1 Hartz, Louis B., The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).Google Scholar

2 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 423, 527, 435–36Google Scholar. Further references to this work will be made in the body of the text. See also, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 71Google Scholar; “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1987): 336–339, 342; “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 127Google Scholar. Appleby, Joyce, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 124, 136, 139, 290Google Scholar. Hamowy, Ronald, “Cato's Letters, John Locke, and the Republican Paradigm,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 273, 276Google Scholar. Spitz, Jean-Fabien, “La face cachée de la philosophie politique moderne,” Critique 45 (1989): 307, 311, 333.Google Scholar

3 “The pioneering student of the republican vision of community, Pocock asserted that an appeal to community was integral at the crucial Founding moment of American nationhood. ⃛ This claim struck a resonant chord among some historically inclined political intellectuals eager for the news that liberal individualism has not been the only mainstream voice in American history. The claim that republican community in one form or another was the (or a) dominant political idea in late eighteenth century is now the ascendant view among intellectuals and scholars” (Fowler, Robert, The Dance with Community [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991], p. 27Google Scholar, emphasis added; cf. p. 65). Consider also a recent textbook on political ideologies: “Drawing on the writings of Aristotle … the Renaissance republicans argued for a revival of civic life in which public-spirited citizens could take an active part in the governance of their independent city or country. The key concepts in this argument were liberty, virtue, and corruption, and nowhere were these concepts deployed more effectively than in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli” (Ball, Terence and Dagger, Richard, Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal [New York: Harper Collins, 1991], p. 31Google Scholar, emphasis in the original). Salkever, Stephen J., Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 230Google Scholar. Davis, J. C., “Pocock's Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington,” The Historical Journal 24 (1981): 683CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hampsher-Monk, Iain, “Political Languages in Time—The Work of J. G. A. Pocock,” British Journal of Political Science 14 (1984): 90, 99, 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sullivan, Vickie B., “Machiavelli's Momentary ‘Machiavellian Moment’: A Reconsideration of Pocock's Treatment of the Discourses,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Spitz, , “La face cachée,” p. 318Google Scholar. Appleby, , Historical Imagination, p. 21.Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., Barber, Benjamin, “Unscrambling the Founding Fathers,” New York Times Book Review, 13 01 1985Google Scholar; and Dworkin, Ronald, “Liberalism,” in Liberalism and its Critics, ed. Sandel, Michael (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 72Google Scholar. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, “The crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other” (MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 241Google Scholar. Cf. Skinner, Quentin, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Bock, G., Skinner, Q., Viroli, M. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1990), pp. 293ffGoogle Scholar. See also the frequent citations of Pocock in Sullivan, William M., Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For Pocock's relation to communitarianism see Isaac, J. C., “Republicanism vs. Liberalism? A Reconsideration,” History of Political Thought 9 (1988): 351–55, 373–77Google Scholar.

5 See, Pocock, , “The MM Revisited,” p. 72Google Scholar. Here Pocock states that “the only question worth scholarly debate [raised by The Machiavellian Moment] is whether languages and ideas have moved in the manner, and operated in the contexts, which I have attempted to describe.”

6 Ibid., p. 55.

7 Pocock believes this can be done only by respecting the opposition between liberalism and “classical or Machiavellian republicanism” (Machiavellian Moment, pp. 545, 423). For examples of how Locke can be understood in a nonadversarial relation to Machiavelli, see Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Balinski, Rebecca (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chaps. 1–4Google Scholar; and Zuckert, Michael, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For two outstanding demonstrations of the failure of the traditional “liberal synthesis” to capture the full moral vision of even Locke's liberalism, see Tarcov, Nathan, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984Google Scholar); and Kautz, Steven, Liberalism and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

8 For the interchangeable use of the terms “civic humanism” and “classical republicanism” see Pocock, , “MM Revisited,” 49.Google Scholar

9 While Appleby and Isaac have criticized Pocock's sharp division of ideologies into distinct republican and liberal paradigms, they both accept his characterization of Aristotle as a wholehearted republican. Appleby, Joyce, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986): 29, 33–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appleby, , Historical Imagination, pp. 21, 282Google Scholar. Isaac, , “Republicanism vs. Liberalism,” pp. 353, 356, 375Google Scholar. For Pocock's response to Appleby, see Pocock, , “Between Gog and Magog,” pp. 344–46.Google Scholar

10 Machiavellian Moment, pp. 537–38, where Pocock calls Tocqueville's critique of égalité des conditions “basically Aristotelian.”

11 “The dereliction of one citizen, therefore reduced the others' chances of attaining and maintaining virtue, since virtue was now politicized” (Machiavellian Moment, p. 75, emphasis added).

