John Pocock's Life, Legacy, and Languages of Historical and Political Thought

When I was invited in 2019 to tweet a book a day for a week I had no hesitation as to what my first book would be. John Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was probably the single biggest influence on me as a student, directly affecting the direction my research has taken. For this reason I was thrilled later that year when, just before the publication of my Intellectual Biography of James Harrington, I received one of John Pocock's beautiful handwritten letters expressing his interest in my forthcoming book, which initiated a brief correspondence between us. Following Pocock's death at the age of 99 in December 2023, I was honoured to be invited by John Marshall to contribute to 'John Pocock's Life, Legacy, and Languages of Historical and Political Thought', which was held simultaneously at Johns Hopkins University and online on Tuesday 5th March 2024.

Having initially reassured John Marshall that I relished the challenge of saying something meaningful about 'Pocock's Harrington and the history of republicanism' in less than five minutes, I did subsequently question my initial enthusiasm. The reality of drafting something worthwhile that did not breach the time constraint was tough. It was, though, very illuminating to hear the other speakers perform equally impossible tasks of summarising Pocock's thoughts on a range of topics including the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke in less than five minutes each. Papers were presented by scholars at all levels, from PhD students to Emeritus Professors; and the event closed with three excellent questions by graduate students currently studying at Johns Hopkins. The organisation of this event was largely down to John Marshall (though with a supportive team around him). His vision for the event and his dedication to making it a success were impressive. What follows, provides a taste of what I gained from this ambitious celebration. Anyone who missed the event, and would like access to the recording, can contact John Marshall directly.

What came across more than anything else was John Pocock's phenomenal intelligence and the breadth and depth of his scholarship. Eliga Gould, speaking on behalf of Pocock's students, put it well when he referred to the capaciousness of his work and vision. During the course of his lifetime, Pocock offered groundbreaking insights on a whole host of individual figures while also making significant contributions to broader fields of study. These included the Enlightenment - where he put a persuasive case for thinking in terms of a plurality of Enlightenments rather than a single Enlightenment. He also contributed to the transformation of British History by challenging the dominant Anglocentric emphasis, calling for the inclusion of the histories of Scotland and Ireland, but also Wales, Cornwall, the Channel Islands, America (pre-1776) and, of course, his native New Zealand. Equally important was his stress on the tensions and interplay between metropolitan zones of law and marcher zones of war. In addition, Pocock set the terms for the study of the history of republicanism: emphasising and unpicking the ancient legacy; highlighting the centrality of the conception of time to republican thinking; and prioritising the vocabulary or language of republicanism over institutions.

Despite the breadth, it is possible to identify consistent threads that run throughout Pocock's thought. One was his robust approach to historical research, which - as was noted by David Bromwich (in relation to Burke) and John Marshall - involved reading all the works available by a particular author in order to enter into the thinking of those who interested him. He also adopted a broad approach to sources, consulting manuscripts as well as printed material, treating style as important (David Womersley commented on this in relation to Gibbon), and recognising that political 'sources' could take a variety of forms including literature and - as Anna Roberts noted - even artefacts.

Central among the sources Pocock himself deployed were histories. His first work The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law was a major achievement in the field of historiography. As Colin Kidd explained, it documented ideological uses of the past, treating historical thinking as political thinking. For Kidd this exposed a space between politics and the history of political thought in the form of the history of political argument. Pocock returned to this territory in the magnum opus of his later years, the multi-volume account of the thought of Edward Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion. Both here, and in his works on other individual thinkers, Pocock sought to identify and understand the political and intellectual battles in which those thinkers were engaged.

While The Ancient Constitution and Barbarism and Religion are the works that most obviously treat historical writings as political thought, the preoccupation with history and time also lay at the heart of Pocock's other major work The Machiavellian Moment. In the first place, the conception of time is presented as crucial to republics in that they exist in time and are, therefore, subject to corruption and decay. This was what Pocock meant by the 'Machiavellian Moment'. He argued that Machiavelli was particularly concerned with 'the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time' and explored how this idea played out in the writings of others in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century Britain and America. In adopting this broad chronology, the book also examines the survival - and transformation - of ideas over time. While there is continuity in terms of the central problem being confronted and the vocabulary deployed to address it, the republican language at the heart of the book was adapted to fit different circumstances and Pocock was sensitive to the particular historical contexts that prompted the production of specific texts. The adaptations are especially evident in the case of James Harrington. He drew on Machiavellian ideas to construct an immortal commonwealth - which Machiavelli would have declared an impossibility - and his ideas were in turn deployed by those Pocock labelled 'neo-Harringtonians' in ways directly contrary to Harrington's intentions.

