'EPIC YEARS': THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION AND J.G.A.

POCOCK'S APPROACH TO THE

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Author(s): J.C. Davis
Source: History of Political Thought , Autumn 2008, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn 2008), pp.
519-542
Published by: Imprint Academic Ltd.

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 'EPIC YEARS': THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION AND
J.G.A. POCOCK'S APPROACH TO
THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT1

J.C. Davis

Abstract: J.G. A. Pocock has been a dominant force in the history of political thought
since his first major work, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, was pub
lished in 1957. This article is focused on the contribution he has made to the study of
the revolutions of seventeenth-century England and the extraordinary body of
political discourse to which they gave rise. It begins with an examination of the ways
in which ideas about continuity, innovation, institutions and historiography have
shaped his approach to the history of political thought and their application to
seventeenth-century conditions. Central to a fundamental continuity in his ideas over
the last five decades have been notions about the interface of 'paradigms' with both
language and socio-political circumstance in the construction and deconstruction of
both historiographies and political theories. The article then offers a critical assess
ment of his contribution to our understanding of the English Revolution.

Prodigious, prolific, sometimes provocative, always intelligent and intellec

tually challenging, in a career of over fifty years J.G.A Pocock has written
some of the best work not only on specific issues in the study of early modern
Western political thought but also on the 'map' of Western political and
historiographical thinking and on the problems of writing such history. The
reach of his best known work covers the development of European and
American political and historical thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, but the corpus as a whole stretches from the intellectual life of clas
sical Greece and Rome to the post-imperial dilemmas of the Anglophone
world.3 In depth, he has rescued, from almost complete obscurity: the impor
tance of lawyers to the historical and political thinking of seventeenth-century
England; the rise of the idea of feudalism as a caesura in what had otherwise
been thought of as the unblemished continuity of English history; and the
problem for political thinkers, and politicians, of innovation in a world con
tinuously on the edge of crisis and collapse but wedded to custom and tradi
tion. He has written the most comprehensively researched study (and one
probably of unsurpassable detail) of the intellectual context of the greatest
English historian of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon. Were this not

1 My thanks to John Morrow and Jonathan Scott for their critical support in the writ
ing of this essay.
2 Emeritus Professor of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ.
Email: Colin.Davis@uea.ac.uk
Especially after Britain's entry into the European Union.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXIX. No. 3. Autumn 2008

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520 J.C. DAVIS

enough, in the last decade

exploration of the problem
identity4 both in countries
ex-colonial world, and for a
Such versatility, in range a
tion of his colleagues; no do
He believes that the past we
that complexity must be ref
frequently terse, intensel
found his work depicted a
match the range of his learn
for a mother, he was, as he
people to receive a Renaissan
is no history without theor
engages both theory and pra
contextualization, critical qu
are then, when we come to
nificant of Anglophone hist
of the most demanding of
Necessarily, the scope of th
studies of the ideas generat
seventeenth century in Eng
Revolution and what Pocock
English political intellect'.6
cal assumptions behind this
findings and their impact, a
The fit between these aspir
The article's focus will be ne
will throughout be an exerci

II

Essential to the understandin

sense has remained, a histor
which past societies generat
articulating their history, a
cises. Since any political th

4 Although, revealingly, Pococ

5 J.G.A. Pocock, Valedictory L
(Nashville, 2006), p. 6.
6 The Varieties of British Politic
and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambr

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 521

equally, he argues that ' "history" is commonly a mode of "politic

His first monograph explored the political implications of the h
that the law in England was immemorial and that, since it had n
ated' by any legislator nor 'sanctioned' by any officeholder, it
and imposed limitations upon the will of every person, body o
This historical doctrine could be seen as a response to the claim
seventeenth-century monarchs to the possession of discreti
which authorized them to override the law or generate new law
tance was, accordingly, considerable. Those royal claims were b
the discovery of a different version of English history in which
that much of the fabric of English law had been imported fro
Europe and was bound in with the socio-political requirements
Since feudalism itself had declined, new dispositions of the law
developed and it could be disputed whether the better instrum
development was the monarchy or Parliament.8 In this sense,
tional conflicts of seventeenth-century England, and the civil
arose from them, could be represented as struggles about histor
tion, conflicts simultaneously about politics and history. From
point, Pocock became a pre-eminent practitioner of the history
phy (and thereby of the history of political thought) in the twen
Certainly, he saw himself as re-founding that discipline,9 givin
our, intellectual vision, sense of its political repercussions and
with a distinctive methodology.
The best place to start the study of his approach and aspirati
manifesto, in many ways a masterwork, which he published in
'The Origins of Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach'. Ess
sets out Pocock's understanding of how the history of historica
hence of political thought, was to be conducted and he has foll

7 Compare Glenn Burgess, 'Pocock' s History of Political Thought, th

stitution, and Early Stuart England', in The Political Imagination in
Concerning J.G.A. Pocock, ed. D.N. De Luna with Glenn Burgess (Ba
p. 180. For later reassertions of this position see J.G.A. Pocock, The
Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 132-3; and
'Political Thought and History: A Method and its Prospects', forthcomi
edition of the Japanese journal Shiso.
8 J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Stu
Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957).
9 'This kind of approach has not, so far as I know, been made before.'
'The Origins of Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach', Compar
Society and History, 4 (2) (1962), p. 209. For essays complementary to t
Pocock, 'The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry',
Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, second
1967), pp. 183-202; J.G.A. Pocock, 'Time, Institutions and Action: An
tions and their Understanding', in Politics and Experience: Essays prese
Oakeshott, ed. Preston King and B.C. Parekh (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 2

