¹ ‘Political Ideas as Historical Events’, p. 142Google Scholar. (For full references to this and other titles by Pocock see the bibliography.)

² This characterization of the reasons for incorporating the history of political thought within degree structures, and of the more general justifications of the subject imputed to past scholars is indefensibly cavalier. In mitigation it can only be pleaded that others have been no less so. It is time that the origins of the historiography of political thought as an academic subject were the object of some scholarly research.

³ See especially Skinner, Quentin's ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, VII (1969), 3–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Pocock's own dialogue between the philosopher and the historian in his ‘Political Ideas as Historical Events’. Collingwood seems the most potent source of this ideal although of course Skinner derives his methodological prescriptions from contemporary work in the philosophy of action. Pocock also makes reference to this material but with far less insistence.

⁴ The bibliography appended to this review makes some claim to completeness. I hope I have included all but minor reviews. I should like to acknowledge the help of Professor Pocock in providing bibliographical information.

⁵ A start in the reassessment of Harrington in the light of renaissance concerns with civic virtue had already been made by Raab, Felix in his posthumously published The English Face of Machiavelli (London, Routledge, 1964)Google Scholar. See Pocock, 's ‘“The Onely Politician”: Machiavelli, Harrington and Felix Raab’.Google Scholar

⁶ The dominance of Namier's account, and the intrusiveness of his methodology did not encourage work on the ideological dimensions of mid-eighteenth-century political life. This view was pushed back into the earlier part of the century by Walcott, R., English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by Feiling, K.. Plumb's Growth of Stability (London, Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar provided a useful corrective here while conceding the later case.

⁷ The seminal article is ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’.

⁸ Even in Britain there were, of course, possible alternative sources of historical awareness. Canon law had brought continental traditions to the island. There was a body of Tudor-Stuart historiography, which cannot fairly be dismissed as myth or chronical. Antiquarians such as Verstegan and Camden possessed at least a conception of Saxon society as a distinct entity, and that great antiquarian John Aubrey was already, in mid-century, formulating an awareness of the stages of Britain's early past and speculating on the lives of the pre-Roman inhabitants and builders of monuments such as his beloved Avebury. Aubrey's Monumenta Brittanica has lain unpublished since his death but is shortly to be published in an edition by John Fowles.

Pocock's argument, here as elsewhere, depends on holding apart and presenting as discrete to consciousness ‘languages’ or modes of thinking within a natural language. The identification of specialized languages and the conditions under which they interact is a major feature of Pocock's work, crucial alike to his mode of explanation and the identification of his subject.

⁹ Pocock distinguishes between traditional, traditionalist, rationalist and historicist attitudes to the past. Traditionalism involves the conscious formulation of the principle obtaining in unreflective traditional societies, namely that existing practices be continued.

¹⁰ In 1581 the unfortunate Arthur Hall had been imprisoned for impugning the immemoriability of the House. The story is recounted in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 154.Google Scholar

¹¹ Moderate constitutionalism was a position shared both by Falkland, and Culpepper, who ghosted ‘His Majesty's answer to the Nineteen Propositions’ on the eve of Civil War in 1642Google Scholar, and by the parliamentarian apologist Henry Parker in his ripost to that tract ‘Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers’. The Levellers notoriously sought the true constitution in the time before the conquest and the imposition of the ‘Norman Yoke’. Historical arguments for royalism begin with Filmer's halting attempts to show that the commons began to meet regularly under Henry III and not at all before Henry II. His argument was that what kings have granted they can revoke. Within the confines of antiquarian scholarship Spelman and his Scots predecessor Craig had already established the existence of a feudal society in Britain. It was not until the Brady controversy of the 1680s that scholarship and ideological history finally link up in this respect.

¹² Pocock broaches this wider issue in his ‘Origins of the Study of the Past’ and in several essays in Politics, Language and Time.

¹³ See ‘Virtues, Rights, and Manners’, especially pp. 358–60.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Oceana, in Political Works, p. 62Google Scholar. There were of course a number of other English republicans. The roles of figures such as Milton, Sidney, Vane, Marvell, Marten, Nedham in his later works, and Parker are given varying degrees of attention by Pocock. Some will undoubtedly repay closer investigation in the light of Pocock's wider argument concerning the importance and mode of transition of civic humanism to English thought.