Pocock's intelligence, and the breadth of his scholarship, could make him appear intimidating, yet he tempered this with a deep humanity - and this also came out strongly in the presentations. Again and again, contributors spoke of the personal impact he had had on them and commented on the fact that, while he was challenging, he was also generous, encouraging, and fun (the last being exemplified by the fact that his sons Hugh and Stephen chose to begin their contribution with a song). Eliga Gould spoke of him having a personal and unique relationship with each of his graduate students, but it is clear that his intellectual relationships extended well beyond those who had the special privilege of being taught by him. Indeed, it was striking that one of the older contributors, Orest Ranum, who had been on the committee that appointed Pocock to his position at Johns Hopkins in 1974, described him as a constant teacher - instructing not just students but all those with whom he came into contact. Another Johns Hopkins colleague, Christopher Celenza spoke for many when he described the privilege of being taken seriously by Pocock - even when this meant disagreement. The possibility that polite disagreement could co-exist alongside friendship and respect, was also highlighted by perhaps Pocock's closest intellectual companion, Quentin Skinner, who admitted in his talk that he never succeeded in convincing Pocock on the subject of liberty. He was, then, as Jamie Gianoutsos articulated, not only a careful student of republican vocabulary, but also a model citizen himself.

I hope I have conveyed the fact that this event was deeply moving, instructive, and inspiring. I was, though, left with a slight sense of regret. Skinner recalled that in 1973 Pocock announced that he had a plan for a huge new project. It would explore all of British historical and political thought from Bede to Bertrand Russell. The scale and ambition of such a project reflects the massive breadth of John Pocock's vision and the strength of his drive, but perhaps also explains why it never came to fruition. I don't suppose I was the only person at the event who took a moment to lament this fact. I would have loved to read it.

An Interlude: Thinkers as Readers

Programme for the workshop ‘David Hume as Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume’, 03.05.19.

In my last few blogposts I have been examining some of the thinkers whose works influenced James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. There are more figures I want to explore in future posts, but this month I want briefly to digress, by looking at someone who was influenced by him: David Hume. This is prompted by the fact that on 3rd May I attended a stimulating workshop at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh entitled 'David Hume as a Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume'. The workshop was organised by Max Skjönesberg and Robin Mills and included excellent papers by various scholars each of whom examined the ways in which the works of a particular thinker or genre influenced - or, in the words of the workshop’s subtitle, provoked - Hume. Working on my own paper for this workshop, at the same time as thinking about the various authors who inspired Harrington, led me to reflect more generally on this approach to the history of political thought, what it reveals, and how it could be used to enhance and enrich more conventional studies.

Of course, focusing on authors as readers of other authors immediately brings to the fore various problems. Several speakers at the workshop raised the question of what might constitute reliable evidence of one author having read another. The catalogue of a thinker's personal library, or one to which we know that thinker had access (as in the case of Hume and the Advocates Library), can be useful in this regard. The presence in such a catalogue of a particular book makes it possible, in some cases even probable, that the thinker had read that work, but on its own it cannot prove that (s)he did so. Even when it can be established that a thinker did read a particular work - for example where annotations in their own hand are found in a copy of the work, or where references are made in a commonplace book, diary or correspondence - it does not necessarily follow that that reading then influenced their own thought or writings. 

A more fruitful indication is evidence of one author borrowing (whether explicitly or implicitly) from another. In future, further advances may be made in this area as a result of improvements in digital technology, such as the development of sophisticated machine reading software. Yet it is also important to remember that a lack of critical engagement with a work does not necessarily constitute proof that the author has not been influenced or provoked by it. Furthermore, awareness of the ideas of a particular thinker may develop by reading abridgements or reviews rather than the work itself, or via discussions in settings such as debating societies or political clubs.

Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

A second observation to be made is that influence itself does not always take a simple form. This is something that I was particularly aware of in exploring Hume's reading of Harrington. Occasionally it is possible to identify an example of one thinker directly appropriating an idea from another. Hume, for example, adopts Harrington's preference for the rule of laws rather than men, though we might query whether he derived this directly from Harrington's works or via an intermediary and, indeed, whether Oceana was the true origin of that idea. Elsewhere we can find examples of thinkers embarking from a similar starting point, but moving in different directions, or of them using different methods to achieve similar ends. Alexandra Chadwick offered an example of the former in her paper on Hobbes and Hume, where she showed that they started from similar foundations in terms of their views of human nature and psychology, but diverged with regard to the vision of mankind and society that they sought to paint. Working the other way around, I noted that Hume shared Harrington's concern with accountability, but rejected his mechanism of rotation of office, and instead sought alternative measures to achieve that end. 

