For most Anglo-American historians, the classic Enlightenment is a forward-looking movement. To these historians, the Republic of Letters are an outdated construction of the 17th century. But in John Pocock's eyes there are two Enlightenments: one, associated with Edward Gibbon, the author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", which is erudite, serious, and scholarly grounded in the Republic of Letters; the other, the trivial Enlightenment of the Parisian "philosophes". The first is a product of a peculiarly English/British and Protestant liberal political and theological tradition and points to the future; the second lacks the anchor of socio-historical analysis and leads unintentionally to Revolutionary mayhem.