J G A Pocock
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3628162 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J G A Pocock |
| NOMBRES | J G A |
| APELLIDO | Pocock |
| FIRMA | POCOCK J G A |
| AFILIACIONES | Johns Hopkins University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 132 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 454 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 134 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1959 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
J. G. A. Pocock, essay on the fourth volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall
John Pocock and the ‘Edge of Empire’ Thesis. A Late Letter from 2021
Pocock's Test
Written in memory of the historian J. G. A. Pocock (1924 - 2023), this essay revisits a series of exchanges in 2004 and 2005 between the editor of Common Knowledge and Pocock, a founding member of the journal's editorial board. In the first exchange, Pocock drew a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, professional academic specialists like himself and, on the other hand, intellectuals such as read and write for Common Knowledge and who, "in…
A response to Samuel James’s ‘J. G. A. Pocock and the Idea of the “Cambridge School” in the History of Political Thought’
This is a very able piece; Samuel James has done a great deal of research, and brought to light a number of articles I don’t remember writing. There is a difficulty, however, that he aims to contra...
On the unglobality of contexts
This essay takes shape as a review of a review: Rosario Lopez’s admirable ‘The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History’, itself a review of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intellectual History. Lopez proposes that ‘the quest for the global’ entails a critique if not an abandonment of the concept of ‘context.’ The attack upon context entails questions about both ‘political thought’ (or ‘theory’) and ‘intellectual history’ (if n…
The Translatability of Cultures
Research Article| April 01 2019 The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Budick, Sanford; Iser, Wolfgang, eds., The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 348 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2019) 25 (1-3): 421. https://doi.org/10.121…
Two essays
The Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but…
Must We Divide History into Periods? by Jacques Le Goff
Book Review| April 01 2018 Must We Divide History into Periods? by Jacques Le Goff Goff, Jacques Le, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. DeBevoise, Malcolm (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 176 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (2): 331. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4362523 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailT…
Nature and History, Self and Other
Voyages and Beaches
What actually happened as Europeans and peoples of the Pacific discovered each other? How have their respective senses of the past influenced their understanding of the present? And what are the consequences of their meeting? In this collection of essays, scholars from European, Polynesian, and Settler backgrounds provide answers to these questions. Writing from, and between, a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, Maori Studies, literar…
A method, a model and Machiavelli
John Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald Weinstein until his death in 2015, when it was identified by his widow Beverly Parker as being of importance. The text is especially revealing about Pocock’s attitudes to the history of ideas/intellectual history in the late 1960s and more especially th…
From The Ancient Constitution to Barbarism and Religion; The Machiavellian Moment , the history of political thought and the history of historiography
KEYWORDS: The Machiavellian Momentancient constitution and the feudal lawBarbarism and Religionhistory of political thoughthistory of historiography
Afterword
Published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment stands a little short of a midpoint in a sequence of works I have written over the last 60 years. I shall attempt to situate it in this sequence and thei
Gibbon’s second trilogy
This essay is speculative in character. It is the work of a historian who has completed a study, written on certain principles, of the first three volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and does not intend to advance to a similar study of the second three. He does, however, believe that such a study would differ profoundly from that he has constructed of the first trilogy and wishes to offer hypotheses as to why this should be s…
The Machiavellian Moment
Originally published in 1975, this book remains a landmark of historical and political thought. The book looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. It shows that Machiavelli’s prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which the book calls t…
The Machiavellian Moment
The cave
The Cave is a short history of political philosophy that John Pocock wrote at some point in the 1970s. It was a jeu d'esprit, but is revealing of many of his attitudes to intellectual history and the history of political thought, after the publication of The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 and his great edition of Harrington in 1977. Moving from ancients to moderns and from Asia to Europe, The Cave underscores Pocock's range and distinctiveness
Response and Commentary
Barbarism and Religion , the first half of J. G. A. Pocock’s study of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall , was designed to set Gibbon’s work in context, using a method developed in Cambridge, by juxtaposing his narrative to many others—to some but not all of which he explicitly referred. Helena Rosenblatt has misunderstood Pocock’s intent, which was to show that Gibbon’s work took much of its inspiration for its treatment of Christianity from a world of e…
The Royalist Revolution
Book Review| September 01 2016 The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding Nelson, Eric, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 400 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2016) 22 (3): 503–505. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3634058 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permis…
Chinese Historicity
This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State (2014), which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004). According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a n…
Barbarism and Religion
This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence of works on Barbarism and Religion examines Volumes II and III of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carrying Gibbon's narrative to the end of empire in the west. It makes two general assertions: first, that this is in reality a mosaic of narratives, written on diverse premises and never fully synthesized with one another; and second, that these chapters assert a p…
Hard, Soft, and Fuzzy Historiography
In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (2013) and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies" (2011 - 13). Sowerby opposes the "Whig interpretation" that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart "popery and arbitrary government" and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy f…
Theory in History Problems of Context and Narrative
This article examines the context and narrative problems associated with the study of the history of political theory. It suggests that in order to study the relations between political theory and history, it is necessary to study these terms and reduce them to manageable forms. It explains that the histories of political thought/theory were canonically constructed and they arranged modes of discourse in an order which it had come to be agreed fo…
Barbarism and Religion
Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, revolution and counter-revolution; a eurosceptical enquiry