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 522 J.C. DAVIS

prescriptions, as laid down he

amendments ever since.10 T
struction of a paradigm) of t
the past can exist. Awareness
of its continuity'.11 Social st
continuity'.12 That structure
continuity, of existence in ti
past, to some degree in conte
bering and preserving the pa
existence.13
Pocock then moves to a consideration of the steps a historian of this sense
of the past and its articulation, the historian of historiography, must take in
engaging with his/her subject. Close attention should be paid to the institu
tions and activities which generate particular forms of awareness of the past.
The nature of the documentary and literary forms in which such awareness is
expressed should be closely observed, as well as their variety.14 Only then
should attention turn to what past historians did with the materials and memo
ries which form their society's awareness of the past. At its simplest, the his
torian expounded a relationship with the past. But, at a greater level of
complexity, he/she might engage with a problem seen to inhere in the story to
be told or in the traditional account of the past.15 In part, this might involve
dealing with conflicting accounts of the past. Here the historian's choices
were either to restore the traditional account or to construct 'a new image of

10 For illustrations of the continuity and the minor amendments see: Varieties, ed.
Pocock, Schochet and Schwoerer, ch. 2; J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and
the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century — A
Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge, 1987) (hereafter cited as Retrospect) Part Two.
Pocock is frequently associated with the linguistic contextualism of the 'Cambridge
School' but the association should not be accepted uncritically. For example, his
approach to the civic humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one which
largely ignores its central philological and linguistic concerns. This would be odd in a
historian for whom the primary mode of contextualization was linguistic but for Pocock
in 1962 (and arguably ever since) the primary mode was paradigmatic, with language in a
critical but secondary role. For his more recent comments on this see J.G.A. Pocock,
'Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds', address given at the National
Chiba University, Chiba, December 2005.
11 Retrospect, p. 9. The sense is also conveyed that it is impossible for a polity to exist
without some sense of its own continuity.
12 Ibid., p. 212.
13 Ibid., pp. 211-13.
14 Ibid., pp. 213-15.
15 A topic worth further exploration is the extent to which Pocock follows the model
of the French practitioners of histoire problème.

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 523

the past in terms of some new continuity'.16 Depending on the inte

conflict and the resources available, recourse might be had to
their verification) of describing the past 'as it really was' or to the
universal laws and their particular instances. The preconditions o
of historiographical contestation were: available and organize
(sources); the breakdown of traditional frameworks sufficient to
sion possible, if not necessary; and the 'concepts' enabling the hist
to describe the past and to explain its relationship to the present
terms.17
The argument then moves on to a series of illustrations by case study. The
first considers the historiography of ancient Athens; the second that of Confu
cian and Taoist China.18 The third illustration covers European historiography
from the Renaissance through some national case studies (England, Scotland,
Ireland and France). Here our focus is on the general theme underlying these
case studies. Late medieval Europe is seen as rich in documents, institutions
and concepts of authority which enable it to relate to Graeco-Roman, Hebrew
and Germanic pasts but also to a fourth and Christian tradition which in some
senses is seen as at odds with the other three. From the twelfth century there
had developed growing unease about the glosses overwritten by medieval
scribes copying the manuscript documents of these traditions. One impetus
for humanist scholarship was how to get back to these sources in the closest
possible approximation to their original state. According to Pocock, by about
1560 and as a result of this scholarship, humanists were beginning to appreci
ate that the past might be too different to be imitated.19 As contexts and
historical circumstances differed, different institutions and rules could be
seen to be appropriate. In particular the 'discovery' of feudalism stimulated a
reappraisal of the relevance of Roman maxims to medieval life, just as the
demise of feudalism raised questions as to the appropriateness of its institu
tional framework's continuance into the present. These were at once both
historiographical and political questions.
In England, by the early seventeenth century, it was the common lawyers
who maintained the most vigorous sense of the nation's historical continu
ity.20 The common law mind insisted on a customary framework of law which
was immemorial, an ancient constitution with its origins beyond the reach of
human memory. Immemoriality was important because otherwise some per
son or body could be seen to have introduced the system and would thereby

16 Retrospect, p. 217.
17 Ibid., p. 218. It may be worth noting that in this 1962 essay Pocock uses the term
'concept' rather than 'language'.
18 Ibid., pp. 219-24.
19 Ibid., pp. 225-7.
20 The argument for this had already been deployed in Pocock, Ancient Constitution
and Feudal Law.

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524 J.C. DAVIS

have a claim to sovereignty. H

no breach in the continuity o
argument ran, monarchs had,
agreed to be bound by the cu
This paradigm was dominant u
undermined by scholars su
asserted that the greater part
Robert Brady (c. 1627-1700) w
was not immemorial but part
by the Normans. One could th
either the English were under
English monarchs were not
which was only maintained as
against these positions rema
undermined so much by Lock
This framework has had a
1968,21 writing about the role
he elaborated the story but t
his medieval paradigm only u
for dealing with particulariti
experience, memory and cus
quently either timeless unive
ingless or irrational. Political
not innovatio. Providence was
son. If custom failed, men wer
ible Fortuna of the ancients.
roots in the work of Hans Bar
human self-fulfilment was on
scious, autonomous member o
the public was privileged over
citizens were specific to place
capacity to command territory
by giving greater priority to
ity made some citizens depe
Aristotelian-Polybian notion t
might become corrupted unle
that tendency. Out of this cam
of Machiavelli and Guicciar

21 J.G.A. Pocock, 'Civic Human

Pensiero Politico, 1 (2) (1968), p
22 Hans Baron, The Crisis of
Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 525

