which threatens
the center, no miscegenation, and no hybridity. In
examined both the colonized peoples and the Eur
any meaningful connection at all with their res
not, as Festa would have it, that an overactive
policed.33 Europeans do not have their desires in
regions of the globe. It is rather that there is no
desire, at all. Importantly, this lack of affective c
Dutch and British from pursuing their colonial
tion of interests which I initially showed to exi
people, is preserved in the colonial relation. Gib
effects of this disjunction to exist at the centre o
of the sovereign and his subjects, or even betwe
senses, and at its periphery, in the radical diffe
the colonizer and the colonized. In this sense, th
an indefinitely inclusive public sphere, the prod
tion, or the linking together of Europe in an ha
disrupted, in eighteenth-century England, by th
tion. After the supposed devolution of absolutis
sovereign relation remains and finds its final hom
ing existence of the imperial project of modern
Gibbon's analysis of the relation between sym
hardly the last word in the discussion of these
phy. Indeed, the debate about the political valen
fever pitch in the aftermath of the French Revolu
the debate in the 1790s is the extent to which
and the fact that the language of sentimentality
by both republicans and supporters of the estab
cratic government.34 Claudia Johnson has show
tions on the Revolution in France (1790) was based
and John Barrell has illustrated how, in Englan
and George III garnered sympathy for these mo
family men, as husbands and fathers.35 Contras
that monarchy was an interruption to the "kin
pathy because the monarch "can never be in an
cannot sympathize with his su

sphere of the 1790s a critical d
quickly become a polemical p
that while Gibbon was revisin
tion, he struggled against the
a figure critical of England's e
Gibbon was "in danger of acq
character," and this despite G
revolution and to English const
tion, we need to look at Gibbo
violence of sovereignty, but a
by projects to homogenize soc
sovereign relation, then, (and,
the emerging discourse of the
attempts at this), are problem
Gibbon's critique of the sym
his analysis of the radical dom
are thus quite historically speci
of republican ideology as a ra
able to critique the vertical s
publican, and he is able to dem
of sympathy without promoti
power. As Womersley shows,
much more ideologically char
ever, precisely this historical
gauge the ideological position o
volume was published, that m
between the persistent violen
balization of human rights to
inclusive horizontal social bon
theories of sovereign power n
to be able to undo.40 Gibbon's
bring them more clearly into
NOTES
I would like to thank Ruth Mack, Steven Miller, and Shaun Irlam for their patient
and commentary on many drafts of this essay. Special thanks must also go to W
Schmidgen, whose far-reaching and incisive comments on a very early draft g
future revisions. Finally, I want to acknowledge the helpful comments and per
suggestions of the anonymous readers at The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interp
The essay is significantly better for their work.
1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols., ed
Womersley (London, 1994), 111.41 . Subsequent references to The Decline and F
be cited parenthetically by volume and page num

Womersley's edition, not to Gibbon's divisions.
2. See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Dom
Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), and Karen O
Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Ca
perspective, Ruth Perry's Novel Relations: The Transforma
and Culture (Cambridge, 2004) also makes the 1770s c
bond based on horizontal, rather than vertical bonds
family comes to be replaced by the conjugal family m
3. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eigh
(Baltimore, 2006).
4. Festa builds on a body of post-colonial criticism whi
affective contact central to the colonial relation. See, f
tipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of
Preserving the Self in the South Seas , 1680-1840 (Chica
rid Zones: Maternity , Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth
1995). As I will argue in the final section of this essay,
of colonialism and imperialism in which this contact,
happens, in which there is no meaningful relation be
which the boundary between self and other is never in
5. Recent criticism has tended to see sympathy as
than insufficient. See, for example Alex Wetmore, "
and the Automaton," Eighteenth-Century Studies 43,
"Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Bu
Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 1(2006): 23^49.
6. J. G. A. Pocock, "Political Thought in the English
1: The Imperial Crisis," The Varieties of British Polit
(Cambridge, 1993), 246-85, 285. See also Kathleen Wils
Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambri
7. See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays
Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985),
tion to commerce as a way to preserve virtue after the
must make us wary of those who attribute to Pococ
virtue which excludes commerce as luxury; see, for
cal Representation, (Stanford, 2001), 118-19. In fact,
who embraces commerce, Pocock is able to claim tha
of civil society that departs from the problem of cor
civic republicanism. This claim is at the basis of Poc
Gibbon entitled Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cam
strate, however, Gibbon's skepticism about commer
ism, tends to interrupt any narrative of the rise or cor
8. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 323.
9. For David Hume's account of the origins of civi
the importance of the sovereign see Part Two of A Trea
Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford, 2000), 307-66.
10. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologie
(Stanford, 1996), 11.
11. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Languag
tury (Oxford, 1988), 30.
12. All citations in this paragraph are from Hume, T
13. For convincing interpretations of Hume's doctr
line of argument see Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility : L
don, 1993), 7, 28; and Pinch, 25.
14. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Enc

