This article was downloaded by: [University of Saskatchewan Library] On: 03 September 2012, At: 20:22 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History of European Ideas Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20 The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock's Politics of History Dana Simmons a a Department of History, University of California, Riverside, 1212 HMNSS Building, 900 University Ave, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA Version of record first published: 21 Feb 2012 To cite this article: Dana Simmons (2012): The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock's Politics of History, History of European Ideas, 38:2, 288-306 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2011.646673 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Transcript
This article was downloaded by: [University of Saskatchewan Library]On: 03 September 2012, At: 20:22Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
History of European IdeasPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20
The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A.Pocock's Politics of HistoryDana Simmons aa Department of History, University of California, Riverside, 1212HMNSS Building, 900 University Ave, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA
Version of record first published: 21 Feb 2012
To cite this article: Dana Simmons (2012): The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock's Politics ofHistory, History of European Ideas, 38:2, 288-306
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2011.646673
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
The Weight of the Moment: J. G. A. Pocock’s Politics of History
DANA SIMMONS*
Department of History, University of California, Riverside, 1212 HMNSS Building,
900 University Ave, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
Summary
One of the great intellectual productions of the postwar period, J. G. A. Pocock’sThe Machiavellian Moment was also an intervention in the American polity of the1970s. The book’s content, its rhetorical style, its methodology, and even itsphysical printed form were all designed to effectuate a political gesture. The crisesof 1968 to 1973 invalidated the optimistic liberalism of Pocock’s academic circle.The history of political language offered a refuge and a programmatic foundationfor Pocock’s pragmatic conservatism. The Machiavellian Moment was designed toreinforce the weight of tradition in contemporary political debate.
Keywords: J. G. A. Pocock; Cambridge school; historiography; Conservatism;
There is a point at which historical and political theory meet, and it can be
said without distortion that every society possesses a philosophy of history-a
set of ideas about what happens, what can be known and what done, in timeconsidered as a dimension of society-which is intimately a part of its
consciousness and its functioning.1
J. G. A. Pocock, in the closing passages of The Machiavellian Moment, breaks
abruptly with the historian’s lofty writing style. He grandly invokes the work at hand as
‘a contribution [. . .] on the conservative side of the ledger, with which a history being
*E-mail: [email protected] John G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding’,in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, 1989), 233.
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS
Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2012, 288�306
History of European Ideas ISSN 0191-6599 print/ISSN 1873-541X online # 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandfonline.com
completed at a profoundly counter-revolutionary point in time may be permitted,
without prejudice, to conclude’.2 Following upon an erudite history of political thought
from medieval patristic classics and sixteenth-century Italian humanists to Eisen-
hower’s military-industrial complex, this statement of political purpose strikes the
reader as provocatively elliptical. Pocock’s suggestive conclusion leaves the reader of
The Machiavellian Moment to puzzle over its historiographical and political ambitions.
One of the great intellectual productions of the postwar period, The Machia-
vellian Moment was also an intervention in the American polity of the 1970s. This
intervention occurred on a multiplicity of levels. The book’s content, its rhetorical
style, its methodology, and even its physical printed form were all designed to
effectuate a political gesture. In over forty years’ of work, Pocock has dealt with a
constant set of themes: language and time, meaning and political legitimation, and
the historian’s task. Each of his works represents a strategic gesture in response to the
political context of its time, from the McLuhanism of the 1960s to recent debates on
European integration. This essay examines the elegant coincidence of Pocock’s
historiographical and political projects and his style, method, and content. One
remarks while carrying The Machiavellian Moment across a university campus: the
book’s weight is more than a metaphor; it literally slows the reader down.The Machiavellian Moment was written in 1973, a year that sounded the end of the
postwar Golden Age. It was very much a work of its time. The crises of 1968 to 1973
invalidated the optimistic, progressive liberalism of Pocock’s academic circle. The
intellectual world of Pocock’s mentors, Cambridge historians Peter Laslett and J. H.
Plumb, receded. Laslett and Plumb were central to advancing a progressive, scientific
vision of history adopted by much of British intelligentsia in the 1960s. Guy Ortolano
has linked Laslett and Plumb to the ameliorist politics of novelist C. P. Snow, British
Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and American President John F. Kennedy.3 The two
historians published their greatest works*exemplars of rigorous social history*at the
peak of Golden Age optimism in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
By 1973, the oil shock and looming global recession challenged liberals’ faith in
the march of global democracy, scientific and industrial improvement, and rising
standards of living. Social and economic structures, which in the Fordist era
appeared to many intellectuals to work as stabilising forces, began to seem
dangerously mutable. What would come to replace the Fordist consensus was not
yet clear in 1973, but the extent of crisis certainly was. The progressive vision of
history undergirding Laslett and Plumb’s work was lost.
Language offered Pocock a refuge. If social and economic progress appeared
illusory in 1973, intellectual history could provide a different story. Pocock turned to
language*more precisely, writing*as a force of conservation. Pocock’s story fits
within a historiographic turn in the 1970s away from social history and toward a
history of discourse. This turn took many different forms, from British and American
leftists inspired by E. P. Thompson to the followers of French historian Francois
Furet. By the 1980s, historians of discourse, language, and culture gained increasing
prominence within the profession.
2 John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic RepublicanTradition (Princeton, 1975) 551.3 Guy Ortolano, ‘Human Science or Human Face? Social History and the ‘‘Two Cultures’’ Controversy’,Journal of British Studies, 43 (2004), 482�505 (482, 488�89). See also David Cannadine, ‘Historians in the‘‘Liberal Hour’’: Lawrence Stone and J. H. Plumb Revisited’, Historical Research, 75 (2002), 316�54.
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William Sewell has reflected on the timing of this discursive turn at the start of the
post-Fordist era, a moment of ‘powerful changes in social and economic structures’.
Historians of language and discourse, Sewell warns, ‘ceased not only to grapple with
such structures but even to admit their ontological reality’.4 Two of the most
prominent, Furet and Pocock, were quite explicit about their politics. Both took up
the history of language to defend against what they viewed as the greatest danger of
their time: revolutionary, antinomian tendencies. Furet’s Interpreting the French
Revolution was a ‘history of the illusion of revolutionary politics’, designed to
discredit the French left of the 1970s.5 Pocock was troubled by those who made
claims based on universal, ahistorical norms and by those who promoted individual
agency as a political panacea. He turned to the history of political language as a
means to retain political debate within the bounds of inherited tradition.
