John Pocock's Histories of Political Thought

Abstract

As a historian of political thought, John Pocock has too often been identified with one work, The Machiavellian Moment, and with the theory of republicanism. By studying all three of his major works as well as important articles in sequence, this essay argues that what connects them as histories of political thought is a more fundamental preoccupation with the ways in which history and conceptions of time have framed the understanding of the political. In The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, it was the historical reconstruction of feudal law in the 17th century that undermined the idea of an ‘immemorial’ ancient constitution, and made possible a new understanding of the relation between landownership, parliament and crown in English politics. The Machiavellian Moment traces the passage from Machiavelli’s engagement with historical contingency through Harrington’s reassessment of the relation between property and virtue to the advent of political economy, and a new understanding of the relation between land, commerce and credit. The ensuing ‘rise of the social’ threw into doubt the autonomy of the political which Machiavelli had sought to preserve. These themes in turn recur and are developed across the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion, as Gibbon’s predecessors as historians of Rome are shown struggling with empire’s contingency as a political form. But here Pocock adds another dimension to the historical understanding of European politics, its unavoidable engagement with sacred or ecclesiastical history, and draws from this a normative preference for an Enlightenment concept of toleration. The article draws on Pocock’s intellectual biography, and shows how his methodological writings relate to his historical works. But its primary purpose is the interpretation of these texts.