Born in London and brought up in Christchurch, New Zealand, J. G. A. Pocock was educated at the Universities of Canterbury and Cambridge, and was for many years (1974-1994) Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. His many seminal works on intellectual history include The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957, Second Edition 1987), Politics, Language and Time (1971), The Machiavellian Moment (1975), and Virtue, Commerce and History (1985). He has also edited The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) and Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1987), as well as the collaborative study The Varieties of British Political Thought (1995). A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Pocock is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

• Introduction; Part I. England and Switzerland, 1737–1763: 1. Putney, Oxford and the question of English Enlightenment; 2. Lausanne and the Arminian Enlightenment; 3. The re-education of young Gibbon: method, unbelief and the turn towards history; 4. The Hampshire militia and the problems of modernity; 5. Study in the camp: erudition and the search for a narrative; Part II. The Encounter with Paris and the Defence of Erudition, 1761–1763: 6. The politics of scholarship in French and English Enlightenment; 7. Erudition and Enlightenment in the Académie des Inscriptions; 8. D'Alembert's Discours Preliminaire: the philosophe perception of history; 9. The Essai sur l'Etude de la Litterature: imagination, irony and history; 10. Paris and the gens de lettres: experience and recollection; Part III. Lausanne and Rome: The Journey Towards a Subject, 1763–1765: 11. The return to Lausanne and the pursuit of erudition; 12. The journey to Rome and the transformation of intentions; Epilogue: Gibbon and the rhythm that was different; Bibliographies; Index.

'Pocock manages to place Gibbon within these larger cosmopolitan movements without diminishing the historian's extraordinary accomplishment.' Tim Breen, New York Times Review of Books