Pocock was born in London in 1924 to a francophone Channel Islander and a
South African classics professor, and spent his youth and early professional career in
New Zealand. From thence he passed the years 1956 to 1958 as a research fellow at
Cambridge University, where he came under the wings of Laslett, Plumb, and Herbert
Butterfield. In 1966, Pocock immigrated to the United States to teach at Washington
University, Saint Louis, where he began work on The Machiavellian Moment. Much
of the book was written during a fellowship year at Australian National University in
1973.6 Perhaps because of this geographic hybridity, Pocock has been more explicit
than most in inserting himself into a specific political tradition.
Pocock responded to the crisis of the postwar Golden Age with great trepidation.
He feared the ascendancy of revolutionary politics, untethered from history. In this
‘moment of romantic agony’7 the historian’s role appeared clear: to defend the past
and present from revolutionary destruction. In a later retrospective essay, he directs
his readers to consider his work in ‘contexts drawn from that time gone by’.8 He
recalls that
there were Red Guards abroad in those days, real as well as theoretical; [. . .][the] Weatherman might not be worse than the Ohio National Guard but was
more often at one’s doorstep, pressing demands which more obviously arosefrom within one’s own values and perverted them. [. . .] it was against elements
of the left that humane learning and the liberal arts had sometimes to be
defended.9
4 William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago Studies inPractices of Meaning) (Chicago, 2005), 52.5 Michael Scott Christofferson, ‘An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Francois Furet’s‘‘Penser la Revolution Francaise’’ in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s’, French Historical Studies,22 (1999), 557�611 (572). The link between Pocock and the French discursive historians has beensuggested by Kari Palonen, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Rhetoric of Conceptual Change’, History of the HumanSciences, 10 (May 1997), 61�80.6 ‘Pocock, J(ohn) G(reville) A(gard)’, in Contemporary Authors: Bio-Bibliographic Guide to CurrentWriters in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, 321 vols(Detroit, 1962�), CXCVIII, 286.7 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of PoliticalThought’, in Politics, Language and Time, 11.8 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Preface’, in Politics, Language and Time, ix.9 Pocock, ‘Preface’, in Politics, Language and Time, xi. Pocock notes that his historiographicalinterventions could equally be targeted against a Thatcherite, market-oriented vision of the intellectualenterprise.
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Pocock first elaborated his model of the conservative polity in opposition to what he
condemned as ‘the mutual fallacies of Chicago’: the policeman’s club and the
antinomian revolutionary.10 He was haunted by the riots and repressions of 1968, both
East and West. He warns the reader not to ‘overestimate’ his ‘moderate unfriendliness
toward the romantic revolutionary’ and stipulates that bureaucratic, autocratic, and
violent repression constitutes an equivalent threat to a political society.11 However, the
romantic revolutionary preoccupied him to a far greater extent.
More than once Pocock drew affirmation from W. H. Auden’s call in ‘August,
1968’ that ‘the Ogre cannot master Speech’.12 Pocock turned to language as a
bulwark against revolution. Writing, for Pocock, is a slow and measured process.
Through writing, language is tied to time and history. Such a vision of writing is in
itself an artefact of a conservative position in the world; from a post-millennial
standpoint, one can barely imagine words and writing as slow-moving objects.
Handwriting*its practice and cadence*is central to Pocock’s intellectual autobio-
graphy:
I have been developing and practicing my own handwriting ever since
[preschool], and have discovered that the art of composition, which is a large
part of the art of thought, is the art of letting your hand trace on paper therhythms and cadences forming in the inner ear of your mind.13
Language, for Pocock, was slow, physical, and structured by time.
Pocock saw the world of the Instant Message coming, and worried about it deeply.
In 1971 he warned against the ‘presaged communications universe of electronic
intersubjectivity in which concepts and images will not stay fixed enough for the
individual to determine his identity by self-location with regard to a conceptual and
paradigmatic structure’.14 To counter this flux, he imparts language with an almost
material weight and physical force. He describes traditions of speech as ‘frictions in
the medium’ which block instantaneous communication.15
Pocock promoted a measured and weighted political discourse that would prevent
any party from controlling or manipulating the terms of debate.
I do think it desirable to slow down the action to the point where it can be
conceptualized and criticized and we can relate ourselves to it; I have anti-
McLuhanist preferences, and if this be conservatism, make the most of it; but
my main concern is for the preservation of a structure of two-way commu-
nication [. . .]. I am seeking to slow down the power act so that it ceases to be
immediate and unmediated.16
10 John G. A. Pocock, ‘On the Non-Revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism’, in Politics,Language and Time, 283.11 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 283.12 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 282; Pocock, ‘Preface’, Politics,Language and Time, xi.13 Pocock, Valedictory Lecture, 6.14 In this sense, Pocock shares the American neoconservative abhorrence of mass media and telecommu-nications as a threat to a stable polity. These media promote fast-moving discussions that further a rel-ativist stance. See Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 290. On theneoconservative suspicion of mass media, see Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Straussand the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven, 1994), 64.15 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech’, Political Theory,1 (1973), 35.16 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, 35.
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By burdening the terms of political discourse with their past histories, he sought to
lay a barricade against creative, ironic, or revolutionary usages. He constructed his
historical work such that its very format forces the reader to grasp and respond to its
strictures. His historiographical interventions aim to introduce road bumps on theburgeoning information highway.
Pocock purposefully designed The Machiavellian Moment to limit the speed and
mutability of political debate. ‘[. . .] one can imagine books and other forms of printed
matter serving as deliberately introduced blockages,’ he writes, ‘compelling the
merchants of images to slow down the production and transformation of their output
so that we can inspect it.’17 The thickness of his language and the complexity of his
narrative are calculated to slow the reader down to the pace of a history transmitted
across centuries*the pace of a tradition.In this sense Pocock drew his politics of history less from Laslett and Plumb than
from a third Cambridge mentor, historian Herbert Butterfield. The Whig Interpreta-
tion of History (1932) was published in an earlier moment of twentieth-century
‘romantic agony’. In it Butterfield fustigates against historians who manipulate the
past to justify present politics. The great crime of the ‘Whig historian’, in Butterfield’s
eyes, lay in historical abridgement. Omissions, inferences from extra-historical
principles, and false certainties were the tools of manipulators and ideologues. These
‘abuses of abridged history [. . .] show why history can so often be turned intopropaganda’.18 Such dangerous operations could be countered only by emphasising
the particularity and complexity of individual historical moments. Pocock never
shared Butterfield’s yearning for an ‘objective’ history that erects barriers between past
and present.19 Nevertheless, Butterfield’s vision of historical activity resonates with
Pocock’s later pronouncements. The chief function of the historian, writes Butterfield,
‘is to act [. . .] as the mediator between other generations and our own [. . .].’20
Condensation, simplification, and manipulation were Butterfield’s anathemas. Po-
cock’s historiography, like Butterfield’s, seeks to obstruct such quickening operations.Several critics of The Machiavellian Moment have commented on an ‘often
obscure, even baroque, style, which tends to distract from clarity and precision of
expression’.21 Perhaps more surprisingly, the author himself has publicly claimed that
such was his design: ‘for reasons ancient to the practice of rhetoric,’ he writes of the
book, ‘it was intended to be difficult’.22 Pocock designed The Machiavellian Moment
as a discursive reinforcement of a tradition of political discourse.
