J.G.A. Pocock

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John Greville Agard (J.G.A.) Pocock (born March 7, 1924) is a world-renowned historian and expatriate New Zealander, noted for his trenchant studies of republicanism in the early modern period (especially in Europe, Britain, and America), for his treatment of Edward Gibbon and noteworthy contemporaries as historians of Enlightenment, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse.

[edit] Early life and career

Contents

Born in London, Pocock and family soon relocated to New Zealand in 1927 to accommodate his father's professorial appointment there. His academic career began at Canterbury University College with a B.A./M.A. in 1946. He moved to Great Britain where he earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1952 under the tutelage of Herbert Butterfield. He returned to New Zealand to teach at the University of Canterbury, 1946-48, and lecture at the University of Otago, 1953-55. In 1959, he established and chaired the Department of Political Science at Canterbury. He moved to the USA in 1966 to be named the William Eliot Smith professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Roughly a decade later in 1975, Pocock assumed his present tenure at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he is now Harry C. Black Chair of History Emeritus.

His first book, entitled The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law elucidated the common law mind, showing how thinkers such as the English jurist Edward Coke (1552–1634) 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 middle to late seventeenth century. Some of this work has since been amended,[1] but much is still accepted as the historical gold standard on the common law.

[edit] Later work

By the 1970s, Pocock had changed his focus from how lawyers understood the evolution of law, to how philosophers and theologians did. The Machiavellian Moment, his widely acclaimed magnum opus, showed how Florentines, Englishmen and Americans had responded and analysed the destruction of their states and political orders in a succession of crises sweeping through the early modern world. Again, not all historians accept Pocock's account, but leading scholars of early modern republicanism are patently influenced by it especially in their characterization of political theorist James Harrington (1611-1677) as a salient historical actor.[2]

Pocock's most recent project explores the literary world inhabited by famed English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), and how he understood the cataclysm of decline and fall within the Roman Empire, i.e., as an inevitable conflict between ancient virtue and modern commerce. Gibbon, it turns out, evinces all the hallmarks of a bona fide civic humanist,[3] even while composing his great "enlightened narrative."[4] The first two volumes of his projected six-volume series on Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion, won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999.

[edit] The 'Cambridge School'

Pocock is celebrated not merely as an historian, but as a pioneer of a new type of historical methodology: contextualism, i.e., the study of 'texts in context.' In the 1960s and early '70s, he, (introducing languages of political thought) along with Quentin Skinner (focusing on authorial intention), and John Dunn (stressing biography), united informally to undertake this approach as, the 'Cambridge School' of the history of political thought.[5] Hereafter for the Cambridge School and its adherents, the then-reigning method of textual study, that of engaging a vaunted 'canon' of previously pronounced "major" political works in a typically anachronistic and disjointed fashion, simply would not do.

Pocock's 'political languages' is the indispensable keystone of this historical revision. Defined as "idioms, rhetorics, specialised vocabularies and grammars" considered as "a single though multiplex community of discourse,"[6] languages are uncovered (or discovered) in texts by historians who subsequently "learn" them in due course. The resultant familiarity produces a knowledge of how political thought can be stated in historically discovered "linguistic universes," and in exactly what manner all or parts of a text, can be expressed.[7] As examples, Pocock has cited the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political languages of the 'common law', 'civil jurisprudence' and 'classical republicanism', through which political writers such as Harrington, Hobbes and Locke had reached their rhetorical goals.

[edit] British history

He has also since the 1970s pressed historians to reconsider two issues involving the future of British history. First, he urged historians of the British Atlantic archipelago to move away from histories of "The Three Kingdoms" (Scotland, Ireland, England) as separate entities. In what then became known as "the new British history," he called for studies implementing a conflation of these national narratives into truly integrated enterprises. It has since become the commonplace preference of historians to treat British history in just this fashion.[8] Second, he prodded policymakers to reconsider the Europeanisation of Great Britain still underway, via its entry into the European Union. While also politically and economically devasting to New Zealand, in its abandonment of a major portion of national sovereignty purely from economic motives, that decision threw into question the entire matter of British sovereignty itself. Pocock asks, what will (and must) nations look like if the capacity for and exercise of national self-determination is put up for sale to the highest bidder?[9]

[edit] New Zealand

Alongside his ongoing work on Gibbon, has come a renewed attention to his nation of citizenship, New Zealand. In a progression of essays published since 1991, Pocock explored the historical mandates and implications of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (the New Zealand equivalent of Magna Carta) for both native Māori and the descendants of the original 19th century European (but mainly British) settlers, known as pākehā. Both parties have legitimate claims to portions of their national sovereignty.