Joseph Collyer, portrait of David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery SP IV 7711.

This idea shades into another way of thinking about influence, which was explicitly articulated by Tim Stuart-Buttle, whereby one thinker generates problems or questions that are then addressed by later generations. This astute observation raises further questions and complexities. It might equally be the case that two contemporary thinkers engage with similar problems or adopt similar approaches not because one has influenced the other, but simply because they are operating within a common political and cultural context. Tim Hochstrasser suggested that this perhaps explains at least some of the affinities between Voltaire and Hume. Richard Whatmore complicated the idea in a different way, suggesting that it sometimes appears as though an author is only influential when (s)he is totally misunderstood by the next generation. Among the papers at the workshop there were certainly several examples of reading against the grain. For instance, Danielle Charette suggested that Hume did not read Machiavelli in the traditional way, but instead sought to move beyond the moralism of many eighteenth-century accounts, modelling instead how Machiavelli might be read fruitfully in the modern world.

While undoubtedly complex, there can be no doubt that juxtaposing authors in this way and examining in detail the connections - and the divergences - between their ideas, can enrich our understanding of the thought of both thinkers. On the basis of this, I was led to wonder whether focusing on reading might provide us with a new dimension to the exploration of intellectual history. Reading offers a middle way between the traditional 'great thinkers' approach to the history of political thought and the contextual methodology pioneered by members of the Cambridge School. Cambridge School historians quite rightly challenged the assumption that the great thinkers of the past were simply conversing with each other and were unaffected by the historical events and more trivial and quotidian intellectual debates going on around them. They have shown, for example, that Hobbes was deeply affected by the experience of living through the English Civil War and was responding to contemporary debates, such as that surrounding the swearing of the Engagement Oath - an oath of loyalty to the new regime in the aftermath of the regicide. Yet this emphasis on historical and intellectual context can sometimes lead us to forget that these people also read and responded to the writings of prominent thinkers who had gone before them. By adding some consideration of who and what thinkers of the past were reading, alongside what they were experiencing and which intellectual debates they were engaging with, we can perhaps produce a richer and more nuanced understanding of the genesis of their ideas.

Representation and Misrepresentation

Last month I wrote about the 'Translating Cultures' workshop that I attended at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in late June 2018. The same week I also spoke at the Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought held at UCL in London. The theme this year was 'Representation and Misrepresentation' and I was honoured to be invited to deliver the keynote address. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first five panels, but I heard some fascinating, inspirational papers that led me to reflect on several key themes.

One of these was the sheer complexity of the concepts 'representation' and 'misrepresentation'. This complexity has a long history. While representative government is often associated with modern democracy - with representation presented as a means of making democratic government workable in large modern nation states - Ludmilla Lorrain reminded us that representation was originally developed in opposition to democracy. Late eighteenth-century advocates of representative government - for instance, the American founding fathers, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Edmund Burke - believed democracy ought to be avoided, and instead celebrated representative government as superior. In this context, Lorrain argued, William Godwin's commitment to 'representative democracy' is worthy of investigation.

Benjamin Constant, as Arthur Ghins demonstrated, sided with Sieyès and Burke rather than Godwin. The advantage of representation for Constant was not that it made democracy possible, but rather that it would result in good political decisions. Ghins also argued that Constant was more concerned with representing interests than individuals, further complicating what we understand by political representation. 

John Stuart Mill, replica by George Frederick Watts, 1873. National Portrait Gallery NPG 1090. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

The question of who or what was to be represented was always contentious, and from the French Revolution onwards some claimed that representation ought to extend to women as well as men. John Stuart Mill was a particularly strong advocate of this claim. In her paper, Stephanie Conway argued for the centrality of this commitment within Mill's thought. Mill, she suggested, believed that the enfranchisement of women would solve the pressing problem of overpopulation.

Alongside who should be represented, the tools used to exercise representation have also proved contentious. The timely issue of the uses of referenda in representative governments was explored by Gareth Stedman Jones, in his introductory address, and by Ariane Fichtl. Opening her paper with a reference to Jacques Louis David's painting 'The Oath of the Horatii', Fichtl noted that the Horatii were eventually acquitted after an appeal to the Roman popular assembly. Yet in 1792 it was the Girondins, rather than David's allies the Jacobins, who advanced the idea of referring the decision about what should be done with the former French king to the people. Stedman Jones noted that under both Napoleon III and Hitler referenda were used as a means of providing apparent democratic accountability in systems that were some way from being democratic.