2. The Quarrel of the Self with History
Pocock’s writings of the 1960s and 1970s return incessantly to the theme oftransmission and history. A basic claim structures both his theoretical and his
historical writings*namely that the manner in which a society envisions its
17 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 291.18 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1951), 101.19 Similarly, Pocock cites sympathetically Michael Oakeshott’s pronouncement against the ‘abridgementof tradition into ideology’. See Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time,245, 253.20 Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 10.21 Neal Wood, ‘The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic RepublicanTradition’, Political Theory, 4 (1976), 101�04 (104).22 John G. A. Pocock, ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology’, TheJournal of Modern History, 53 (1981), 49�72 (52).
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relationship with the past, time, and tradition determines the range of political and
discursive possibilities open to the society’s members. In a 1968 essay entitled ‘Time,
Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and their Understanding’, Pocock
posits a fundamental human need to understand and situate the self in a continuum
of social relationships, a continuum that extends beyond the self and that structures
its existence. He refers to this human condition as ‘social self-awareness’23 and,
alternatively, ‘historical consciousness.’24 Historians, as interpreters of tradition, play
a unique and vital role in forming and articulating conceptions of the self in society.25
The engaged intellectual constructs an account of the political traditions that
structure modern social life. ‘The concepts which we form from, and feed back into,
tradition have the capacity to modify the character of the tradition conceptualized
and even the extent to which it is conceived and regarded as a tradition.’26 Pocock
envisioned his history as a formative intervention.
The Machiavellian Moment may be read as a history of the thought that created
the ‘modern sense of history’27 as a political force. Pocock reinforces such a reading
with references to the deep significance of his subject for contemporary political
thought and action. He clearly envisaged this project as a genealogy of the major
political positions available today.
Both in the seventeenth century, as in the twentieth, it has been salutary to be
reminded that society is indeed immemorial, and further that our knowledge of
the social usages that have preceded us is inherited from those usages
themselves, from the assumptions that they encourage us to make and theintimations that they permit us to pursue.28
The work thus operates on two levels: as a scholarly review of a current in political
thought, and as an intervention in the ‘social self-awareness’ and the political
discourse of the contemporary era, marshalling historical argument to further a
political project.
3. Tradition
In composing The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock sought to write a history of ‘what
can be known and what can be done, in time considered as a dimension of society’.29
The work describes the development of a tradition of thought, including a history of
the notion of tradition itself. Pocock defines traditions as ‘enduring patterns in [. . .]consciousness’.30 They are recognisable as a ‘series of repetitions’ over time and
23 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 236.24 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 236.25 Here again Herbert Butterfield offers a striking precedent. In the wake of the Second World War,Butterfield grappled with the political implications of national history. ‘The problems of historiography,’ hewrites, ‘are at certain points closely connected with the problems of life. They touch the question of the wayin which human beings are to take their vicissitudes on the earth � the way in which nations are to reflecton their corporate experience. [. . .] it is possible for historians [. . .] to give men a wrong notion of what theycan do with their destiny’. Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of HistoricalScholarship (Cambridge, 1955) 30.26 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 235.27 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, vii.28 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 238.29 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 233.30 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, vii.
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space.31 Traditions develop through a process of inheritance, the ‘handing on of
formed ways of acting and living’.32
The ‘Machiavellian tradition’ represents not a normative model but a paradigm.
Writers in the Machiavellian tradition grappled with the puzzle of how republics can
survive in an ever-changing world, confronted by the temporal finitude of all things.
This led to a fundamental reconsideration of the relation between self and history.33
A ‘formal dilemma’34 such as this one takes on various shapes over time, but is
expressed by a constant and particular vocabulary. In defining this tradition, Pocock
did not wish to establish a set of transcendent norms and values. Rather, he sought to
identify a common and continuous language, a set of formal assumptions that
ground modern political thought.
One can identify the Machiavellian problem where one encounters use of
characteristic terms such as virtue, corruption, and fortune. Whereas in the Italian
republics these terms were directed at the civic personality, later thinkers adapted
them to describe new developments such as professional militias and large-scale
commerce. In this manner, Pocock is able to describe Machiavelli as the ‘father of
American populism’, as well as English republicanism and many other strands of
political thought.35
The historian, therefore, can recognise a form of this particular tradition by its
use of a common conceptual vocabulary. Florentine political theorists developed a set
of concepts that allowed them to measure, understand, and control historical change.
These include the notion of a balanced government, the active civic personality, and
the effect of arms and property in shaping that personality.36 As new generations of
thinkers appropriated it, this tradition took on different forms specific to place and
time. Pocock identifies an eighteenth-century form in America, where writers utilised
a Florentine linguistic tradition in order to express an opposition to commercial
capitalism.37
Though it has become commonplace to associate Pocock’s name with classical
republicanism, it was not his intention to promote a classical republican politics. To
the contrary, the Machiavellian tradition serves to exemplify Pocock’s general theory
of the rules of historical transmission. On the basis of this theory, and in opposition
to some aspects of classical republican ideology, Pocock constructs a ‘pragmatic
conservative’ politics.
In confronting a tradition, Pocock claims, a thinker may emphasise the stability of
social structures inherited from an immemorial past, or describe it as a series
of singular creative moments of origin. The first approach presumes a framework of
custom that shapes and determines each subsequent historical development; the
second allows for the possibility that creative actions and ahistorical norms and
values can supersede and overturn historical precedent. Some might deny the
existence of secular history altogether and call for a return to a pure past moment.
Some might attempt to synthesise all known traditions into a single set of precedents
31 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 37.32 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 233�34.33 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, viii.34 Pocock characterises this tradition as ‘the formal dilemma of the humanist republic’ in John G. A.Pocock, ‘Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought’, in Politics, Language and Time, 99.35 Pocock, ‘Civic Humanism’, in Politics, Language and Time, 98.36 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, viii, 402.37 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, ix.