(London, 1992); and Markman Ellis,
in the Sentimental Novel (Cambri
oric could as easily be used to deh
ment with them. See especially h
shows the extent to which sentim
between pursuing equality and gi
especially his analysis of Henry M
15. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philo-
sophical Historian/' Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. G. W.
Bowersock, John Clive, and Stephen R. Graubard (Cambridge, 1977), 108.
16. Critics such as Isaac Kramnick have long held that the Lockean paradigm of the
consensual social contract and the public sphere that results from it is a better explana-
tion of eighteenth-century political thought than Pocock's revival of civic republicanism.
See especially Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late
Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, 1990). For a recent elaboration of the con-
test between civic republicanism and public sphere ideology, see McKeon, "Civic Hu-
manism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation/' The Political Imagination in History:
Essays Concerning ]. G. A Pocock, ed. D. N. De Luna (Baltimore, 2006), 59-99.
17. Hume, Treatise, 206.
18. Until this point, I have attributed to Gibbon a theory of sovereignty not unlike that
of Carl Schmitt's, in which the sovereign's exceptionality guarantees the coherence and
homogeneity of the political community. At this point, however, Gibbon's theory of sover-
eignty goes beyond Schmitt's critique of liberalism, which argues that the horizontal bonds
of liberal political theory are unable to form a coherent community without excepting an in-
divisible sovereign power. For Schmitt, the sovereign who is excepted must remain one and
indivisible. As we will see, Gibbon demonstrates that the sovereign is unable to maintain
this unity with himself and is thus, equally with the horizontal bonds of liberal theory, un-
able to guarantee the homogeneity of the political field that Schmitt regards as essential to
its existence. For his account of sovereign unity and the homogeneity of the political sphere,
see Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996).
19. O'Brien, 2.
20. O'Brien, 169.
21. John Robertson, "Gibbon's Roman Empire as a Universal Monarchy: The Decline
and Fall and the Imperial Idea in Early Modern Europe," Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed.
Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (Cambridge, 1997), 247-70, 269.
22. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 11.394. The "Observations" were finished by 1774.
23. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 147.
24. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, IV.331.
25. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, IV.331.
26. See esp. Hulme; and Ellis.
27. See Festa, 48-49.
28. W. B. Camochan, in Gibbons Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (Stanford,
1987), compares Gibbon's narrative voice to the voice of ingénu satire, arguing that
Gibbon writes "ingénu satire in which the ingénu role is a masquerade, as if the naïve
Gulliver and his knowing creator had come together in the single rhetorical creation of
an innocent visitor who comes to know all there is to know, a sleuth who only plays
dumb" (86). This characterization is accurate, but tends to maintain the possibility that
there is some knowledge to be gained from the satirical encounter of innocence and
experience. As we will see with the Abyssinians and the Portuguese, this conclusion is
not entirely justified. Peter Cosgrove, in Impartial Stranger: History and Intertextuality in
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Newark, 1999), also relates Gibbon's
narrative voice to that of ingénu satire, but he sees this position as one of transcendence of
one's own norms "designed to establish a universal no

