SOURCE: Starobinski, Jean. “From the Decline of Erudition to the Decline of Nations: Gibbon's Response to French Thought.” Daedalus 105, no. 3 (1976): 189-207.

In the following essay, Starobinski analyzes arguments in Gibbon's Essai sur l'étude de la literature, an early work by the historian which concerns itself with the relationship between the decline in letters and the decline in nations.

Gibbon included in his Memoirs of My Life a critique of his own first work, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. Among the things he singled out for disapproval was his imprecise use of the word littérature: “Instead of a precise and proper definition [of] the title itself, the sense of the word Littérature is loosely and variously applied. …”¹ He is, however, being rather hard on himself, for when he wrote his Essai the meaning of the term littérature in French had in...