In 1985, in a famous essay on Dutch republicanism, Kossmann pointed out one of the most puzzling shortcomings of Pocock's history of republicanism: he showed that the Machiavellian paradigm and the Atlantic tradition are ‘not easily applicable in the only major republic which was formed and which survived in early modern Europe’, i.e. the Dutch Republic. Kossmann – the doyen of Dutch studies in the history of political thought – expressed his perplexities in a very polite manner, recognising the quality of Pocock's ‘exceptionally stimulating and enlightening’ work, though making a very pointed attack:

Notwithstanding this promising start, Kossmann draws disappointing conclusions, stating that the theoretical explanation and justification of Dutch republicanism was in fact firmly based on conceptions developed outside the Netherlands and deeply influenced by foreign intellectual innovation.

Thus Kossmann points out the difficulty of ‘interpret[ing] the history of Dutch republican theory as a continuing tradition of its own’, since ‘it did not draw inspirations from its own intellectual past’ and ‘used vocabularies developed abroad’; he therefore concludes by denying the existence of ‘a peculiarly Dutch intellectual tradition which it would be correct to define as the Dutch paradigm’ (ibid.: 485–6).