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to follow. Some might try to escape from history in a single violent gesture. Others
might simply accept the contradictions inherent in historical transmission, and use
them as best they can.38
These are the basic positions available to the political historian or theorist.
Pocock assigns each a label: radicalism, traditional conservatism, pragmatic
conservatism, and revolution. Each corresponds to a particular moment in the
history of political discourse, as recounted by The Machiavellian Moment. Each
represents a distinct attempt to resolve ‘the quarrel of the self with history’39: the
conflict between the civic personality and the institutions that impart a society’s
structure and a people’s nature.In Pocock’s account, secular history first appears in the form of ‘traditional
conservatism’.40 This type of conservatism emphasises the immemorial nature of
tradition. It views the past as a series of innumerable repetitions or cycles. One
cannot know anything of particular moments in the past, or distinguish one or
another as a source of authority. One can only accept the fact of transmission itself,
which has brought a certain set of customs, laws, and languages to the present. ‘His
basic position’, says Pocock of the traditional conservative, ‘is that the existing
arrangements of society contain their own justification, that it is not justifiable to
subject them wholly to be evaluated by some standard existing outside themselves.’41
Social institutions cannot be legitimised by any means other than their existence in
the present, which implies continuity with an inscrutable origin located deep in the
past.
The most striking example of traditional conservatism is English common law,
designed to codify unwritten and immemorial usages.42 Pocock defines common law
theory as a prerequisite for all the secular notions of time and history that follow. In
seventeenth-century English discussions of custom, usage, and induction, ‘modes of
thought can be detected which were explicitly concerned with the problems of
political particularity’.43 Such an attitude, similar to Edmund Burke’s, rests on a
largely passive acceptance of received authority and a gingerly ‘prudent’ stance
toward the present and the future.44
38 This set of options corresponds to Pocock’s description of the choices available to republics in theirstruggle with their own finitude: ‘the republic’s struggle to attain self-sufficient virtue and stability in acontext of particularity, time and change. It might escape from history by a self-constituent act of timelessrationality; it might seek to tame history by combining in a grand synthesis all the elements of instability,identified and interwoven; or it might confess that the problem could not be solved and that the pitfalls ofhistory remained forever open’. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 328.39 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 549.40 Prerequisite to the whole discussion of time and traditions that characterises the ‘Machiavellian mo-ment’ is the assumption that we live in a secular, particular history. Christian scholastic thought, byPocock’s estimation, effectively denies the existence of such a historical past; for medieval thinkers, onlythe universal and the divine carry meaning. Individual events make sense only within an eternal frame-work, and true existence is timeless. The ‘Machiavellian moment’ could take place only once Europeanthinkers accepted that events occur in a finite timeframe.41 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 266.42 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 240.43 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 9. Pocock ties Edmund Burke’s vision of history to such a vision oftransmission. See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 24.44 ‘Prudence [. . .] was the present and future, where custom was the perfect, tense of experience. [. . .][experience] judged what had proved good and satisfactory; it judged also what had proved adapted to theparticular nature, or ‘‘genius’’ of the people, and this judgement was likely to be self-fulfilling, since useand custom created this ‘‘second nature’’ as well as evaluating it [. . .]’. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment,25.
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Pocock formulated his pragmatic conservatism in dialogue with political
philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Pocock’s seminal essay, ‘Time,
Institutions and Action’, first appeared in a collective tribute entitled Politics and
Experience: Essays presented to Michael Oakeshott.45 Oakeshott defines tradition as a
set of inherited rules and assumptions that ground human behaviour. Traditions shape
societies through a ‘common recognition of the rules which constitute a practice of
civility’.46 Oakeshott was not interested in recuperating any given moment of origin;
his concern was to guarantee the continuity of social forms. For Oakeshott, traditions
represent no more and no less than the sum of accumulated social practices.
Oakeshott makes explicit claims for the present-day polity on the basis of his
theoretical model. In particular, he emphasises the role of a centralised state in
enforcing rules for social interaction. He promotes a strong and non-normative state.
Government should avoid promoting any particular substantive goal or norm; the
choice of values and ends should be left to individuals. Yet national institutions are
vital to maintaining common standards for behaviour. The state acts as an
instrument of social cohesion, not of social justice.
Pocock largely adheres to Oakeshott’s politics of tradition. He describes his
tribute to Oakeshott, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, as an attempt to ‘formulate’ a
set of ‘predictable laws’ by which ‘traditions operate’.47 Pocock turned to the rules of
political language as a bulwark against normative activism. Like Oakeshott, he
inscribed the polity within the bounds of the sovereign nation, and desired to
preserve the nation’s autonomy and coherence.
Unlike Oakeshott, however, Pocock’s interest lay not in the simple fact of
inheritance, but in the unfolding of traditions over time:
We are concerned less with tradition as an objective fact, a necessary mode of
social life, than with the conceptualization of tradition, with what happens
when a society forms an image of itself as a constant transmission of ways of
living and behaving.48
Whereas Oakeshott viewed the historian as an aesthetic observer of established
tradition, Pocock sought to interrogate and modify his inheritance.49 For Pocock,
multiple traditions of political thought have evolved in parallel and have brought
about a critical dialogue between past and present. The historian’s role as transmitter
of the past lends him a privileged position in this ongoing conversation. Pocock’s
historian has two tasks: to reconstruct political languages and their rules; and thereby
to enter into conversation with previous authors. Pocock sought to confront past
45 Politics and Experience: Essays presented to Michael Oakeshott, edited by Preston King and Bhikhu C.Parekh (Cambridge, 1968).46 Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975), 128. Cited in Devigne, Recasting Conservatism,18.47 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought’, in Politics ofDiscourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and StevenN. Zwicker (Berkeley, 1987), 31.48 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 239.49 ‘The conservative style leaves [history] in the role of mistress, but it has been the aim of this essay toshow that traditionalism and its refinements form only one voice in a dialogue with and within tradition,out of which arises a constant discussion and redefinition of the modes of continuity and authority whichlink past to present and give the present its structure. In that dialogue the past is to the present somethingmore like a wife: an other self, perpetually explored’. Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics,Language and Time, 272.
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statements with their changing and contingent circumstances. His traditions are not
of the Burkean variety*fixed and immutable*nor are they so flexible as to allow for
pure rejection or play.This model of tradition as language and dialogue is significantly at variance with
the conservative vision propounded by Leo Strauss and his followers. Strauss looked
to the past for a world we have lost; he called upon ancient philosophical tradition to
recover from a degenerated modernity. In this sense, Strauss adopted a radical stance
with respect to the past: he desired to ‘go back to the point where the destruction of
political philosophy began’, to ‘study the political philosophies as they were
understood by their originators’.50 The Straussian mode of analysis seeks truth
beyond and before history. It strives to recuperate and reveal a pure state of the past.
