relatively powerless — the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid c… - Thomas E. Ricks

By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures — the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume — were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.

spent “a Clowdy morning” reading Charles Rollin’s Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, which is basically an introduction to education by the rector of the University of Paris.68 Rollin was even better known for his Ancient History, which was published in French in sixteen volumes from 1730 to 1738, with the first translation into English appearing a year after that. It, along with his later work on Roman history, soon became what one historian terms “a principal medium through which they [colonial Americans] learned about classical heroes.”69 Adams thought Washington had gotten most of his knowledge of the ancient world from that text,

Jefferson was notably ambivalent about the French philosopher. “In the science of government Montesquieu’s spirit of laws is generally recommended. It contains indeed a great number of political truths; but almost an equal number of political heresies: so that the reader must be constantly on his guard.