After attacking Christianity in the first volume of his Decline and Fall, Gibbon revealed himself not to be the embodiment of amoral despair, Robert Kaplan says, but the very flower of Enlightenment rationalism:
He was a conservative along the lines of his contemporary Edmund Burke, who saw humankind’s best hope in moderate politics and elastic institutions that do not become overbearing. Only rarely did imperial Rome or early Christianity display the necessary traits. Gibbon, like Burke, was shocked by the French Revolution. His Rome had also known violent mobs screaming noble platitudes in order to remove a tyrannical ruler, only to see another one set in his place.Gibbon’s certainty that the tendency toward strife is a natural consequence of the human condition — a natural consequence of the very variety of our racial, cultural, and economic experience, which no belief system, religious or otherwise, can overcome — is reminiscent of James Madison in The Federalist. Madison, too, was convinced that a state or an empire can endure only if it generally limits itself to adjudicating disputes among its peoples, and in so doing becomes an exemplar of patriotic virtue.