A tradition, for Strauss, was a fixed inheritance waiting to be recovered and used in
combat against modern liberalism.51
Pocock shared with Strauss an aversion to philosophical relativism and to
transcendent political norms. For both scholars, the past stood as a restraint upon
individual agency. However, Pocock virulently objected to Strauss’s equation of
historical transmission with philosophical revelation. Pocock condemned a method
based on esoteric truth and exegesis on the grounds that it leads to ‘a closed
ideology’.52 In a 1975 review, Pocock opposes Strauss’s history of hidden meanings
with a history of language.53 For Pocock, a tradition does not simply exist in some
pure past state, awaiting recuperation; rather, traditions function as languages in a
critical dialogue between the self and history.
4. RevolutionPocock aimed the full force of his political history against a ‘revolutionary’ politics
of history. He dedicated a full essay in 1971 to warning against ‘the nakedness
of existential freedom or dereliction’,54 and pointed a heated critique against a
romantic dialectics of the self. He argues strenuously against political positions that
assert the individual personality as the ultimate carrier of civic value. The
revolutionary, he claims, is caught in a continuous transformation of the self,
alienated from any common institution, and unable to acknowledge any form of
historical transmission.
In Pocock’s description, revolutionaries view history as a medium for pure human
experience. They refuse the inevitability and even the necessity of social structures or
paradigms. They defy institutions and regard the past as a series of moments of
creative action. The revolutionary seeks a basis for political authority in the
autonomous individual, not in customary structures.
Revolutionary, or ‘romantic’, political action consists of ‘a transformation of the
self, a reconstruction of the conditions under which selves are to be created, and an
engagement in the presumed self-creations of others’.55 As such, this represents a
50 ‘Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time’, 217�18; The City and the Man, 9, cited in John G.Gunnell, ‘The Myth of the Tradition’, The American Political Science Review, 72 (1978), 122�34 (127).51 Gunnell, ‘The Myth of the Tradition’, 122�34 (127).52 John G. A. Pocock, ‘Prophet and Inquisitor: Or, a Church Built upon Bayonets Cannot Stand: AComment on Mansfield’s ‘‘Strauss’s Machiavelli’’’, Political Theory, 3 (1975), 385�401 (386).53 Pocock, ‘Prophet and Inquisitor’, 385�401 (392�94).54 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 278.55 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 275.
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strongly normative program. The revolutionary projects the entirety of historical
experience onto the development of each individual personality. Negating the
historical role of paradigms, the revolutionary views time as a series of creative
moments, and seeks to erect new structures that could immediately be torn down
again.
In The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock traces the origin of the autonomous civic
personality to the modern republic. The sixteenth-century thinkers at the origin of
Pocock’s ‘moment’, notably Guicciardini, placed full responsibility for safeguarding
the republic’s integrity on the person of the political participant. For the Florentine
theorists, the sphere of republican life coincides exactly with that of the vivire civile, or
active citizenship. The polity coheres around individual virtue*the sacrifice of
particular considerations in favour of universal values. The key to such an
arrangement lies in a social structure that provides the individual a forum in which
to express total personal autonomy, both economic and moral. The founding values
of the republic cannot be found in social institutions or in past traditions. Rather,
they reside entirely in the citizen.The polity drew its strength from the autonomous civic personality. This, man’s
‘first nature’, refers to a universal essence outside of history and tradition.
Republican theorists sought to allow this essential nature to express itself fully and
without interference. Contingent, historical circumstances that lay outside of the civic
personality had to be reshaped in order to conform to the internal force of civic
virtue.
From the seventeenth century onward, this politics of virtue faced growing
challenges from a globalising commercial society and by liberal philosophies of
interest. Pocock devotes the final chapter of The Machiavellian Moment to two
attempts to escape or overcome the intensifying contradictions of modern history. In
different ways, both seek to return to a pure, normative conception of civic virtue.
The first of these attempts originated on Pocock’s adoptive soil: Americans, he
claims, have avoided the conflict between the civic personality and the social forces of
history by denying the latter altogether. They seek to escape the danger of corruption
by rediscovering virtue in wild, uncultivated territory. From the Bishop Berkeley to
the founding fathers and Frederick Jackson Turner, Americans have refused to tie
their fortune to the forces of history, to the point of denying tradition altogether. The
nation’s boundless geography would provide space for the political individual to
assert his vita activa and to fulfil his essential nature. ‘What was involved was a flight
from modernity and a future no less than from antiquity and a past, from commercial
and Whiggish Britain [. . .] no less than from feudal and popish Europe’.56 Yet
Americans have been unable to escape the corruption of which they accused the
British parliamentary monarchy in 1776. Pocock interprets Richard Nixon’s
impeachment as an instance of ‘the language of commonwealth ideology’, which
views executive corruption and patronage as a threat to human virtue and freedom.
‘The Nixon administration’, he wrote in 1985, ‘was immolated on altars originally
built by the Old Whigs; and the knives were still sharp’.57 Pocock considers
Americans still incapable of theorising contradictions between practical realities such
56 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 546.57 John G. A. Pocock, ‘1776: The Revolution Against Parliament’, in Virtue, Commerce and History:Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 83.
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as the closing of the frontier or the loss in Vietnam, and the ideal of the republic, in
terms other than anguished ‘jeremiads’.58
A second response to the threat of personal corruption appears in The
Machiavellian Moment under the heading of ‘an idealist mode of discourse’, bywhich Pocock refers to Romanticism and early Marxist socialism.59 German
Romantics recognised the tensions between a philosophy of civic virtue and an
active commercial society. Dialectics explain the chasms that appeared between the
moral and the material, value and history, universal personal virtue and subjective
social convention. This philosophy formed the basis for a theory of false-conscious-
ness and alienation.
Marxists sought to dispel the corrupting forces of culture and commerce and to
establish a pure and creative revolutionary self. The theory of alienation was groundedin a conjecture that the civic personality would degenerate as a result of the same
forces that built up the material wealth and culture of the polity as a whole. To
overcome these contradictions, socialists looked to the self and the force of civic virtue.
