J. G. A. Pocock passed away in December 2023, just months away from his centenary. Between the early 1950s and his death, Pocock produced a wealth of books and essays on intellectual history between 1500 and 1800, on topics such as ancient constitutionalism, republicanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the history of the writing of history. He is probably best known for The Machiavellian Moment (1975). A proud New Zealander, Pocock spent some of his formative years at the University of Cambridge, and much of his career at Johns Hopkins University. All things considered, he has a good claim to being the greatest historian in the English-speaking world in the last 100 years.
Pocock was not only a great historian but also a deep thinker and an inimitable writer, in whose pages the Owl of Minerva shares the stage with references to Humpty Dumpty and J. R. R. Tolkien. It was as a writer on methodology that Pocock became a historical thinker of the first order. Several of his essays on such topics are autobiographical, and more than anyone else among the other main participants (Quentin Skinner and John Dunn), Pocock narrated the emergence of the so-called Cambridge School, or the contextualist approach to the study of political ideas.
In this essay, I am not concerned with Pocock’s methodology in relation to the Cambridge School but some different and less noticed aspects of his historical thought: his understanding of tradition as central to civil society, connecting past, present, and future, and the connection which Pocock identified between history and sovereignty. To borrow the words from one of his heroes, Edmund Burke, when describing the social contract, history for Pocock played a key role in turning society into “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Michael Oakeshott
As a historical thinker, Pocock was inspired by and engaged with the thought of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Pocock was particularly struck by Oakeshott’s treatment of the concept of tradition. According to Oakeshott’s inaugural address as professor of government at the London School of Economics in 1951, later published in the essay collection Rationalism in Politics (1962), politics in terms of discourse is restricted by “the pursuit of intimations” integral to a society’s tradition. Apart from in revolutionary contexts, and perhaps to an extent even then, this means that political thinkers are limited by the discourses and languages they inherit from the past. Since political societies are “hereditary co-operative groups,” it implies that political activity “is never offered the blank sheet of infinite possibility.” In Oakeshott’s terms, politics is the activity of “attending to arrangements” rather than “making arrangements.” For him, political education
begins in the enjoyment of a tradition, in the observation and imitation of the behavior of our elders, and there is little or nothing in the world which comes before us as we open our eyes which does not contribute to it. We are aware of a past and a future as soon as we are aware of the present. Long before we are of an age to take an interest in a book about our politics we are acquiring that complex and intricate knowledge of our political tradition without which we could not make sense of a book when we come to open it.
Nothing appears on the surface of a tradition without deep roots in the past, and we can only understand its significance by studying how it has come into being. And what people thought and said about what happened, the manner of their political thinking, is equally important. According to Oakeshott, it follows that academic study of politics must be a historical study, concerned with the concrete.
These Oakeshottian ideas had a deep impact on Pocock. But Pocock took issue with Oakeshott’s profound yet rather limiting notion of the activity of the historian. For Oakeshott, history in the academic sense is concerned with what he termed a “historical past.” A “historical past” is different from a “practical past,” which is what the politician, the moralist, or the advocate might be interested in. The “practical past” is a useful past, whereas the historical past is a “dead past.” Knowledge about a historical past advances historical knowledge, and if and when we are looking for any utility or relevance beyond this, we stray into a practical activity, and we are no longer following the logic of historical research.
Oakeshott’s distinction between a historical past and a practical past is arguably more relevant than ever, as academic history has in recent years been challenged by various political and moral forces, for example, efforts to change the curriculum to suit specific tastes in the present while excluding others. But it was ultimately insufficient for Pocock.
The Political Role of the Historian
In Pocock’s narration, while deeply involved with the thought of Oakeshott, he “used [it] for [his] purposes in ways of which neither he nor his committed followers would have approved.” Crucially, Pocock came to disagree with Oakeshott’s idea that to engage in historical study for practical purposes was a form of “necromancy.”
Pocock’s conservative liberalism made him a critic of the twenty-first-century trend of global history.
Tongue-in-cheek, Oakeshott had described the relationship between the historian and the past as that between a lover and his mistress who mesmerizes him without talking sense. In a contribution to Oakeshott’s Festschrift from 1968, Pocock instead compared the past for the historian to a wife: “an other self, perpetually explored.”
For much of his career, Pocock was interested in the political role of the historian and the politics of historiography. He was convinced that the writing of history does not escape politics but simply diversifies it. The reinterpretation offered by the historian will have political consequences, which can be intended as well as unintended (as a pioneering scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment, Pocock was always attentive to the latter). Even to say that “this statement has no practical consequences” is self-falsifying, according to Pocock, as such a statement would itself have practical consequences. Political histories can be written to authenticate, legitimize, or subvert, and Pocock himself was certainly capable of all three.
Antipodean and Anti-European
In the 1970s, he launched “British history” as a new subject (as opposed to, say, English or Irish history), as the United Kingdom was pursuing membership of what later became the European Union. Pocock was clear that the sovereign state was the proper object for the political historian, though this could of course be a multi-national state as in the case of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Britain’s pursuit of a European future alarmed Pocock because it meant a future without New Zealand, a settler colony in the British Empire. Indeed, he worried that his native land might be written out of British history. Pocock was skeptical about the European project, which he described as “an association of recently defeated states compensating for their loss of extra-European empire by constructing a shared and highly globalized economy, in which sovereignty became problematic.” In a letter to Quentin Skinner, he described his collected essays on British history as “anti-European, antipodean and autobiographical.”