Pocock concludes that the issue of New Zealand's sovereignty must be an ongoing shared experience, a perpetual debate leading to several ad hoc agreements if necessary, to which the Māori and pākehā need to accustom themselves permanently. The alternative, an eventual rebirth of the violence and bloodshed of the 19th century "Land Wars," cannot and must not be entertained.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: an introduction to English political thought, 1603-1642. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
  2. ^ among several, see Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican writing of the English revolution. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); Eric Nelson, "James Harrington and the 'Balance of Justice', in The Greek Tradition in Republican thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); James Cotton, James Harrington’s Political Thought and its context. (New York: Garland Publishers, 1991.)
  3. ^ Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," Daedulus 105,3(1976), 153-169.
  4. ^ Barbarism and Religion vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: 1999), 123; 303-304.
  5. ^ eventually, and for his own purposes, Pocock preferred history of political 'discourse' to that of political 'thought', wishing to widen and refine the field into the study of "...speech, literature, and public utterance in general, involving an element of theory and carried on in a variety of contexts with which it can be connected in a variety of ways." see Pocock, "What is Intellectual History?", in What is History Today? (London: MacMillan Press, Ltd., 1988), 114.
  6. ^ Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the métier d'historien: some considerations on practice," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden. (Cambridge: 1987), 21-25; and of an earlier vintage, see also essays no.1, nos.3-4 in Politics, Language and Time (Monographs).
  7. ^ Pocock's method originally incorporated a theory of "traditions," combined with elements of Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms" (see Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996]), but Pocock has since explained that "a political community is not simply a community of enquiry, and that therefore the status and function of [political] paradigms" differs from Kuhn's depiction of scientific investigation. see "Preface, 1989," in Politics, Language, and Time.
  8. ^ "British History: a Plea for a New Subject," 22-43; and "The Field Enlarged: an Introduction," 47-57, in The Discovery of Islands (see Monographs). In view of the established acceptance and practice of the restructured programme, Pocock prefers that "new" be discarded. also Discovery of Islands, at 289.
  9. ^ "History and Sovereignty: the Historiographical Response to Europeanization in Two British Cultures," Journal of British Studies 31(Oct. 1992), 358-389. And more lately, in which Pocock speculates that the European Union might devolve into an "empire of the market," see "Deconstructing Europe," in Discovery of Islands, 269-288, at 281.

[edit] Monographs (complete)*

  • The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957)
  • The Maori and New Zealand Politics (1965) editor;co-author
  • Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (1989;1972)
  • Obligation and Authority in Two English Revolutions: the Dr. W. E. Collins lecture delivered at the [Victoria] University on 17 May 1973 (1973)
  • The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975)
  • The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) editor
  • John Locke : papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, 10 December, 1977 (1980) co-author
  • Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (1980) editor;co-author
  • 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
  • Conceptual Change and the Constitution (1988) co-editor,co-author
  • James Harrington: The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (1992) editor
  • The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800 (1993) co-editor;co-author
  • Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays (1997) co-editor
  • Barbarism and Religion, vol.1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (1999)
  • Barbarism and Religion, vol.2: Narratives of Civil Government (1999)
  • Barbarism and Religion, vol.3: The First Decline and Fall (2003)
  • Barbarism and Religion, vol.4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (2005)
  • The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (2005).
  • Announced 2005: Barbarism and Religion, vols. 5 and 6.
  • More than 225 published scholarly articles and reviews (as of October 2006). For a partial bibliography of these, see The Work of J.G.A. Pocock.

*in English language.

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