Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was an English historian whose life work is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From Trajan to the fall of Constantinople he traces institutions, manners, and secondary causes with classical learning and a cool irony. Chapters on early Christianity treat the rise of the church as a historical process open to natural explanation. History, he writes, is little more than the register of mankind's crimes, follies, and misfortunes. He supplies secular narrative at full scale. What he leaves open is a philosophy of history's direction. Hegel and others would take up that demand.