The undistracted, unspecialized man � hunter in the morning and critic in the
afternoon � whom Marx and Lenin hoped to restore to his universality is in the
long view an Aristotelian citizen, participant in all the value-oriented activities
of society, and his history is in large part the history of civic humanism.60
Pocock claims that the Marxist ideal of a virtuous, non-specialised and autonomous
individual, ‘committed to the social whole in all its diversity,’ drew its roots from the
modern notion of the civic personality.61
Pocock’s strongest indictment of a politics grounded in the strength of the civic
personality is that it ‘forces men to be free, to involve them in history, or in political
and historical action, to a degree beyond their capacity for consent’.62 In imposing
normative standards and moral absolutes upon the individual, these theories put
more political weight on one person than he or she can withstand. The conflation ofpersonal and social morality tie the shape and the success of the community to the
strength and direction of an individual will.
In the final analysis, the ideal of virtue is highly compulsive; it demands of theindividual, under threat to his moral being, that he participate in the res publica
and, when the republic’s existence in time is seen to have grown crucial, in
history.63
Conversely, customary historical structures become highly unstable when exposed tothe fluctuations of personal creativity. Traditions as Pocock envisioned them would
no longer be possible. For this reason, a revolutionary politics is fraught with danger.
5. Pragmatic Conservatism
As an alternative to traditional conservatism and revolution, Pocock offers
the history of a third position: ‘pragmatic conservatism’. This standpoint views the
58 Pocock, ‘The Revolution Against Parliament’, in Virtue, Commerce and History, 83.59 Pocock, ‘The Revolution Against Parliament’, in Virtue, Commerce and History, 505.60 Pocock, ‘Civic Humanism’, in Politics, Language and Time, 103.61 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 551.62 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 551.63 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 551.
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movement of history as a result of human creativity, expressed through traditions and
social institutions. A variety of traditions emerge organically over time, and each
tradition implies a different mode of action. The accumulation of diverse social
structures leads to conflict and contradiction between adherents of these various
points of view.
The pragmatic conservative, recognising the complexity of tradition, proposes
that various customs must be identified and weighed against each other in order to
achieve a practicable solution. However, this comparison should take place with the
limited aim of reinforcing existing conditions, which already requires a necessary ‘act
of provisional acceptance’.64 Where the traditional conservative would seek to
preserve the edifice of political discourse in exactly its original form, and where a
romantic revolutionary might attempt to blow up the building, the pragmatic
conservative is content to change the colour scheme and to rearrange the furniture.65
The conservative does not claim to comprehend tradition fully; he or she refuses
any universal or external standard in judging it, for no law can be justified outside of
its customary transmission. ‘A certain relativism attaches to them all’.66 Pocock’s
pragmatic conservative neither describes tradition in normative terms nor proposes
solutions based on abstract or universal laws. For him, the rules of civic interaction
are not natural constructions, but social ones. In sum, Pocock represents his
conservative stance not as partisan polemicising but as an attempt to identify a deep-
seated foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in civic life. Such is the
position that The Machiavellian Moment is designed to induce in its reader.
The pragmatic conservative envisions history as the progress of collective social
structures. In so doing, he claims the ability to create new social conditions and,
ultimately, new values. This, for Pocock, is the function of Machiavelli’s ‘sociology of
liberty’: it describes a set of social conditions favourable to the cultivation of
republican values.
Machiavelli stands in Pocock’s work at the divide between a politics of pure
personal virtue and a conservative politics of history. With Machiavelli, the civic
personality assumes a historical existence. His political theory allows for
autonomous institutions that do not hinge on the individual and his virtue.
Machiavelli admits the possibility that one might comprehend change, or in other
words, history, through concrete, ‘intelligible social and material processes’.67 With
Machiavelli, Pocock claims, came a ‘massive increase in the capacity for self-
understanding’.68
Pocock traces a history of Machiavellian tradition through the English neo-
Harringtonians and the American founding fathers. Machiavellians rooted individual
virtue in a set of institutions created over time by social custom. ‘[. . .] a true
Machiavellianism is to be looked for where a political society becomes highly
conscious that its vita is activa to the point of creating its own morality [. . .]’.69
64 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 275.65 Pocock himself seems sympathetic to the analogy to interior decor; at one point he describes tradition as‘the mental furniture of a society, [. . .] worn and domesticated with constant varying use [. . .]’. Pocock,‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 243.66 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 259.67 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 402.68 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 402.69 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 350.
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For Pocock, this development marks the emergence of modern historical
thought.70 The origins and motors of historical change became identifiable as
particular events and processes, and were thereby opened to speculation and debate.
The individual personality lost its monopoly as the fundamental unit shaping the
political community, and broader social phenomena took on a key importance.
In mid-seventeenth-century England, in the midst of a fomenting civil war and
challenges to traditional theories of customary authority, political thinkers turned to
republican notions of virtue. However, in their ‘irreducible conservatism’,71 English
theorists led by James Harrington sought to ground this virtue in something other
than the autonomous individual. Harrington invented a new type of republican
personality founded not on moral integrity but on material security. He opened the
way for an English republicanism based on concrete, material norms for historical
stability: mixed government, an arms-bearing population, and property ownership.72
In Harrington’s mind, the continuity and integrity of the English political community
relied not on individual citizens but on social institutions.73
Pocock credits the Scottish humanists with fully liberating the self from civic
virtue. These thinkers recognised that culture*the variety of possible human
desires*proved antithetical to a model of individual virtue and autonomy.74
Beginning with the writings of David Hume and Andrew Fletcher, the Scots
elaborated a theory of history as a social dynamic of discourse and culture, motivated
by the long-term effects of customary practices. The Scots bartered the strength of
civic personality against an active commercial and cultured society. Normative
virtues gave way to commerce, leisure, and human fulfilment.
Repudiating the universal norms attached to the ideal of the republic,
the commercial society posited by the Scots relies instead on social convention.
Change thus operates in a realm that the individual personality cannot control. ‘The
individual could explain this realm, in the sense that he could identify the forces of
change that were producing it; [. . .] but he could not explain himself by locating
himself as a real and rational being within it’.75 The modern disjunction between
value, individual self-awareness, and history was consummated. If one could identify
the Pocock of The Machiavellian Moment with any one of the political positions he
elaborates therein, it would likely be the Scottish liberal pragmatist. In the spirit of
the British theorists he cites, Pocock calls upon his readers to embrace these historical
contradictions and complexities and to bind ourselves to our traditions.
