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Encompassed with domestic conspiracy, military sedition, and civil war, they trembled on the edge of precipices in which, after a longer or shorter term of anxiety, they were inevitably lost. EDWARD GIBBON, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE In a widely noted coincidence, the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations were both documents of 1776. In a less well-known accident of fate, the Declaration of Independence dovetailed with the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, yet another monument of Enlightenment thought, though not one that created a new nation or established a new method of understanding political economy. Gibbon’s inquiry into the history of an ancient empire passed quickly over its rise. He focused instead on the centuries of decline preceding the fall. These were contrasting endeavors: Jefferson’s excitement about the rights and the liberties of a newborn republic and the learned British historian’s inquiry into the logic of decline in the most paradigmatic of empires. Gibbon’s autumnal epic was peripheral to the creation of a nation. The proper companion for the birth of the American republic, which was destined to be prosperous, was a philosophy designed to unlock the wealth of nations. For a long time, that was the obvious conclusion to draw. Like it or not, Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and philosopher, was a patron saint of the American republic. Three and a half centuries later, the coincidences of 1776 strike us differently. Even if Gibbon is not being revisited in American intellectual life, his preoccupation with decline is now ubiquitous, a settled thesis in search of fresh evidence. Donald Trump may be the face of American decline, not just the president for four years but the monster waiting to finish the work of destruction that he began. Joe Biden may be the face of American decline, America’s oldest president when he was elected and clearly not the FDR he was made out to be after the election. Decline is now etched into the American landscape — its poverty, its inequality, its racism, its weakening manufacturing base, its debts, its environmental crises, its rusting bridges and pockmarked roads, its moneyed anomie, its decadent elites, its unending polarization, its despair, its surliness. And decline is etched into American foreign policy, too, most vividly in the images of the ignominious retreat from Kabul, of partners and innocents abandoned, of theocrats and terrorists resurgent in the age of American flight. When will the barbarians arrive at the gates? Or are those of us within the gates the barbarians? When will the once-mighty city fall? And what will the ruins look like after the fall? These are the questions of the hour, and they are surging across the political spectrum. Before addressing these questions, let us take a closer look at Gibbon and the subsequent career of the declinism that he pioneered. Enduring and worthwhile as the decline of empires is for historians, it is an elusive subject. An aesthetic of decline can certainly be captured — the Goths rampaging through the streets of Rome, Constantinople besieged and then erased by Ottoman armies, Tsar Nicholas II and his family executed outside of Yekaterinburg — and made into the whole of the story. But it is not the whole of the story. It is immensely difficult to explain imperial decline or to disentangle its constituent elements, which usually include individual mistakes, financial ruin, military defeat, intellectual confusion, and the loss of legitimacy. No decline is ever preordained. More carefully considered, the fall of empires can appear accidental. Nicholas II was not obligated to blunder into World War I; many of his ministers tried to argue him out of the mobilization that brought Germany into the war; the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Romanov rule in 1913 was enormous and heartfelt and implied a degree of popular backing that could have enabled the monarchy’s survival for decades to come. Until it happened in 1917, Lenin did not expect to see revolution in his lifetime. Such are the contingencies that complicate every generalization that can be drawn from the annals of failing powers. Decline is not inevitable. It is a consequence of human choice. Gibbon’s history begins with the Roman empire at its apex. Its splendor in the second century CE was manifold: Roman law, Roman military superiority, and Roman engineering, but also an intellectual culture of balance and beauty. For Gibbon, religious toleration was a precondition for Rome’s flourishing. It produced “not only mutual indulgence but even religious concord.” Religion and philosophy worked hand in hand: “in their writing and conversation the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason; but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and custom.” A capital of religion, philosophy, and politics, the city of Rome was “the common temple of her subjects,” the heart of a “polite and powerful empire” and in its architecture attuned to the “liberal spirit of public magnificence.” Rome united the rulers and the ruled. Gibbon attributes a literary cast to Roman political order — “the love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement.” The second century CE was — and Gibbon generalizes here about all ascendant empires — “an age of science and history.” (By history, he meant that empires in their golden age produce first-rate historians.) Finally, Gibbon identified a spirit, a set of principles and practices, that ornamented Rome’s politics in its heyday: “that poetic courage which is nourished in the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the pressure of danger and the habit of command.” So what undid all this stability and excellence? Gibbon supplies three reasons for the Roman empire’s decline and fall. Of these the first is probably the most familiar. It is what we would call overreach. In Gibbon’s words, those entrusted with the habit of command “gradually usurped the license of confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth.”