¹⁵ In fact, Harrington only considered three of these to be fundamental: monarchy, oligarchy and ‘a free people’. See Political Works, p. 736.Google Scholar

¹⁶ e.g. the System of Politics, pts. I and II, Political Works, 835–7.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The central articles are Tawney, R. H., ‘Harrington's Interpretation of his Age’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XXVII (1941), 149–223Google Scholar; Trevor-Roper, H. R., ‘The Gentry, 1540–1650’, Economic History Review, Suppl. no. 1 (1953)Google Scholar; Hexter, J. H., ‘Storm over the Gentry’, Encounter (05 1958), 22–34Google Scholar, and Shklar, J. N., ‘Ideology Hunting: the Case of James Harrington’, American Political Science Review, LIII (1959), 662–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ The statutes were introduced by Henry VII. The account is drawn from Bacon, 's Historie of the raigne of King Henry the seventh (1622)Google Scholar. Although Bacon had no theory of feudalism, Aubrey, who does show awareness of it, sees it as abruptly destroyed by Henry VIII. Harrington's account draws on both. See Ancient Constitution, pp. 139–40Google Scholar and Political Works, p. 45.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ancient Constitution, p. 129.Google Scholar

²⁰ Political Works, ‘The Second Part of the Preliminaries to Oceana’, pp. 201 ff.Google Scholar

²¹ Political Works, p. 116.Google Scholar

²² Scholars disagree over the extent to which Harrington's scheme for a commonwealth relies on institutions creating virtù within citizens as opposed to simply rigging political life so that it is foolproof or rather vice-proof no matter what attitudes prevail. There are clearly elements of both in Harrington. It is the former Pocock has stressed and which he claims is so influential and important in eighteenth-century oppositionist thought. See, for example, Lockyer, Andrew ‘Pocock's Harrington’, Political Studies, XXVIII (1980), 458–64, especially pp. 462–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Davis, J. C., ‘Pocock's Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington’, Historical Journal, XXIV (1981), 683–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ Toland, John, Life, in Harrington's Works (Dublin, 1737), xviiiGoogle Scholar. Toland's biographical essay is not included in Pocock's edition.

²⁴ Ancient Constitution, p. 147.Google Scholar

²⁵ ‘Reconstructing Traditions’, p. 104.Google Scholar

²⁶ For two examples see ‘Verbalising, a Political Act’ and ‘Political Ideas as Historical Events’.

²⁷ Pocock, in rejecting Leo Strauss's opposition between natural law and natural right, sees the views described here as constitutive of modernity (‘Machiavelli and Guiccardini’). Recognizing oneself as not an ancient is what, for Pocock, makes one a modern. This is nowhere near as banal as it may appear. The revival of ancient paganism (by imitation) must be distinguished from the rise of modern paganism (by self-conscious innovation). This latter requires the construction of new modes of thinking about time, and social and political ordering. For Hume's paradigmatic contribution to this see Moore, J. M., ‘Hume's Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition’, Canadian Journal of Political Science X (1977), 807–39Google Scholar. More generally on the reconceptualization of republican vices as commercial virtues Hirschman, A. O.'s sharp and incisive The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press)Google Scholar provides a good introduction. One curiously neglected figure in the transition from classical to modern ways of conceiving of political organization and its relationship to the moral qualities of the citizens is Montesquieu, but see Richter, Melvin, The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and recently Manicas, Peter T., ‘Montesquieu and the Eighteenth Century Vision of the State’, History of Political Thought, II (1981), 313–47Google Scholar. As James Tully reminds me, there is an earlier continental strand to all this: see especially Keohane, Nannerl O.'s Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Part II, Interest and Prudence.