Answer to the XIX Propositions23 and reaching its fullest development

writings of James Harrington. With the latter we reach the beginnings of
Pocock saw as Anglo-American variations on civic humanism. They
distinguished by a concern with the material basis of autonomous citize
For Harrington, this depended on the possession of freehold land defen
a citizen militia. For him, mercantile wealth was too unstable to under
citizenship but, in the eighteenth century, his successors were increas
willing to accept independence based on commercial enterprise. By the
threat to autonomous citizenship was seen to come from dependence o
state either through private material advantage or investment in gover
securities (the monied interest) or through dependence on a mercenary,
ing army. Central to the acceptance of commercial wealth as the basis f
zenship was the paradigm's historiographical development by thinkers o
Scottish Enlightenment, such as Adam Smith, who conceived of progr
stages in the development of civilization, culminating in the commercia
scientific.24 The contrary paradigm maintained that the modern age wa
of unrelieved corruption and looked back to the restoration of freehold
baronial independence in the form of an unspecialized Gothic culture.
ideal looked most readily realizable in America, where the abundant la
the frontier appeared to provide the basis for the renewal of an unsop
cated Gothic independence. From this perspective Europe was already i
mediably corrupt and the eastern seaboard of the Union heading in the
direction. It was in the American west that a populist version of Machia
republicanism could still be envisaged (however unselfconscious that v
might be). In America too an alternative paradigm, the paradigm of G
also had durability. In the Florence of Machiavelli's redirecting of
humanism, Savonarola set off in a different direction, arguing that the
lic would only be immune to corruption if all citizens were virtuous bu
fallen world, this could only be by the action of God's grace. Here then
apocalyptic republic in which God, not men, ruled.
In 1972 the role of Machiavelli and the problem of innovation25 were
orated, but as an exercise of further exposition within this framework. Par
The Machiavellian Moment (1975) was essentially a reiteration of this s
analytical and narrative scheme and parts of it were embodied in the in

23 J.M. Mendie, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, The Estates of the

and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Alabama, 1985).
24 Marx and Lenin might be seen, according to Pocock, as adapting Smith's p
sive stages of social development to culminate in a final stage which would rest
zen universality, presumably in the withering away of the state. Pocock, 'Civic
ism', p. 189.
25 J.G.A. Pocock, 'Custom and Grace, Form and Matter: An Approach to Machia
velli's Concept of Innovation', in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed.
M. Fleisher (New York, 1972), pp. 153-74.

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526 J.C. DAVIS

tion to Pocock's edition of J

1979 and 1987 he reflected o
Western thought but made o
Such consistency is by no m
be taken as a criticism. Wha
mation of Pocock's views of
how his thinking has contin
then can we summarize th
which are populated and art
him in a dual sense. They fu
history was and how it shou
the basis for the analysis an
rative reconstruction. Poc
Thomas Kuhn's approach to t
scientific revolutions.28 Str
thought competed to addres
those circumstances persi
When the circumstances ch
course would no longer 'fit'
In these terms, the history
lishing the prevailing and co
their 'normal' working and t
to adapt to changing circu
alternative, dominant paradi
or discourse being deployed
recover the paradigmatic fr

26 The Political Works of Jam

partially reissued 1992).
27 See J.G.A. Pocock, 'Whiggi
lished paper, Washington, 1979
might have been made of late s
overstated the insularity of e
constitutionalism as static. He
Spelman as 'ahead of the scholar
spect was a restatement of the
28 See, for example, J.G.A. Po
cal thought and History, Chief
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structur
29 See, for example, an untypi
cal thought of the Cromwellia
consciousness than the establi
Thought in the Cromwellian In
and P.S. O'Connor (Dunedin, 197
was engaged in as that 'of tryi
Commerce and History, p. 61.

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 527

was a consistent mismatch between language and framework,

knew that he/she was either misunderstanding the language, p
guage in the wrong (possibly anachronistic framework) or bein
the paradigmatic preconceptions he/she was carrying to the ta
present. In this way the paradigm of ancient constitutionalism
could not survive the breakdown of the ancient constitution in the 1640s and
thinkers like James Harrington had to contemplate the establishment of a new
paradigm of political justification.30
Over time, Pocock has come to use the terms 'language' and 'discourse'
rather more than 'paradigm' but a continuing preoccupation has been the need
for a justificatory theory of authority in terms of institutional continuity.31
Institutions require certain types of argument/history or to use existing argu
ments and languages in particularized ways that serve their specific needs.
Hence, while for Pocock languages and linguistic context have been impor
tant, their significance has been different to that associated with them by
Quentin Skinner.32 While paying tribute to the latter's role in giving historians
of political thought 'a logic of their own inquiry', for Pocock that logic has
continued to operate within the framework of paradigm recovery.33 Thus, for
Skinner patterns of linguistic usage and the clarification of authorial intention
from them have been all important but for Pocock their importance has been
in their illustrative force within particular frameworks of political thought. As
a result, Pocock's attention has simultaneously focused on the analysis of par
ticular languages and on their rise, consolidation and displacement, on the
narrative thrust of paradigm change. In Politics, Language and Time (1972)
he referred to the capacity of paradigms, as evoked by Kuhn, to control con
cepts and theories. 'Men think by communicating language systems' but
these systems seemed indistinguishable from multivalent paradigms.34 It fol
lowed that the practice of the historian of political thought must be twofold.
He/she must identify a 'language' or 'vocabulary' and also 'show how it func
tions paradigmatically to prescribe what he [the past actor] might say and how
he might say it'.35 The recovery of such a paradigm enabled the historian to
make statements of probability which were then historically testable. Track
ing the succession of these paradigms through time was the narrative obliga

30 For one amongst many examples illustrating this approach see Pocock, ' "The
Onely Politician": Machiavelli, Harrington and Felix Raab\ Historical Studies, 12 (46)
(1966), pp. 283-4,287.
31 Expressed in both his 1962 essay and his valedictory lecture of 1994.
32 See, for example, Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding
Method (Cambridge, 2002).
33 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 6.
34 J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and
History (London, 1972), pp. 13, 15-16, 18.
35 Ibid., p. 25.

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 528 J.C. DAVIS

tion of the historian of pol

demonstrating how it functio
rian had nevertheless to embr
discourse was generated: 'l
dent'.37
As illustration, we might take his account of the collapse, in the 1640s, of
the ancient constitutionalist paradigm as it confronted the civil war break
down of the ancient constitution and its inability to offer solutions to the
dilemmas now confronted by Englishmen. A series of 'events' outside the
paradigm itself precipitated its collapse and led men to look for a more satis
factory paradigm with both more explanatory power than the old one and the
capacity to legitimate new solutions. On the eve of civil war, the King's
answer to the terms offered to him by Parliament in midsummer 1642 was the
first articulation of this collapse and a recognition that a new intellectual, as
well as constitutional, framework might be needed. Ancient constitutionalism
(and divine right theory) were abandoned in favour of an Aristotelian/Polybian
paradigm of mixed government, balancing the one, the few and the many.38
Pocock was aware that, while the theoretical development of linguistic con
textualism from the mid-1960s had a new sophistication, a careful emphasis
on the recovery of past political languages was not unprecedented.39 But the
terminology he himself used in regard to language was often reifying and
deterministic.40 This is a point to which we will return later.

