J.G.A. Pocock, who died in 2023 at the age of 99, taught for many years at Johns Hopkins. He was the author of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion, concerning Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and many other books about the history of political thought and about history as a kind of political thought. He wrote for the LRB on subjects including Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke and Aotearoa New Zealand, where he grew up.
Few areas of the humanities have undergone such a remarkable transformation over the past half-century as the history of political thought. Students were once introduced to it by way of its...
Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and...
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790. By then, Burke had long ceased to be the dominant intellectual influence in the Whig Party. He hoped the...
Demolish a much-loved building, and you are left with rubble. Demolish a much-loved piece of political theory, and you find it rising from its own ashes, somewhat changed in appearance, but...
Was there such a thing as ‘Neo-Classicism’, outside the special sense of the term which art historians apply to a later period than the one over which students of literature lose so...
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