As part of a programme of disintegrating and re-assembling the concept or concepts of Europe , there is offered (1) a revision of Franco Venturi's exceptionalist account of England's place in Enlightenment, (2) an alternative to Isaiah Berlin's account of the movement through Enlightenment to historicism. The objective is to enhance the British and English role in European intellectual history, while showing that we must rewrite the concept of Eu…
Barbarism and religion, Volume 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764
Barbarism and Religion' - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of whi…
Political Theory
The Limits and Divisions of British History
THIS ESSAY CONTINUES A PROJECT begun some time ago-that of defining a field of study that might properly be termed and providing a conceptual framework within which such history might be written.' This project, however, involves more than a mere revision of parameters and entails some reflections on the social character and purposes of historiography itself. The reasons why history has not been written are good, in the sense that they follow natu…
II. Burke and the Ancient Constitution-a Problem in the History of Ideas
The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism-as it may be termed-from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held-to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of c…
The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution
There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternativel…
British History
Virtues, Rights, and Manners
The Origins of Study of the Past
In this paper I shall attempt to consider how far the history of historiography can be treated as the history of the problems occasioned by men's awareness of the past in different societies, and of their attempts to deal with these problems. This kind of approach has not, so far as I know, been made before. That is to say, the history of historiography has not been approached as primarily a part of the history of social man's awareness of his pa…
Verbalizing a Political Act
Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions
THIS LECTURE IS DESIGNED AS AN EXPERIMENT IN resynthesis rather than deconstruction. It is conventional for both the modern and the post-modern to assume that the dead weight of some tradition or paradigm is controlling our minds and that its burden has as our first move to be cast aside. This assumption is often justified, and we do often find ourselves under just such a necessity. But the assumption may itself become a convention, and when it d…
Atlantic History
Book Review| August 01 2006 Atlantic History: Concept and Contours Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 160 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2006) 12 (3): 524. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2006-019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. G. A. Pocock; Atlantic Hi…
Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking1
Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century
Quentin Skinner
Book Review| August 01 2004 Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols.: Regarding Method, Renaissance Virtues, Hobbes and Civic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1,088 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2004) 10 (3): 532–550. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10-3-532 Cite Icon C…
The Machiavellian Moment Revisited
Historiography and Enlightenment
This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety …
History and Sovereignty
When we were a little tiny colony of Britain (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves) Our feckless history began to be written (And the waves break busily night and day). When first we fought in an Empire's cause (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves) It wasn't for the loot, nor yet for the applause (And the waves break busily night and day). Then when we came to Dominion Status (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves) Nor slump nor squee…
II. Prophet and Inquisitor Or, a Church Built upon Bayonets Cannot Stand
Ritual, Language, Power
(1964). Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay On The Apparent Political Meanings Of Ancient Chinese Philosophy. Political Science: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 3-31
The Politics of History
Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century
HE study of past political ideas is an activity which may be undertaken for at least three methodologically distinguishable types of reason. For the historian it is primarily, I think, the study of the language used in a particular society to discuss political problems, and of the light thrown, often inadvertently, by the use of that language upon the character of that society and the events taking place in it. For the political scientist it is-s…
Michiavelli in the Liberal Cosmos
Between Gog and Magog
On the unglobality of contexts
This essay takes shape as a review of a review: Rosario Lopez’s admirable ‘The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History’, itself a review of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intellectual History. Lopez proposes that ‘the quest for the global’ entails a critique if not an abandonment of the concept of ‘context.’ The attack upon context entails questions about both ‘political thought’ (or ‘theory’) and ‘intellectual history’ (if n…
The Fourth English Civil War
EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he…
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law
II. Burke and the Ancient Constitution-a Problem in the History of Ideas
The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism-as it may be termed-from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held-to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of c…
History and Theory
This occasional but substantial joumal, devoted by its title to the philosophy of history, will publish, we are told in an editorial note, material 'principally in four areas: theories of history, cause, law, explanation, generalisation, determinism; historiography, studies of historians, historical figures and events which illuminate general historiographical problems; method of history, interpretation, selection of facts, objectivity, social an…
The Origins of Study of the Past
In this paper I shall attempt to consider how far the history of historiography can be treated as the history of the problems occasioned by men's awareness of the past in different societies, and of their attempts to deal with these problems. This kind of approach has not, so far as I know, been made before. That is to say, the history of historiography has not been approached as primarily a part of the history of social man's awareness of his pa…
Reappraisals in History
Ritual, Language, Power
(1964). Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay On The Apparent Political Meanings Of Ancient Chinese Philosophy. Political Science: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 3-31
Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century
Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century
HE study of past political ideas is an activity which may be undertaken for at least three methodologically distinguishable types of reason. For the historian it is primarily, I think, the study of the language used in a particular society to discuss political problems, and of the light thrown, often inadvertently, by the use of that language upon the character of that society and the events taking place in it. For the political scientist it is-s…
The Onely Politician’
Political Philosophy and Time
James Harrington and the Good Old Cause
The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew…
Bolingbroke and His Circle
Politics, Language, and Time
Politics, language, and time
The Idea of Perfect History
Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century
Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal
Verbalizing a Political Act
Politics, Language and Time
II. Prophet and Inquisitor Or, a Church Built upon Bayonets Cannot Stand
On Richard Ashcraft's “On the Problem of Methodology” (Volume 3, No. 1, February 1975)
British History
British History
The Machiavellian Moment
The Moment is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the Machiavellian moment.After examining this problem in the thought of Machiave…
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