Ill

It may be helpful to summarize the argument to this point. For Pocock, the
history of the intimately related subjects of historiography and political

36 It may be that having established the main outlines of the paradigmatic story of
European political thought since the Renaissance so early in his career, Pocock was
forced back to the detailed testing and defending of his narrative for much of the rest of it.
This left him feeling throughout his life that history 'has been becoming ... less a history
of thought than of languages, discourse and literature'. Pocock, Valedictory Lecture, p.
17.
37 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 36. This might also be compared with
Skinner's rather more autonomous view of language, its linkage to authorial intention
and the argument that perceptions of social reality are themselves linguistic constructs.
38 Retrospect, pp. 307-8. A similar process was seen to be at work in 1675-7 and
after 1679 when the fear of standing armies, corruption and the demand for frequent par
liaments become dominant. Ibid., p. 342.
39 See, for example, his commendatory references to Margaret Judson's The Crisis of
the Constitution (New Brunswick, 1949). Other examples might be found in the work of
Caroline Robbins and Zera S. Fink.
40 For example his depiction of his own enquiry 'into how human beings live within
the possibilities of their language systems, and the systems of historical time which their
language articulated for them'. Retrospect, p. 387 (my emphasis).

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 529

thought was both a matter of identifying ideas which interlocked in a

or paradigm and of recovering the languages which articulated,
defended and sought to persuade others of the validity/legitimacy
ideas and their interdependence. On this basis a longer term narrati
rise and fall of these structures (paradigms) could be built.
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law begins with an explo
what Pocock calls the 'paradox of humanism': the past was to be reco
order to imitate it, but in recovering it more fully the humanists re
circumstances had altered too drastically for imitation to be viable.4
digm was in crisis. It had become unworkable. But paradigms could
thrown into crisis by political and social events. Relating them to
socio-political contexts was, therefore, also vital. Pocock's cont
judgment that English republican thought was the product rather
cause of the execution of the King and the abolition of the House o
exemplifies this sense of paradigm shift and its origins.42 Similarly,
ture of James Harrington's political thought could only be understo
the context of 1656 when England possessed a written constitution
rability of which was open to doubt, and when the issues of dealin
dominant, mercenary army and the possibility of a revised House
were under discussion.43 After 1660, those who still favoured Harr
proposals had to adjust them to the circumstances of a restored mon
renascent aristocracy and a restored House of Lords.44 In the late se
and eighteenth centuries further adjustment came in the rehabilitat
Gothic. What Harrington had seen as the inherent instability of th
constitution, a powerful baronial class, was now lauded as a model o
orous and independent defence of 'liberty' against the insidious powe
ruption via state patronage, standing armies and the monied interes
fantasy world of credit. The neo-Harringtonians took from Harrin
Polybian respect for freeholder citizens as they jettisoned his historic
of the demise of a feudal aristocracy.45
But Pocock was also seized by the notion that the historian had a
tion to tell a story, in this case of the rise and fall of political paradigm
discourse through which they were expressed. By this means histori

41 Retrospect, pp. 4-6.

42 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 5. '... there is a sens
the fall of the monarchy made men republicans, rather than ideological rep
acting as the cause of its fall'.
43 J.G.A. Pocock, 'James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of
logical Contextof his Writings', The Journal of British Studies, 10 (1 ) ( 1970), p
43.

44 Ibid., pp. 47-8. Compare this with his contextualization of the King's Answer to
the Nineteen Propositions in Varieties, ed. Pocock, Schochet and Schwoerer, pp. 149-53.
45 J.G.A. Pocock, 'Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the
Eighteenth Century', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 22 (4) ( 1965), pp. 565-75.

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530 J.C. DAVIS

could contribute to a communi

tion which, like so much else, w
is interesting to see him engag
Annales school, who were also p
jectories through time and dev
change; structure, conjoncture
'How far was belief in the anci
matter of conjoncture et struct
the slow and continuous change
use another annaliste term, m
which he had done so much to r

IV

In the early stages of Pocock' s

of political thought was seldom
universities. It was more likely
riculum. Historians tended to s
which dominated their teachin
tory. Politics was not about ide
deep economic substructures. In
and his disciples, political histor
to what people, often misleadin
their familial and social connect
interests which drove them a
screen. In a similar, but not ide
cially in the 1950s, to see ide
determined by the relationship
the substructure and driven by
rians concerned themselves very
prospographical studies or econ
Nevertheless, two groups of sch
of political thought. On the on
enced writers who wanted to e
ist ideas47 and to give the depth
themselves from bourgeois hege
be called the 'Whig triumphalis
democracy in 1945/6 as both a t
in need of defence as the Cold W

46 Retrospect, pp. 277-8, 279-80.

47 See for example, D.W. Petegorsk
(London, 1940: reissued Stroud, 19
48 Again, as an example, see the vo
be sampled in his Collected Essays