6. The Politics of Language
The conservative position that Pocock claims in composing The Machiavellian
Moment refers to a ‘denial of activism’, the rejection of an image of society shaped by
70 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 253.71 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 371.72 See also John G. A. Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, in James Harrington, The Political Works ofJames Harrington, edited by John G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977).73 Steven Pincus has suggested that Pocock’s account gives excessive weight to Harrington and neglectswidespread liberal sentiment among supporters of the English Commonwealth in the 1650s. See StevenPincus, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Def-enders of the English Commonwealth’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 705�36.74 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 430.75 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 466.
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the vita activa of the individual citizen.76 In opposition to a politics of creative action,
Pocock proposes a politics of language. Language, as it displays the inherent qualities
of a paradigmatic structure transmitted over time, may serve to gird other existing
structures. If discourse is delimited by traditional paradigms then the types of
authority that language legitimates will also be fixed and traditional. In the ‘Preface’
to the 1989 edition of Politics, Language and Time, Pocock calls upon the potential of
‘speech as a counterrevolutionary strategy: the creation of a context too rich and
complex to be unmade all at once by any great cultural revolution, or made to yield
to any one set of revolutionary demands’.77 Institutionalised forms of discourse play
a vital political role, working against creative interventions and reinforcing existing
social structures.
Pocock’s rhetorical practice seeks to infuse each term and expression with the full
range of its possible meanings. His abhorrence of ahistorical abstraction leads him to
state and restate concepts in terms of every linguistic usage that they might possibly
support. He voraciously appropriates classical, Anglophone, and European vocabul-
aries in a continuous and strategic reformulation. ‘It is of the nature of rhetoric and
above all of political rhetoric [. . .] that the same utterance will simultaneously
perform a diversity of linguistic functions’.78 The density of The Machiavellian
Moment reflects that of political language, whose ‘inherent ambiguity and [. . .]cryptic content are invariably high’.79
Nothing typifies this rhetorical complexity better than Pocock’s discussion of
language itself, in which he has incorporated philosophical, colloquial, and
methodological models from a hotchpotch of disciplinary and geographic origins.
Over several years’ worth of writings on the subject, he has ceded pride of place to a
Kuhnian model of paradigms, a discussion of the Annales-style duree, Saussurean
semiotics, language game theory, classical philology, and notions of ‘discourse’ with
or without a Continental flavour.80
In his 1971 collection Politics, Language and Time and in related articles, Pocock
explores the role of language as an inherited set of structures from which thinkers
fabricate political discourse. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn, Pocock claims that
language, as a set of stable and institutionalised units, ‘is of its nature paradig-
matic.’81 The very use of language demands an engagement with custom that extends
far beyond the intentions of any one speaker. The languages available to deal with a
particular subject, then, determine the range of positions and actions that one may
take. ‘To know a language is to know the things that may be done with it [. . .]’.82 A
language paradigm constitutes a collection of possible styles and meanings that
define the spectrum of its political use. The choice of a political language thus
76 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 551.77 Pocock, ‘Preface’, in Politics, Language and Time, xi.78 Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications’, in Politics, Language and Time, 17.79 Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications’, in Politics, Language and Time, 17.80 Melvin Richter has referred to the ‘playfulness’ involved in Pocock’s methodological writings. MelvinRichter, ‘Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner and the GeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe’, History and Theory, 29 (1990), 57.81 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 281.82 Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications’, in Politics, Language and Time, 26. This claim stands incontrast to Pocock’s later caveat that one should not take ‘the language context [as] the only context whichgives the speech act meaning and history’. John G. A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the Metierd’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-ModernEurope (Ideas in Context), edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), 20.
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commits the speaker to a structure of authority and to a politics that he or she may
not even be aware of: ‘[. . .] when we speak, we are not sure who is talking or what is
being said, and our acts of power in communication are not wholly our own’.83
This view of language and politics, emphasising the force of customary social
institutions, assigns a key role to the historian of ideas. The intellectual historian
identifies and interprets the social developments undergirding the structures of
contemporary political life. In order to promote informed use of political language
and awareness of its implications, Pocock considers it essential to trace the range of
meanings that discourses have accumulated over time. In this sense, Pocock views the
historian’s attitudes toward tradition and continuity as fundamentally political
phenomena in their own right. ‘The theory put forward to provide a matrix for the
history of political ideas is at the same time a theory of the political language and the
linguistic polity’.84 The historian, as an interpreter of traditional modes of authority,
establishes the range of concepts*and thus the range of possibilities*open to those
who would claim or impart authority to a given practice or institution. Political
actors depend upon the richness of material imparted by the past*its variety and
manipulability. A critical record of past political thought thus provides a catalogue of
the political possibilities of the present.
In this sense, Pocock’s method of contextual discursive history contrasts sharply
with that of his close colleague, Quentin Skinner. Although critics have tended to
conflate these two thinkers, each has gone out of his or her way to emphasise
distinction. By 1971, Pocock had already disavowed Skinner’s provocative article
‘Meaning and Understanding’, which argues that an author’s intentions in compos-
ing a text should attract the historian’s primary attention. In clear opposition to
Skinner’s position, Pocock claims that the notion of a linguistic paradigm should
take precedence over any consideration of intended meanings.85 Indeed, for Pocock,
the modes of speech and vocabularies available at any moment create the possible
range of intentions that any author might hold. Furthermore, Pocock’s concern with
traditions led him to seek continuity in historical concepts. He emphasises the
indirect, posthumous effects of an author’s production, which by definition are
unpredictable and unintentional for the author himself.86
For Pocock, once one accepts the institutional nature of language*which already
pre-empts a position of pure individual intention and creativity*one has entered into
a realm of custom and tradition. Such a concession is inevitable in Pocock’s eyes, for
the human condition naturally pushes one to search for stable points of reference and
to avoid the horrors of existential freedom. With this consensus achieved, a
communicative political society moves from action to dialogue. ‘At this stage it will
be noticed that conservative and revolutionary have become identical, and there is
reason to think that [. . .] the historian will join himself to them’.87 When the linguistic
83 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, in Politics, Language and Time, 31.84 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 286.85 Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications’, in Politics, Language and Time, 25.86 John G. A. Pocock, ‘State of the Art’, in Virtue, Commerce and History, 4�6. Skinner, for his part, pointsto the weaknesses in methods built upon a Pocockian notion of ‘language’. He warns that this historicalmode risks assimilating authors to unintended traditions and missing rhetorical techniques such as irony.Quentin Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in Meaning andContext: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, edited by James Tully (Cambridge, 1988), 106.87 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 290.
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paradigm becomes the primary political reference, all parties find an essential ground
of agreement and political exchange takes on a more gentlemanly cast.