12 See also Pocock, J. G. A., “What Is Intellectual History,” History Today 35 (1985): 52–53.Google Scholar

13 Pocock, J. G. A., “Languages and Their Implications,” in Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 25Google Scholar.

14 See note 5, above.

15 Cf. Rousseau, , Social Contract, 2. 7Google Scholar. See Yack, Bernard, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 12–14.Google Scholar

16 Aristotle, , Politics, trans. Lord, Carnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1280a30–1280b40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further references to the Politics will be made in the body of the text.

17 See also Aristotle's analysis of the motives behind the participation of democrats and oligarchs at 1293a7–10 and 1309a3–7. Cf. Plato, Republic 347a-e.Google Scholar

18 For two different arguments that Aristotle did not consider active political participation essential to full human development see Mulgan, Richard, “Aristotle and the Value of Political Participation,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 204, 207–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lord, Carnes, “Politics and Philosophy in Aristotle's Politics,” Hermes (1978): 346–47Google Scholar; Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 352–53Google Scholar. Mulgan claims Aristotle rejected the necessity of active participation in the name of a “mixed ideal” of philosophic activity plus communal or “social living,” an attitude consistent with the emerging “quietism” of political life after Alexander. Lord thinks Aristotle's rejection is based on the self-sufficiency of philosophic contemplation. The precise resolution of the relation between political and intellectual virtue is not necessary, I think, to maintain my narrower point, since, for Aristotle, neither consists in willing the universal.

19 Pocock's treatment of Aristotle is the most notable exception to what J. H. Hexter has praised as his practice of “not try[ing] to translate the political terminologies men once used into the ones with which late twentieth-century readers are familiar” (Hexter, J. H., On Historians [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], pp. 265–66Google Scholar). Cf. also Pocock's description of the “angst” suffered by certain Greek and Roman intellects (Machiavellian Moment, p. 31), and his practice of putting a key-word or concept into the mouth of an author when “it helps if we insert it” {e.g., pp. 189, 533).

20 See Politics 1279b33–1280a6.

21 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 17Google Scholar. Cf. Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (Bungay: Penguin, 1963), p. 276Google Scholar. For Pocock's acknowledged debt to Arendt, see Machiavellian Moment, p. 550. The extent to which Pocock's reading of the Politics owes more to Arendt than Aristotle can be seen by comparing her loose paraphrase of Jefferson's proposal for a ward system (On Revolution, pp. 251–55) with Machiavellian Moment, pp. 66–75. See Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 319 n. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rahe, Paul A., “Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science,” Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 479 n. 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Newell, W. R., “Superlative Virtue: The Problem of Monarchy in Aristotle's Politics,” Western Political Quarterly 40 (1987): 169–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, Taming the Prince (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 39.Google Scholar

23 Bartlett, Robert C., “Aristotle's Science of the Best Regime,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Newell, , “Superlative Virtue,” pp. 175–76Google Scholar. Mansfield, Taming, p. 41.

25 Mulgan, , “Participation,” p. 210.Google Scholar

26 Cf. 1256a30–38, 1256b22–25 where Aristotle treats piracy and hunting human beings as a means of acquisition on par with hunting, shepherding, and farming.

27 Given the extent to which Aristotle identifies polity with the regime based on military virtue, an aspect of polity ignored in The Machiavellian Moment, it becomes necessary to re-examine Pocock's claim that Machiavelli's great innovation within the republican tradition was “the militarization of citizenship” (pp. 213, 200, 218). More importantly, this allegedly Machiavellian “innovation” is also among the most prominent themes of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus (see Book 1. 5 and Book 2), a work which goes unmentioned in The Machiavellian Moment despite it being the only book Machiavelli explicitly recommends in the Prince for further reading.

28 Aristotle Politics 1255a14–17, 1288a38–41, 1295a25–32, 1325b38, 1331b40–a2; Nicomachean Ethics 1178a24–b24, 1098a10–20, 1108a23–31. Madison, James, Letter to Jefferson, 8 02 1825, in The Republic of Letters, vol. 3, ed. Smith, James Morton (New York: Norton and Company, 1995), p. 1924.Google Scholar

29 Salkever, , Finding the Mean, pp. 230–31.Google Scholar

30 Pocock, , Machiavellian Moment, pp. 175, 207–08, 316–17Google Scholar. SeeSullivan, , “Momentary Moment,” 314Google Scholar. Machiavelli does use traditional teleological language, but for the non-traditional purpose of showing how “form” must be imposed on recalcitrant “matter” through a continuous effort of the human will. See Machiavelli, , Discourses, 1.16–17, 3. 1, 1. 1.Google Scholar

31 For an elaboration of the motives and consequences of this break, see Manent, Pierre, La cité de l'homme (Paris: Fauard, 1994).Google Scholar