Jacques-Louis David, 'Oath of the Horatii', 1784. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David-Oath_of_the_Horatii-1784.jpg

Sir William Temple, Bt., after Sir Peter Lely. Based on a work of c.1660. National Portrait Gallery NPG 152. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

As well as causing me to reflect on the complexities of representation, the papers also encouraged me to think about the nature of the history of political thought as a field. In the first place it is clear that the importance of examining works in their historical and intellectual context - as pioneered by the Cambridge School - remains a useful and revealing methodology. Interestingly, it was, perhaps, the speakers from the European University Institute in Florence who displayed the richness of that approach most eloquently. Bert Drejer explored the revisions that Johannes Althusius made to the 1610 and 1614 editions of his Politica, methodice digest in response to changing circumstances. Moreover, in answering questions he noted that part of the reason for Althusius's greater emphasis on cities in the later editions was probably that he had become a syndic himself in the intervening period. Juha Haavisto is writing an intellectual history of William Temple and very much seeking to set Temple's thought in its context. He described Temple as a practical and pragmatic writer whose lack of consistency can be explained by the fact that he often adapted his thought to the circumstances. Elias Buchetmann is working on a contextual reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy. He argued that Hegel's observation of events in Württemberg, particularly the constitutional crisis of 1815-19, had a significant impact on the development of his thought. Morgan Golf-French also touched on this approach in his question to Ghins regarding the relationship between Constant's liberalism and his knowledge of, and engagement with, the German context.

Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan with its image depicting the state literally representing or embodying the population. Reproduced with permission from Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Special Collections, Bainbrigg (Bai 1651 HOB).

While suggesting much continuity, these papers also showed signs of new developments and trajectories in the history of political thought. In particular, it is clear that there is a growing tendency towards branching out from politics, narrowly defined, to explore the interrelationship between politics and other fields of knowledge. The 2009 book Seeing Things Their Way put forward a two-pronged argument: that advocates of the Cambridge School have often ignored or downplayed the religious dimension of earlier thought; and yet that their methodology is particularly conducive to understanding and making sense of religious beliefs and convictions in their own terms (Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Building on this idea, Connor Robinson reminded us that debates about the polity took place within the church as well as the state in seventeenth-century England. He suggested that ideas of representation in that period might usefully be read against the background of Protestantism, showing that the ideas and practices of the early church were central to the responses that James Harrington and Henry Vane made to Thomas Hobbes. Barret Reiter also linked political and religious thought, presenting Hobbes's interest in the problem of idolatry as part of a much wider concern with the fancy or imagination. The root of Hobbes's concern with idolatry, Reiter argued, lay in the individual following his own imagination rather than obeying the sovereign.

Other papers touched on other relationships. Alex Mortimore examined the way in which political ideas could be expressed in literary form, specifically in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's work Die Aufgeregten (The Agitation), which was written in 1792 at the height of the French Revolution. I was particularly struck by the subtitle of this work 'A Political Drama' and wondered whether this was a common genre at the time or whether it was prompted by Goethe's reaction to this highly charged political moment. The paper served to remind us that literary sources can be just as valuable as political texts in reflecting the political views being expressed and debated at particular points in time.

Economics is another discipline that is closely related to politics and that was often not fully distinguished from it in earlier periods. Both Ghins's paper and that by Henri-Pierre Mottironi explored the interrelationship between politics and economics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mottironi demonstrated that the French Physiocrats modelled their ideas of citizenship, taxation, and representation on practices that were well established in corporate institutions, including joint stock companies such as the French East India Company. Sieyès then derived his understanding of these same concepts from the Physiocratic model and embodied them in his constitutional proposals many of which were reflected in the French constitution of 1791. While convinced of this borrowing, I was also struck by the tension that this brings to light between what revolutionaries like Sieyès were claiming and what they were doing. Sieyès set out to replace the unjust and unequal organisation of French society around corporate bodies such as the Estates with a more equal and rational system centred on individuals. Yet Mottironi's work suggests that in the very conception of this new rational model Sieyès was himself drawing on practices that operated in corporations like the joint stock companies.

Perhaps it is precisely because political concepts are so complex that the history of political thought is in such rude health?