J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume One: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1999).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1999).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Three: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003) ("Early in he seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had proposed that three technological inventions had transformed human history about the year 1500: the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder. About 1700, it began to be perceived that history was being again transformed by a new series of inventions, of which two that here concern us were social rather than technological in character; the third, the new philosophy of Locke and Newton, was a separate if more universally important phenomenon. The two were the standing army and public credit. The first--the acquisition by the state of the means of paying and maintaining an army year after year--transformed not only the nature of warfare but the nature of the state itself, giving it an effective monopoly of the means of violence. The standing army, regularly paid out of the state's fiscal resources, was professional, an arm of the state proper, whereas its immediate predecessor, raised by short-term contracts on which the state regularly defaulted, was mercenary; the former was unlikely to intervene in the government of the state, but gave the state new and alarming power over its citizens. It had been the strength of Harrington's politico-historical perception that he saw that a state lacking such fiscal resources was dependent on an army that could live of its own, but his weakness that he greatly underestimated the state's ability to acquire such resources. Premising that a bank could never pay an army, he had imagined the New Model as a body of armed proprietors--which it was not--and had constructed a Gracchan history of Europe, in which the free military colonists of the republic had become the stipendiated but unreliable legions of the principate, and had been replaced by the feudal colonies of the Goths, out of whose unbalanced system a free people in arms had emerged in England, as an unintended consequence of Tudor legislation. His scheme could be modified, but not replace, by the supposition that the Gothic model had included freemen in arms, living by tenures rather allodial than feudal." "It was the invention of public credit that destroyed the Harringtonian account of history. Many banks, both national and diasporic, took part in it; but a major effect upon Britain of the Dutch invasion of 1688 and the enlistment of England and Scotland in the Dutch resistance to France was the erection of the Bank of England to which the Revolution regime pledged its credit, and the consequent growth of the 'military-fiscal state' that enabled the Kingdom of Great Britain to challenge both the French and the Dutch for hegemony in both Europe and Europe's oceanic empires. The Enlightened vision of a European republic of states was the expression of a temporary equilibrium in this contest for imperium; it came to an end a century later, when the burden of public debt to pay for wars of empire grew too great for some of the contending states to bear. Meanwhile, however, what were the effects of the new military-fiscal order upon the individual as proprietor, subject and freeman? The state's possession of a standing army went far towards eliminating any possibility of a civil or religious war in which he might have to draw the sword himself. Notably in England, where such a war was a nightmare not far from recurring, this assurance was heartily welcomed and it freed the individual to take part in all the rich diversity of commerce, manners and civil society offered him by what we are calling Enlightenment. But by laying aside the sword, as Hobbes had abjured him to do, he was laying aside the ultima ratio he had once possessed for determining what the state might or might not do, in peace and war. Machiavelli had located this freedom in the Roman plebs, so long as they retained the arms which made them necessary to the republic's armies and this is why Roman history remained of importance to Europe in the age of Enlightenment and the standing army. The new state of Great Britain, where civil war was a vivid and highly politicalised memory but military strength in the state a new experience, furnished an ideological theatre in which these issues were contended for in detail." Id. at 310-311.).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Four: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2005).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Five: Religion: The First Triumph (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2010).