²⁸ ‘Virtues, Rights, and Manners’, p. 359.Google Scholar

²⁹ It has been pointed out to me by James Tully that this account betrays an ambiguity as to whether civic humanism yielded to a sceptical consequentialism (of which he sees elements in Machiavelli) or a rights-bearing conception of the individual. I think (and I believe this is Pocock's view) that both traditions were instrumental here. My view is that although utilitarianism is a potent and versatile set of ideas by which to judge entire systems of government and law, it has trouble providing a system of market relations with the individual units, either in positive law, or conceptually, which could form the substance of the contract between agents. Only a notion of right can do this. Thus although the market was justified (in general) on utilitarian grounds, individual exchanges could only be articulated where rights were held. Where natural right was used to justify the provisions of the system as a whole, or conversely where individual utility was claimed as a criterion by which to assess the justice of the whole, the implications for unrestrained market capitalism were usually subversive. These outlines of ideas clearly require more space than it is possible to give them here.

³⁰ Virtues, Rights, and Manners', passim.

³¹ But see the essay devoted to the topic in Politics, Language and Time: ‘Languages and their Implications’.

³² These remarks are provoked more by Skinner's methodological injunctions and not by his substantive work.

³³ See, for example, the classic exposition in ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies’.

³⁴ Lockyer, , ‘Pocock's Harrington’, p. 459.Google Scholar

³⁵ This and subsequent quotations are from ‘The History of Political Thought’.

³⁶ As a writer such as Greenleaf, W. H. seems to want to argue e.g. in his methodological postscript to ‘Hume, Burke and the General Will’, Political Studies, XX (1972), 131–40, especially pp. 139–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ e.g., Art of Law giving, Appendix, Political Works, p. 701ff.Google Scholar

³⁸ Political Works, p. 130.Google Scholar

³⁹ ‘Between Machiavelli and Hume’, p. 164.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ ‘The Problem of Methodology’, p. 318.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Plamenatz, John's Man and Society, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1963)Google Scholar for example, manages to avoid almost any reference to historical context while always being at least sensible in its exegesis. The explicitly historicist approaches to the history of political thought, Marxism and Hegelianism, have of course their own distinct ways of relating the past to the present and the thought of the past to its own present and to ours. Pocock's approach shows distinct affinities with Hegel's position, although I can recall only one reference to that writer by him.

⁴² Skinner's early work on Hobbes established the existence of a group of thinkers who could be called Hobbesian, but they are still few and of questionable impact. Pocock's ability to articulate Hobbe's position within the problems of a wider tradition is elegantly demonstrated in ‘Time, History and Eschatology’, but of Hobbes's contemporaries' awareness of this dimension there is no evidence, nor of the use or acceptance of his ‘solution’ by followers until much later (see Francis, Mark, ‘The Nineteenth Century Theory of Sovereignty and Thomas Hobbes’, History of Political Thought, I (1980), 517–40Google Scholar). On the initial low profile of the Second Treatise see Thompson, Martyn P., ‘The Reception of Lock's Two Treatises … 1690–1705’, Political Studies, XXIV (1976), 184–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and on its later fate see Dunn, John, ‘The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century’, in Yolton, J., ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Pocock himself accepts this underplaying of Locke: ‘Locke himself is isolated from the Whig-Tory debate as this actually proceeded, by the ancient-constitution premise on the one hand and by the de facto premise on the other, and we are at last reaching the point of recognition that this debate proceeded in large measure independent of him.’ (John Locke, p. 6.)Google Scholar

However the state of Locke studies is particularly fluid at the moment and recent work by Richard Ashcraft and others has argued for a more activist interpretation of Locke's historical role. (See his ‘The Two Treatises and the Exclusion Crisis’, in Ashcraft, and Pocock, , John LockeGoogle Scholar, and ‘Revolution Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government’ in Political Theory, VIII (1980), 429–86Google Scholar. This fits with a recent interpretation of Locke's political theory which presents him as considerably more radical than has recently been considered defensible: see Tully, James, A Discourse on Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A forthcoming article by Ashcraft, Richard and Goldsmith, Maurice in the Historical Journal, ‘Locke, Revolution Principles and the Formation of Whig Ideology’Google Scholar, will argue for the reinstatement of Locke's influence in the long-term emergence of the Whig tradition.