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 531

schools of the history of ideas was that they were anachronistic in

sense. They related past thought to timeless, abstract and universa
such as freedom, authority, obligation, rights, democracy, socialism
canism, conservatism and radicalism. There was only a superficial in
what the particular circumstances were that drove past political th
write what they did. Consequently their writings were discussed and
out of context. Secondly, their writings were assessed in terms of a
whereby the function of the past was to produce the present and wr
evaluated in terms of their capacity to anticipate that consummati
kind of teleology may be necessary if history is to serve its fu
explaining how the present emerged out of the past. This, however
unsatisfactory teleology because it was self-congratulatory, approv
approving according to whether the past anticipated the present, an
it was only interested in those elements of the past that were held to
tive of the present, leaving a dark or neglected side of the past an
misrepresenting it as a whole.49
To take G.H. Sabine's A History of Political Theory50 as an examp
see the point illustrated. One of Sabine's starting points was the secul
of politics in the modern world (a view which is perhaps harder to sh
start of the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-twentieth). So
detected the 'process of releasing political philosophy from the ass
with theology' he applauded and commended those thinkers perform
function. In the process he not only misread many past thinkers but
sented what was going on.51 The notion of sovereignty needed, acc
Sabine, to be detached from customary forms (as he assumed it
post-revolutionary America and Europe) and it was therefore seen
pointing that thinkers like Jean Bodin32 did not see this. Others wer
their time' and the full potential of their ideas would only become
much later. For Thomas Hobbes this was to happen in the nineteenth
for the mid-seventeenth century Levellers, with the emergence of '
ary liberalism' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.53 The wo
Robert Filmer (1588-1653), on the other hand, was 'an anachron
when it was written'.54 In terms of the study of the past this is, of

49 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 5-7, 10. Here the implication
present-centred teleology (asking the question 'How did the past anticipat
ent?') was unsatisfactory while a forward-projected teleology (asking 'What
sibilities this could lead to?') could be valuable.
50 G.H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, 1951). A text which
found to be standard when he began to teach the subject.
51 See for examples ibid., pp. 354-5, 376.
52 Ibid., p. 387.
53 Ibid., pp. 388, 406.
54 Ibid., p. 434.

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532 J.C. DAVIS

absurdity, detaching past act

them in terms of some other
Pocock's rejection of the t
heading-in-our-direction' p
political and historical thinke
context in which they found
ing the ideas of previous thin
were used by their own an
attempted to evoke a context
life and choices of past people
Sir Herbert Butterfield's atta
claimed that that perspective
for living in the past. A sec
Laslett, who had shown that
tic purveyor of weak argumen
following, such as Locke, S
whose arguments had to be,
Why was a thinker, so readily
tant to the seventeenth? The
ferent rules, within different
the historian of political tho
engagement with John Loc
radical and less influential th
as a forerunner of modern lib
At the time when Pocock w
the history of political thoug
were also beginning to explor
reductionism, the problem w
which they grafted class co
graphical stock, awarding o
blame — 'left/right', radical/
further difficulty with ortho

55 For the same problem in other

Plamenatz, Man and Society (2
Philosophy ofHobbes: Its Basis
56 For Laslett's influence in th
Pocock, Ancient Constitution
Pocock, 'Present at the Creation
57 Pocock, 'Machiavelli, Harr
'Whiggism: A Problem in Histor
dation text of modern liberalism
teleological inversion, 'the class
58 It may be worth noting that P
demnatory adjectival verdicts on

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 533

became increasingly hard to defend. The notion of a rising middle class and
their mid-seventeenth century, revolutionary displacement of a feudal order
was impossible to reconcile with the aristocratic resurgence of the later seven
teenth century and the aristocracy's continuing, oligarchic domination of
politics through to at least the early nineteenth century.59 The 'ground clear
ing' aspects of Pocock's impact on the understanding of early modern politi
cal thought were thus methodological, chronological and both matters of
detail and of perspective. There was a teleological narrative to be recon
structed but it was forward, rather than backward, looking, was by no means
predetermined and led either to a refocusing of the problems of concern or the
discovery of new problems rather than their resolution. It could not be a
congratulatory narrative nor one of unrelieved immiseration.
What then of Pococok's more positive impact on the history of English
political thought in the seventeenth century? One of his most important con
tributions to the understanding of the civil wars and their aftermath, the Eng
lish Revolution, has been his contribution to the demolition of the notion of a
polarization of pre-war political ideologies. His demonstration of a pre-war
consensus of opinion and belief around the paradigm of the ancient constitu
tion60 has been instrumental in reshaping discussion of the Revolution. If this
was not an argument waiting to become a physical conflict, historians had to
ask themselves to think again about the civil wars and their consequences,
both material and ideological. Pocock identified the precise moment of para
digm breakdown, in 1642, when the Militia Ordinance, seeking to rally men
to fight for Parliament, and the Commission of Array, seeking the same thing
for the King, said almost identical things in justification. Language had lost its
political meaning. The consensual paradigm of ancient constitutionalism had
ceased to have any active force.61 The Civil War might have been a struggle to
reconstitute an institutional cohesion which had formed the focus of

59 For two accounts relating to Harrington see Christopher Hill, 'James Harrington
and the People', in Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1962), ch. 10; and R.H. Tawney,
'Harrington's Interpretation of his Age', Proceedings of the British Academy, 27 (1941).
For Pocock's response see his 'Machiavelli, Harrington and Political Ideologies', pp.
553-6; Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton,
1980), Introduction, pp. 7-10; J.G.A. Pocock, 'Authority and Property: The Question of
Liberal Origins', in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter, ed. Barbara
C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), pp. 338-40.
60 Pocock, Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law, pp. 53-5; Retrospect, p. 261;
J.G.A. Pocock, Obligation and Authority in the English Revolutions (Wellington, New
Zealand, 1973) p. 3; Pocock, 'Whiggism: A Problem in Historical Re-Assessment', pp.
4-5; J.G.A. Pocock, Ά Discourse of Sovereignty', in Political Discourse in Early Mod
ern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 383,
386; J.G.A. Pocock, 'Thomas May and the Narrative of Civil War', in Writing and Politi
cal Engagement in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier
(Cambridge, 1999), p. 117.
61 Pocock, 'Thomas May', p. 123.

