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“... Nations and Tribes is an easy intellectual stroll. Dominated recently by the writings of J.G.A. Pocock, the history of Early Modern ideas is notoriously a zone of intricate and ambiguous exploration: the borderland of the modern age, a shadow-time entre loup et chien where nothing was in its own estimation the way it now appears to us. This book raises the ...”

“... but a dislike of the actual court that lent a republican tinge to their rhetoric. And as J.G.A. Pocock and others have shown, a celebration of austere republican virtue against the corrupting effects of commerce motivated one strand of republican thought down to Jefferson and beyond. It took T.S. Eliot to remind the forgetful English of the full benefits of ...”

“... of Liberty, also often an oak: an irony compounded by the fact, recently pointed out by J.G.A. Pocock, that the cover of some editions of Burke’s Reflections, including Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Penguin, show the planting of the Liberty Tree and not Burke’s ancient oak. Thompson’s account of ‘customary consciousness’ shows the living social ...”

“... the study of political thought. Skinner and the so-called Cambridge School, of which he and J.G.A. Pocock are essentially the founding fathers, have been credited with a major breakthrough in historical scholarship for their contextualisation of political theory. And here precisely is the problem. Historical contexts, for them, are ...”

“... poetry to the ideology of the 18th-century ‘Country party’, as the historian of ideas J.G.A. Pocock has expounded this in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) and subsequent articles. The ‘Country party’ impulse will be to idealise the country gentleman, as the upholder of disinterested virtue, untouched by the corruptions of court and city. In its ...”

“... societies that produced them. One of the two leading figures in that development has been J.G.A. Pocock, who has taught us, as Skinner puts it, ‘to think of the history of political thought’ not in canonical terms but ‘as a more wide-ranging investigation of the changing political languages in which societies talk to themselves’. The other leading ...”

“... that potentia could become potestas overnight. All that Marx had needed to add to what J.G.A. Pocock called the ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ was the idea that the political always includes the social. Now, ‘political space becomes social space,’ and with creative free labour as its subject, constituent power is ‘the revolution itself’.In ...”

“... and original intellectual historians in the next generation, such as Duncan Forbes and J.G.A. Pocock. He saw the importance of the history of science so much earlier than most historians of his formation, just as he saw that the history of historiography was too significant and rich a field to be left to political historians pursuing their professional ...”

“... The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards, is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are everywhere open and indeterminate. ‘Europe’, it can now be seen, is not a continent – as in the ancient geographers’ dream – but a subcontinent: a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked geophysical frontier ...”

“... are multiplying, and there is no obvious boundary at which they can be halted. Europe, as J.G.A. Pocock once forcibly observed in these pages, is not a continent but an unenclosed sub-continent on a continuous land-mass stretching to the Bering Straits (LRB, 19 December 1991). Its only natural frontier with Asia is the strip of water once swum by Leander and ...”

“... that legitimated institutions – was an unduly neglected aspect of political thought. J.G.A. Pocock’s classic work The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) showed that interpretations of the Norman Conquest, including its implications for law and government, were central to political controversy during the Stuart era. Were the events of 1066 ...”

“... after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a few days after the summit at Maastricht, J.G.A. Pocock published a prophetic essay in these pages.6 A trenchant critic of the EU, which he has always seen as involving a surrender of sovereignty and identity – and with them the conditions also of democracy – to the market, though a surrender never yet ...”

“... this would correct abuses, and supply defects.’ McCormick revises the argument of J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975), which focused on the revival of classical republican ideals at the American republic’s foundational moment. Pocock saw Madison, Jefferson and the rest as pursuing a project ...”

“... hitherto. By the second, he means republicanism in the classic sense, as reconstructed by J.G.A. Pocock: that is, the 17th and 18th-century belief that corruption was a perpetual danger to the integrity of the state and the safety of citizens, against which vigilance was a condition of liberty. Lula’s project had been a weak reformism: Dilma aimed at a ...”