There is a footnote in Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Social Contract that I have discussed here before. Here it is again:
In Social Contract 1.2, Rousseau writes:
Grotius denies that all human power is established in favour of the governed, and quotes slavery as an example. His usual method of reasoning is constantly to establish right by fact.1 It would be possible to employ a more logical method, but none could be more favourable to tyrants.
The footnote after “fact” says:
Learned inquiries into public right are often only the history of past abuses; and troubling to study them too deeply is a profitless infatuation” (Essay on the Interests of France in Relation to its Neighbours, by the Marquis d’Argenson). This is exactly what Grotius has done.
I suggest Gibbon may have had this footnote in mind in Chapter 3, Part 2 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Writing of the reign of Antoninus Pius (AD 138-61), Gibbon says:
Titus Antoninus Pius has been justly denominated a second Numa. The same love of religion, justice, and peace, was the distinguishing characteristic of both princes. But the situation of the latter opened a much larger field for the exercise of those virtues. Numa could only prevent a few neighboring villages from plundering each other’s harvests. Antoninus diffused order and tranquillity over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed with moderation the conveniences of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.
As my previous post noted, I suggested that Edmund Burke offers his correction to the Rousseauist way of thinking, or rather to what lesson we take from it, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. This passage of Gibbon perhaps adds another layer, an intermediary in Burke’s mother tongue.