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 534 J.C. DAVIS

consensual ideological aspirati

ing for other justificatory par
the King as the earliest, and p
with his appeal to an Aristotel
an appeal which opened the f
'solutions' to England's trou
Moment' ,63
In his work on James Harrington, Pocock took a marginal and somewhat
eccentric thinker and transformed his historical significance. Attention had
focused on Harrington's history of property distribution and its meaning in
terms of the decline of the post-medieval English aristocracy and the rise of
the gentry/freeholders. Pocock's revisions highlighted the republican face of
civic humanism as presented by Harrington. Through Machiavelli, that face
reflected Aristotle and Polybius and perhaps more immediately Charles I's
importation of these paradigms into official English political discourse. In the
process, Harrington became a pivotal figure in transmitting what had been
ideas relative to the politics of city states (Athens, Rome, Venice and Flor
ence), adapting them for the needs of larger territorial states and thus making
them available to inform the political discourse of revolutionary societies in
the eighteenth century, namely America and France.64 But what was also dem
onstrated in this history was how a civic humanism adapted by Harrington to
what he saw as a society dominated by landed freeholders could be further
adapted by his successors to a world of commerce and industrial enterprise.65
Furthermore, by recasting the role of civic humanism and republican dis
course in the English Revolution in this way, Pocock triggered a (still ongo
ing) debate about the dominant paradigm transmitted by that discourse to the
Enlightenment and beyond. Was it liberal, in the sense of expanding the pri
vate element in social existence and seeking constitutional arrangements
which would protect that element? Or was it committed to a republican ideal
of citizen activism within an open public sphere?66 On this and a number of

62 Pocock, 'Discourse of Sovereignty', p. 388.

63 Pocock, Obligation and Authority, p. 7; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian
Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Prince
ton, 1975). See also Mendie, Dangerous Positions.
64 See especially, Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, Introduction;
Pocock, Machiavellian Moment.
65 For example, Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 450-1.
66 For some examples of this voluminous literature see: C.C. Weston, Subjects and
Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cam
bridge, 1981); The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. J.H. Burns
with Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), Sections II and III and the bibliographies associ
ated with them; Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal
Republicanism in England (Cambridge, 2004); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberal
ism (Cambridge, 1998); Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 535

other fronts, as we shall see shortly, Pocock's work has aroused de

controversy but what, above all, stands as a monument to his intel
impact is the way in which he has changed the terms in which thos
will be conducted. He has put discourse and discursive patterns at th
the history of political thought in the Western world and he has m
immediate contextualization a priority.67 Political thinking in the
become action addressing specified dilemmas68 and issues rather th
tion on timeless issues.

In making a critical appraisal of John Pocock's contribution perhaps the first

question to explore is whether he was the co-founder of a school, the so-called
'Cambridge School', or an independent scholar only loosely associated with
others, like John Dunn and Quentin Skinner working in the same field and on
associated problems. There have certainly been points of convergence with
Skinner. Robert D. Hume identifies the disavowal of dateless wisdom, an
insistence that, for the historian, ideas exist only in particular exemplification
of them and that coherence is no significant criterion of assessment as
amongst them.69 Pocock has himself acknowledged his debt to Skinner and
defended him against his critics but the engagement has never been uncriti
cal.70 There have been points of difference as well as agreement and the short
hand descriptions of the 'Cambridge School' or the 'linguistic contextualists'
can mislead as much as enlighten.71 A particular point of difference is whether
authorial intention can be recovered from language alone (a position towards

of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004); Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The
Crisis of Political Obligation in England (Princeton, 2004).
67 For example The Varieties of British Political Thought, ed. Pocock with Schochet
and Schwoerer, pp. 1-3; Political Discourse, ed. Phillipson and Skinner, Introduction;
Blair Worden, 'Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution', in History and
Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie
Pearl and Blair Worden (London, 1981), pp. 182-200.
68 For a typically witty and ironic depiction of such a dilemma, see Pocock's work on
Restoration cynicism and the demonstration that out of cynicism came forth principle in
the Glorious Revolution. J.G.A. Pocock, ' "Wicked and Turbulent Though it Was": The
Restoration Era in Perspective', in Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart
Britain: Essays Presented to Lois Schwoerer, ed. Howard Nenner (New York, 1997),
pp. 9-12.
69 Robert D. Hume, 'Pocock's Contextual Historicism', in Political Imagination in
History, ed. De Luna with Burgess, p. 34.
70 Forillustrationofboth facets see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 2-7.
71 On the problems of lumping Pocock uncritically with Skinner see Ian Shapiro,
'Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas', History of Political Thought, III (3)
(1982), pp. 535-77; Timothy Kenyon, Utopian Communism and Political Thought in
Early Modem England (London, 1989), p. 11.

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 536 J.C. DAVIS

which Skinner leans) or wheth

(paradigms) which frame the a
into account (Pocock).72 In f
changed, Pocock's approach to
sion of a series of paradigmatic
work and more particularly sin
ism in England after 1660 was a
a problem of language.73 In 19
Nineteen Propositions that it w
nology may have become more
some respects, as J.A.W. Gunn
functions for Pocock as an umb
tion.75 He still thinks that, '
tems'76 and that behind those
munities functioning through
their own continuity by articu
tics.77
In fact, the rise of linguistic contextualism had been anticipated in the
1940s.78 The 1960s saw that practice given a theoretical context and justifica
tion. There was always a danger that disembodied languages could become
points of reference as detached as abstract ideas. Pocock's originality and
the essence of his contribution was that he took the insights of linguistic
contextualism but avoided its weaknesses by insisting that ideas ricochet off
complex, concrete problems, taking vitality from them, and doing so by
engagement with interlocking structures of ideas, or what we might continue
to call paradigms. To summarize, his consistent methodological model has
been to recover language as attempting to articulate and apply politically (lan
guage as events) the key elements of a paradigm, which in turn is rooted in an
institutional/communal need to express continuity. 7J This may be a

72 Kenyon, Utopian Communism, p. 7.

73 Pocock, 'Wicked and Turbulent', pp. 14, 17.
74 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 20.
75 J.A.W. Gunn, 'Republican Virtue Reconsidered', in Political Imagination in His
tory, ed. De Luna with Burgess, p. 125.
76 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 15 and pp. 13-15.
77 Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, pp. ix, 11-12,132-3. In his later work that insti
tutional framework becomes not that of a professional group like lawyers but the nation
state or British Empire.
78 In the work, for example, of Zera S. Fink and Margaret Judson as well as, slightly
later, in such major collaborative projects as the Y ale edition of the complete works of St
Thomas More.
79 One concern is that the community at issue in this for Pocock is either a profes
sional one, as in his study of 'the common law mind', or focused too much on the nation
state. For example his 1966 depiction of the history of ideas as 'the study of a nation's