situation which I analyze here tends to undercut t
the type of magisterial objectivity which seems more
narrative than that of Gibbon's own time. For further discussion of satire and The Decline
and Fall, see also Cosgrove's "The Circulation of Genres in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire/' ELH 63, no. 1 (1996): 109-38.
29. Frank Palmeri argues that Gibbon's footnotes "provide the site of an intensely
satiric dialogue between the religious historians who constitute Gibbon's sources and the
sceptical philosophical historian who inverts their celebration of the rise of Christianity"
("The Satiric Footnotes of Swift and Gibbon," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation 31, no. 3 [1990]: 245-62, 255). He argues that this dialogue is "unresolved"
and that "competing authorities [reveal] the contingent, embattled nature of his text"
(255). Here I argue that it is not so much Gibbon's text that is embattled as dialogue itself.
30. Voltaire, The Age ofEouis XIV , trans. Martyn R Pollack (New York, 1966), 452-60.
31. For explorations of the limits of satire's potential to make positive judgments, es-
pecially in terms of morality, see Michael Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne
(Princeton, 1979); and Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, 1994).
32. Pocock argues that Gibbon's irony is directly associated with his erudition, that
irony throws up details that "are disobedient to laws, and [that] narrative must recount
anomalous behaviour" (Barbarism and Religion , 11.157). Irony is thus a tool of the historian
who can use the ironies of history to improve his own historical practice. Womersley, in
his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Decline of Fall, also sees irony as a consti-
tutive practice of "philosophic historiography": philosophic historiography was ironic
"in the sense that it voiced a vision alert to the paradoxical relation that had existed
between causes and effects" (I.xxii). Lionel Gossman also argues that Gibbon's irony has
an historical and pedagogical function as narrator and reader share "a superior ironical
position" that allows them to pass judgment on history (The Empire Unposses'd: An Essay
on Gibbon's Decline and Fall, [Cambridge, 1981], 75).
33. In her recent book, Eiterary Historicity: Eiterature and Historical Experience in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, 2009), Ruth Mack argues that unlike other historians
of the period, "Gibbon has very little interest in constructing characters with whom, we
can sympathize," and instead creates moments at which we are forced to account for
"the otherness of the past itself" (166). I am arguing here that this fundamental otherness
extends to not only the ancient barbarians to whom Mack refers, but also to the remnants
of the Roman empire that form contemporary Europe's colonial trading "partners."
34. See, for instance, Jones, 7.
35. See Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the
1790's, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago, 1995), 1-23; and John Barrell,
Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 (Oxford,
2000), 49-86.
36. Thomas Paine, "An Essay for the Use of New Republicans in their Opposition to
Monarchy," The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Kramnick (London, 1987),
387-93, 390.
37. Womersley, Gibbon and the ' Watchmen of the Holy City:' the Historian and his Reputa-
tion, 1776-1815 (Oxford, 2002).
38. Womersley, Watchmen, 230.
39. Womersley is clear about this. He says that although, when Gibbon first published
the first volume of The Decline and Fall, he had "congratulated himself on his adroit politi-
cal footwork" in making "both supporters of the royal prerogative and virtual republi-
cans" see in his history "confirmation of their very different political prejudices . . . sixteen
years later the political character of ancient history as a field of study had changed" (228).
"Ambivalence" was no longer possible as the political debate had become radically po-
larized (228).
40. Giorgio Agamben's work on

Sovereign Power and Bare Life , tra
ception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicag
scholarship on political theory. Ch
gives the clearest account of the
lem of sovereign power. More re
immunization, an affirmative bio
tics and Philosophy, trans. Timoth
the paradigm of immunization ca
in Rogues : Two Essay on Reason,
2005). See also Derrida's posthumo
Volume One, trans. Geoffrey Ben
logic of sovereign power remains
world.

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Sympathy for the Sovereign: Sovereignty, Sympathy, and the Colonial Relation in Edward

Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

to their study of the period

eighteenth-century, of which she sees Gibbon as a herald, shares with McKeon

around the relation of the King, as personal sov

HAPPINESS AND THE SOVEREIGN

McKeon claims that the eighteenth-century moved toward the constr

and thus making the sovereig

subjects, in favor of a horizontal social bond in

with other equally absolute pr

for civic virtue by being fundamentally unequal to th

Given that the power of th

sections of this article I will argue that the sovereign

ALIENATED SENSE AND EMULATION

If a philosophy of sympathy asks the subject to feel the happiness o

that of Hume) to the science o

the availability of a space guaranteed by anothe

John Robertson, making a similar argument to O'Brien about Gibbon's as-

At very few, but very significant points, Gibbon provides us with h

who do not fall neatly into the distinction Poco

world had left them in ignorance of the improvements or corrup

empire was shaken by the cou

fications between colonizer and colonized, to set li

ledge. The Portuguese, who "a

to constitute the use of irony as a tool of histor

cannot sympathize with his su

be cited parenthetically by volume and page num

14. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Enc

one's own norms "designed to establish a universal no

40. Giorgio Agamben's work on

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