John Pocock

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John Greville Agard Pocock is a New Zealand historian, noted for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period, for his contributions to the intellectual history of political thought in general, and his studies of historiography in relation to Edward Gibbon and his contemporiaries.

His first book on the Ancient Constitution and Feudal law elucidated the common law mind, showing how thinkers such as Edward Coke built up a historical analysis of British history into an epistemology of law and politics; and then how that edifice later came to be subverted by scholars of the mid-to-late seventeenth century. Some of this work has recently been amended by Glenn Burgess, but much is still accepted as the historical gold standard on the common law.

By the 1970s, still interested in time, Pocock had changed his focus from how the lawyers understood the evolution of law, to how the philosophers and theologians did. The Machiavellian Moment, his sparkling achievement, showed how Florentines, Englishmen and Americans had responded and analysed the destruction of their states and political orders in the succession of crises sweeping through the early modern world. Again not all historians accept Pocock's account, but leading scholars of early modern republicanism like Quentin Skinner, Jonathan Scott and Eric Nelson are patently influenced by it: especially in making James Harrington the focus of their accounts.

Continuing on this theme more recently he has worked on Edward Gibbon, and how he understood the cataclysm of decline and fall within the Roman Empire. As of 2004 he is Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Pocock is celebrated not merely as a historian but as a pioneer of a new type of history, with Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. Pocock developed the idea that the history of ideas should be written not as the history of great texts, with one answering another but as the history of texts in context. Particularly Pocock conceptualised languages. One of these, he argued, was that of the common law, through which past polemicists had communicated. These interests crystallised in his application of Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts to the development of political thought.

He has also since the 1970s pressed historians to reconsider the history of the British archipelago and move away from histories of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales as separate entities. Pocock's analysis of the methodology of the history of ideas has been less significant only than Skinner's within modern historiography, and he is one of few historians to dare to move through the somewhat parochial surroundings of the historiographies of Florence, England in the civil war, the American revolution and the Enlightenment with success.

Writings

The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957)
''Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History.(1972)
The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975)
The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) editor
Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1985)
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1987) editor
James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (1992) editor
Barbarism and Religion, I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (1999)
Barbarism and Religion, II: Narratives of Civil Government (1999)
Barbarism and Religion, III: The First Decline and Fall (2003)
The Discovery of Islands (2005)

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