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 537

satisfactory model for explaining 'normal' political discourse and it

but, as Pocock knows, institutional/communal shifts commonly
explanation outside the language and paradigmatic frameworks wh
threaten to make redundant. In the longer term, the question has to be
what the methodological implications are when discourse becomes d
from historiography and historical sense — the condition of post-m
perhaps.
The methodology might be exposed to criticism, and Pocock has addressed
a number of minor faults in his early work80 but, since the methodology is pri
marily designed to prevent the ahistorical and faulty contextualization which
he and others saw as a feature of earlier work on the history of political
thought, it is the issue of contextualization and whether he got it right which is
the critical issue. One might fasten on any number of detailed criticisms such
as the work of any historian is exposed to but here I want to focus on two much
broader concerns — the State and religion — and question whether these are
the areas in which his work is in greatest need of revision.
Pocock's writings on early modern political thought generally tend to
assume that the key issue for the state in that period is the problem of
King-in-Parliament (the ancient or mixed constitution) and the overwhelming
strains that came under in the mid-seventeenth century. This is certainly an
important and central element in the story but there are three other important
respects in which Pocock's work relating to perceptions of the state is in need
of further supplementation. The first is the growing depersonalization of the
central machinery of government. The Headship of the Church meant that
English monarchs could no longer see themselves as religiously free agents.
The Supremacy was both their apotheosis and their incarceration. Managing
idolatry and religious pluralism became intractable political problems and
while Pocock, in part, recognizes this, he shows no great interest in the litera
ture it generates. There is for him no concern for the historiography and politi
cal thought of the clergy to match that of the lawyers which he has done so
much to recover and yet it is arguable whether lawyers or clergymen were
politically more influential in the period. Similarly, the state in the seven
teenth century confronted problems of fiscality and bureaucracy in face of
the dramatically changed demands of maintaining a military establishment
adequate to a Europe of endemic religious and dynastic warfare. The manage
ment and logistical requirements of substantially larger and more technologi
cally advanced forces required not only the creation of professional standing
armies as opposed to citizen militias (a problem central to Pocock's

legitimating concepts under stress, and of the consequent changes in ideas concerning
the philosophy of political knowledge, the history of the self-legitimating community,
and sometimes — to link the two — the philosophy of historical knowledge'. Pocock,
' "The Onely Politician" ', p. 268.
80 Retrospect.

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 538 J.C. DAVIS

discussion of republicanism)
expanded tax base, commercial
underwrite that growth) and th
necessary to provide the tools
amongst the first to identify an
of the emergence of a world of
cial Revolution of the late seven
There are also issues associated
motion, orbits and machines —
political arithmetic — in which
Locke showed great interest81
third question in relation to Po
state is the reassessment of the nature of that state which historians have been
making over the last decade or so. What is at issue is whether the single
minded focus on the monarchical nation state in itself misses so much as to be
in danger of anachronism. From the point of view of the actual governance of
the communities which made up the realm, what is now observed is a very
high degree of self-governance by unpaid local officeholders who assumed
themselves to have wide rights of discretion and mediation between the
demands of the monarch or parliament and the needs of their communities.
Such a dispersed state could be seen to be monarchical in its upper reaches but
republican in its lower ones.82 In resurrecting the rule of 'King PEOPLE',
Harrington paid great attention to the question of unpaid office holding and
the rituals required for the reinvestment of the 'unacknowledged republic' in
their hands, but this is not a dimension reflected in Pocock's work on him and
one wonders how well his methodology could accommodate such a dimen
sion.83 Evoking the unacknowledged republic as a manifestation of the early
modern English state raises two further questions; the dating of republicanism

81 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle
and their Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). See also David Wootton, 'Liberty,
Metaphor and Mechanism: 'Checks and Balances' and the Origins of Modern
Constitutionalism', keynote address to the annual meeting of the British Society for
Eighteenth Century Studies, 2002. A version of this was published as part of the intro
duction to The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. David Wootton
(Indianopolis, 2003).
82 See Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.l550-1700
(Cambridge, 2000); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern Eng
land c.l550-1640 (London, 2000); Mark Goldie, 'The Unacknowledged Republic:
Office Holding in Early Modern England', in The Politics of the Excluded c.l500-1850,
ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153-94.
83 J.C. Davis, 'Afterword: Reassessing Radicalism in a Traditional Society: Two
Questions', in English Radicalism 1550-1850, ed. Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein
(Cambridge, 2007), pp. 360-2.

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 539

as a consequence rather than a cause of the regicide of 164984 and th

and sources of English republican thought. Whether the principal
that republicanism were Roman,85 Greek86 or domestic is now an
tion. So too are the associated questions of whether, in essence
republicanism was about institutions and constitutions, or about civic
and whether James Harrington was as representative of this republi
Pocock assumes him to be.88
At the end of the introduction to his edition of Harrington's politic
Pocock confessed that he had confined himself to placing sev
century republicanism in a secular tradition. The Christian traditio
which he [Harrington] was also concerned [was] another matter'.89
was not the most central of Pocock's concerns in contextualizi
teenth-century political thought, even if the two could not entire
rated.9" But one of the most essential revisions in the fifty years o
life as a historian has been the insistence on a much more central pla
gion in the political and intellectual life of the period. Consequentl
has come to seem increasingly out of step and less sure footed in this
in any other aspect of his work. His misreading of Harrington's Oc
apocalyptic, for example shows a failure to grasp the linguistic cont

