356
PARTISAN REVIEW
ning of the new phase in the work of Voltaire.* He wrote his
famous
Essai sur les moeurs
in 1740 for the express purpose of
"debunking" the universally admired
Discours sur l'histoire, uni·
verselle
of the illustrious Bossuet-just as his English contem·
porary, Edward Gibbon, wrote
The Decline
and
Fall of the Roman
Empire
out of sheer spite, to reveal as one continuous retrogression
the historical development of human society during the rule of
Christianity. In the supplementary remarks to his work, Voltaire
reports that he had undertaken the task for the benefit of one of
his high-hom lady correspondents who had complained that such
an eloquent writer as Bossuet had in effect "forgotten the Universe
in a universal history." He had neglected Russia which ·alone "is
greater than the whole of the ancient Roman Empire"
(!),
and he
had dealt with only three or four nations which had disappeared
from the earth and had sacrificed even those to "the small nation
of Jews which occupies three quarters of his work." Thus Voltaire,
and likewise Gibbon, made a special point of treating in detail the
history of far-away China which at that time was just being opened
up to Western scholars through the researches of the Jesuit mis–
sionaries from 1675 to 1775. In the same way, one hundred years
later, German philosophers exploited new discoveries about India
and other Asiatic cultures which by that time had resulted from
the recently initiated study of Sanscrit.
The inaugurators of the new, bourgeois type of world history
took a great deal for granted when they imagined that the small
beginnings of their "civil society" constituted a more comprehen–
sive "universe" than that of their predecessors. There is little dif–
ference in this respect-and none in favor of the new-comers–
between their concepts of the historical process and those of Euse–
hius, of Augustine, and of his pupil Orosius. In his
Seven books
of history against the Pagans,
the latter had set himself the task of
rewriting the whole of known history as the history of the suffer–
ings and the final triumph of the Christian church. (This was
exactly the same mood, and almost the same words, in which in the
•We do not deal in this study with the two great fore-runners who stood outside
the great stream of modern European history and whose work is therefore not typical
of the developments traced in the text. The less important is Vico, the Italian, who
published his
Scienza Nuova
in 1715. Incomparably greater is Ibn Khaldoun, the
Arab, who lived in 14th century Spain and Africa.