“As an Antipodean and a neo-Briton I have no cause to love the concept of European union,” wrote Pocock in The Discovery of Islands (2005), “it does not offer me inclusion, and tends to exclude me from an association and a history to which I thought I belonged.” Privately, he would later be skeptical about the Brexit project, as well. In his published writings, he distinguished between the proper “Euroskeptic,” who was skeptical about the idea of “Europe,” and the vulgar usage of the term that often referred to “those caught up in an atavistic and undiscriminating opposition to the project in its entirety.” But his own criticism went as far as arguing that the democratic deficit of the EU was a feature, not a bug: as populations were unwilling to give up sovereignty, they “must be lured into doing this by stages.”
For Pocock, the European onslaught on the sovereign state and democracy represented a double blow against history and politics: “Since the European project has from the start been based on the surrender of their sovereignty by states, nations and peoples, and its transference to agencies … the possibility exists that it aims at terminating the phenomenon of politically autonomous communities, and that of history, lived as well as written, as the continuous life of an always-precarious autonomy.”
In a society in which there is no shared past to re-narrate and disagree about, members might cease being citizens in a meaningful sense.
Pocock saw an apparent connection between sovereignty and historiography: a community writes its history when it has an autonomous political structure. This history will often be about this structure, but it does not have to be uncritical. Pocock’s historian committed to describing the character of their society could thus be conservative or radical, but never a revolutionary, as problematization does not equal deconstruction.
Conservative Liberalism
Pocock’s thoughtful opposition to the European project gave him the reputation of being a conservative. This reputation was enhanced by the fact that he defiantly refused to transition to the digital age, and wrote all his books, essays, and extensive correspondence by hand. But he often chose to emphasize that his conception of history made him a liberal and even a pluralist. This pluralism did not make Pocock a post-modernist; indeed, he denied that narratives are fictions. But the key in a civic society, he argued, is that “there is conflict as to what has happened, ought to have happened and should be happening; there is conflict as to the history because there is, and may for a longer or shorter period have been, conflict in the politics.”
He continued: “The politics of historiography have a strong bent towards conservative liberalism; they tell us that there are many stories to be told of ourselves and many ways of judging them, but that there exists a normative structure within which we can continue to judge ourselves and give effect to our decision.”
In the spirit of pluralism, he welcomed the historical profession’s social and cultural turns in the second half of the twentieth century: “Given that the business of the historian is re-narration and the discovery of new contexts, the enlargement of the field towards the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’ is greatly to be welcomed.” However, he was highly critical of what we may call the “imperial” ambition of cultural history, which sought to marginalize more traditional approaches to the subject, including political and intellectual ones. He pointed out that his hero Edward Gibbon had wanted to replace the dominance of any particular methodology with a “governo misto [mixed government] of all the faculties engaged in the literary study of the culture inherited.”
But Pocock’s conservative liberalism made him a critic of the twenty-first-century trend of global history, which he thought made it impossible to construct narratives of a self-governing political community with which we could identify. In a 2019 essay, published when Pocock was 95 years old, he made the case for the “unglobality” of historical contexts as understood in the Cambridge School tradition. This helped to cement his reputation as a conservative intellectual.
Anti-Revolutionary
Pocock’s politics were anti-revolutionary without being reactionary. Against the backdrop of the protests of 1968, in the final essay in Politics, Language and Time (1971), he targeted “romantic revolutionaries” directly. He wrote: “We have now to ask the question whether a totally revolutionary politics would not be anti-linguistic, in the sense that action would have replaced words as a transmitting medium, and whether the abolition of language would not prove depoliticizing and dehumanizing.”
Using language means communicating, and Pocock implied that revolution entailed an end to communication and the triumph of violence (the influence of Hannah Arendt is readily detected). Yet, Pocock stressed that his unfriendliness toward the romantic revolutionary was moderate. The ambition must be to make the revolutionary enter into dialogue with the non-revolutionary: “If [the revolutionary] is obliged to receive communications from his adversaries which modify the communications he is able to make in return, his mode of politics has indeed shifted some distance from the revolutionary towards the consensual.” For the communications game to be open to all players, conservatives and radicals needed to understand that they could not unilaterally determine the game’s structure.
One reason why Pocock’s writings on the politics of historiography have been neglected might be the perhaps inevitable but regrettable way in which “small-l liberalism” and “small-c conservatism” are understood as opposites and perhaps even incompatible when they in fact need each other. A society that does not allow for dispute and disagreement about its past is totalitarian. But in a society in which there is no shared past to re-narrate and disagree about, members might cease being citizens in a meaningful sense and instead become strangers.
The challenges to political discourse in our time are colossal. More than twenty years ago, Pocock warned of the difficulty of societies having a sense of continuity in the digital age, as the speed of communication and the erosion of the barrier between information and entertainment conspire against both politics and the discipline of history. These issues have, of course, only become greater recently, and one shudders to think of the potential harm of large-scale “artificial intelligence.” But if Pocock was right, the task of improving politics must be intimately connected with the study and writing of history.