84 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 5; Markku Peltone

cal Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570-1640 (C
1995). In some respects, Peltonen's position contra-Pocock, that an English r
mentality can be identified well before 1649, was anticipated by Z.S. Fink, T
Republicans (Evanston, 1945).
85 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism.
86 Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern (3 vols., Chapel Hill, 1
cially Vol. 2.
87 Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Phil Withington, The Politics of Common
wealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005).
88 For the questioning of Harrington's typicality see Jonathan Scott, 'The Rapture of
Motion: James Harrington's Republicanism', in Political Discourse, ed. Phillipson and
Skinner, pp. 139-63; Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 294-5; Arihiro Fukuda, Sov
ereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English
Civil Wars (Oxford, 1997). There has been a similar questioning of the typicality
ascribed by Pocock to Sir Edward Coke amongst the common lawyers: see J.P.
Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640 (London, 1986), p. 78. For a
not entirely satisfactory response here see Retrospect, ch. 1.
89 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 152.
90 This is not to detract from his contribution in initiating a reappraisal of the religion
of Thomas Hobbes or his more recent grappling with church history and Edward Gibbon,
although the latter concerns a later period than the one under consideration here. For the
former see J.G.A. Pocock, 'Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas
Hobbes', in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, ch. 5.

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 540 J.C. DAVIS

enteenth-century millenariani
lost force after 1660 was simp
of the saints had become im
cohesion is not only against th
politicians made impossible by
sion of this problem with rel
where in his work, is a tenden
will of God is of supreme imp
whether human engagement
believers, it is then inferred,
engagements, that is they we
here is Gerrard Winstanley.94
he also wrote a pamphlet urgi
monwealth established after t
There are problems, it has be
linguistic conceptualist's appro
satire and an author's delibera
very language.96 More difficul
to extrapolate from the presu
to be operating and to extrap
digm to positions not verifiab
example of this also reflect
begins with the assumption th
is outside time. However warr
that because the fallen world

91 Ibid., pp. 72-4,81; J.C. Davis, '

Classical Republicanism of Jame
pp. 683-97.
92 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 405. Compare, J.F.C. Harrison, The Second
Coming: Popular Millenarianism (London, 1979). The point has been made repeatedly
since the publication of this book.
93 Pocock, ' "The Onely Politician" ', p. 282. Compare, J.C. Davis, 'Living with the
Living God: Radical Religion and the English Revolution', in Religion in Revolutionary
England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester, 2006), pp. 19-41.
94 Pocock, Obligation and Authority, pp. 12-15.
95 See the entry for Gerrard Winstanley by J.C. Davis with J.D. Alsop in The Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
96 D.N. De Luna, 'Topical Satire read back into Pocock's Neo-Harringtonian
Moment', in Political Imagination in History, ed. De Luna with Burgess, pp. 132,142.
97 Pocock seems to take an obvious delight in teasing out the 'logical' implications of
his subjects' positions. While the question may be to what extent this can become an end
in itself, it is so embedded in his deeply historical approach to texts that it should be dis
tinguished from the ethereal nature of such speculation, which has often been one of the
targets of Marxist criticism of non-Marxist approaches to the history of political thought.

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 ENGLISH REVOLUTION & POCOCK'S APPROACH 541

this blocked historical vision.98 But this is to ignore ecclesiastical

since Bede, as it is to ignore the writing of the influential Elizabet
Richard Hooker, who argued for an ecclesiology which took accou
and circumstance.99 Here the logic has displaced the need for ade
critical documentation of a historical point. Indeed one of the gr
about politics and religion in the early modern period was about
God acted mediately (through human beings and human instit
immediately in history, and that debate is central to both religiou
and historical thought in the period.100 In the introduction to H
works, Pocock maintains that Oceana's aspiration to be a perfect an
commonwealth 'entailed the anti-Christian concept of an aeternit
(17) Oceana had, therefore, to be either a realm of Grace or a qua
affront to Christian values.101 There is undoubtedly a logic here, b
compatible with the historical evidence? Did anyone ever say thes
The irony is that the claim of the common law mind was also one of
and immortality but no one accused ancient constitutionalism of
Christian.102 Again, Pocock stresses as a weakness of Harrington'
that they 'involve a restructuring of the entire electoral machine in
tribes [counties] and the rest of the architecture of Oceana'.103 B
exactly Harrington addressing the needs of an existing machinery,
'unacknowledged republic', which had been under threat from th
ing tendencies of war and, before that, of Stuart policy. In terms o
historical context, such statements should be read as a strength ra
weakness in his political thought. The risk, then, of working in ter
digms or linguistic systems is that their implicit logic can take ove
of the discussion. They may become inferential, or a starting poin
tive processes, rather than hypotheses to be tested against the av
dence.104

98 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 31.

99 J.C. Davis, 'Backing into Modernity: The Dilemma of Richard Hooker', in The
Certainty of Doubt,ed. Miles Fairburn and W.H. Oliver (Wellington, 1995), pp. 157-79.
100 Davis, 'Living with the Living God'.
101 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 17.
102 Similar examples of logical extrapolation from a paradigmatic starting point
being taken to extremes without documentary support can be found in ibid., p. 81 (on
clerical authority; on which compare p. 12) and Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 26
(rule of custom and role of monarch).
103 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, p. 108.
104 Michael McKeon, 'Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation',
in Political Imagination in History, ed. De Luna with Burgess, p. 72. This seems to me a
far more serious criticism than that which claims that his insistence on complexity leads
to obscurity and slipperiness of language (ibid., pp. 47, 63). Davis, 'Pocock's Harring
ton'.

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542 J.C. DAVIS

VI

All of this is by no means to d

or his standing, but to acknowled
generation succeeding him. As o
of his generation in the West
First, to engage with the texts,
political discourse. For him, th
the political thinkers and his
historiographical and political,
of their evaluation. Secondly
historian to tell a story engagin
price of admission to the sto
subtle mind which furnishes n
self-reflective and self-interroga
implications for history and h
has been conscious of the impo
of a priority for him than for s
lessly identified, he has been m
atic exemplar of his own pro
own disciplinary strictures. Po
that sense, a corpus of remark

J.C. Davis UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

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