[. . .] social communication becomes a sort of verbal tennis match [. . .]. Critical
discussion now becomes a consensual operation in which we discuss and
compare the relative spins we have been imparting to the ball, and render the
continuation of the game possible by discussing its rules [. . .].88
To describe political debate in 1971 in terms of a sporting tennis game had more than
theoretical implications. Pocock, following Wittgenstein and Austin, thought of
language as a game. His interest in games, however, focused not on whimsy but on
rules, precepts that structure each player’s entry and participation. In response to
calls for creative ‘play as a means of countering the repressive tendencies oflanguages’, Pocock warns against an image of the speaker as a clown:
[. . .] when the clown or the counter-culture becomes evil it is often because, in
his enthusiasm for antinomian behaviour, he has forgotten the unilateral andunlimited acts of power which antinomian acts may become when they are
performed in and upon the lives of others [. . .].89
Like his historical narrative, Pocock aimed his theory of language to counter romantic,
Nietzschean, or revolutionary attempts at spontaneous generation of identity andmeaning. His model of consensual communication strictly circumscribes creative and
playful use of rhetorical modes such as irony, satire, metaphor, vitriol, and farce.90
7. Conclusion: Polity, History and the Self
Pocock’s pointed vision of history corresponds to a particularistic understanding of
the polity and its members. He defines a community of citizens with respect to those
who are in an equal position to enter into political discourse. Language thus operates
‘as a two-way communication system, to transform the unilateral assertion of power
in action [by speech] into the shared exercise of power in a polity’.91 The citizens ofthis polity are ‘equals’,92 ‘rulers who are also ruled’.93 Such theoretical conditions for
political interaction threaten the conservative’s claim to a non-normative stance. In
addition, Pocock’s polity is a literary one; his interlocutors are those who have
transmitted written traces of their thought to later generations. One wonders how
many individuals might meet these criteria for citizenship in the Pocockian political
community. There is a likelihood that they might fit into a seminar room, or at most a
lecture hall.
Further, this vision is doubly specific in that it binds a political community to acommon history that forms the basis for its autonomy and sovereignty. In the English
tradition, Pocock has envisioned the polity as a sovereign nation.94 This formulation
88 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 281.89 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, in Politics, Language and Time, 42.90 Mark Bevir adds to this observation in describing a ‘soft linguist’s’ critique of Pocock’s ‘hard linguism’.Mark Bevir, ‘The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism’, History and Theory, 31 (1992), 276�98 (287).91 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, in Politics, Language and Time, 32.92 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, in Politics, Language and Time, 36.93 Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act’, in Politics, Language and Time, 39. This language of equality andshared rule reappears in Pocock’s recent communications.94 Pocock’s deep involvement with the notion of national sovereignty could form the subject of yet anotherarticle.
304 D. Simmons
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is the basis for a series of ‘Euroskeptic’ articles published in the 1990s.95 There is a
hint of determinism, thus, in Pocock’s binding of traditions to particular ‘peoples’ or
communities. As Richard Bourke observes, for Pocock, ‘having a history involves
participating in the sovereignty over one’s past’.96 A shared tradition is a prerequisite
for political sovereignty. Although Pocock allows in principle that one might latch
onto a different tradition than those offered by one’s communal heritage, in practice
the challenges are stiff. To look outside of one’s own tradition, for Pocock, requires
reference to a universal or normative principle, to which the author has demonstrated
a clear aversion. His anti-cosmopolitan standpoint regards the community as a
prerequisite for all individual experience and creativity.
By writing a history of political language, Pocock sought to burden revolutionary
and postmodern politics with their pasts and so to complicate their use in
contemporary debates. The Machiavellian Moment was designed to counter a
‘creative and charismatic’ politics, 97 which draws its norms and prescriptions from
outside the flow of history. ‘The conservative in his pragmatic vein is anxious that
practical steps shall be taken and existing arrangements upheld, without being
subjected to excessive scrutiny in the name of abstract principle’.98 Relativism, as
much as revolution, presents a grave threat to Pocock’s vision of the polity. In recent
years, Pocock has repeatedly warned against a ‘defeatist postmodernism, in which
there is no force but alienation and we are liable to the local dictatorships of those
expert in decentering the subjectivities of others [. . .]’.99 The weight and complexity of
the past stands as a bulwark against imagined communities and invented traditions.
Pocock’s politics are profoundly existential. For Pocock, the ‘citizen’ and the ‘self ’
are inextricable, perhaps equivalent, terms. Both imply the possession of a sense of
history. The fragile political self relies upon the past to provide continuous identity
and a sense of community. Pocock himself has instantiated this equivalence in a
recent series of reflections upon his retirement from Johns Hopkins University: on
the one hand, an elegantly particular account of his own life; on the other, a highly
abstract model of historiography in political societies.100 The Machiavellian Moment
offers narrative detail that goes far in describing Pocock’s vision of the political self:
Machiavelli, the civic humanist, donned his finest clothing every evening in order to
sit in his study and converse with the ancients.101 Such conversations with history
serve to anchor the self against destabilised identities and ‘the terror and freedom of
existential creativity’.102 Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment is thus a political
intervention in the reader’s imaginary. In filling the political self with the weight of
95 John G. A. Pocock, ‘History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanization inTwo British Cultures’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 358�89; John G. A. Pocock, ‘DeconstructingEurope’, History of European Ideas, 18 (1994), 329�46; John G. A. Pocock, ‘What do We Mean by Eur-ope?’, Wilson Quarterly, 21 (1997), 12�29. Gordon J. Schochet has written a manifesto of the Pocockianapproach to contemporary politics in Schochet, ‘Why Should History Matter? Political Theory and theHistory of Discourse’, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500�1800, edited by John G. A.Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1993).96 Richard Bourke, ‘Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History’, The Historical Journal,53 (2010), 747�70 (752).97 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 243.98 Pocock, ‘Time, Institutions and Action’, in Politics, Language and Time, 268.99 Pocock, ‘History and Sovereignty’, 388.100 Pocock, Valedictory Lecture; John G. A. Pocock, ‘The Politics of Historiography’, Historical Re-search, 78 (2005), 1�14.101 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 65.102 Pocock, ‘Character of Paradigms’, in Politics, Language and Time, 277.
305The Weight of the Moment
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history, he sought to lessen our liability to take flight in cosmopolitan fancy. In this
sense, Pocock the historian of political language has been, by his deepest
constitution, conservative.
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Jan Goldstein, Anoush Terjanian, Ben Kafka, Andrew
Jainchill, Rebecca Manley, and Emmanuel Saadia for their comments on drafts ofthis article and more. Thanks also to my colleagues in the Department of History at
