J.G.A. Pocock, Historian Who Argued for Historical Context, Dies at 99 - The New York T... - 0 views
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J.G.A. Pocock, who brought new perspectives to historical scholarship by arguing that the first step in understanding events of the past is to identify their linguistic and intellectual context
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Among the most important were “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century” (1957), “The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition” (1975) and, most notably, “Barbarism and Religion,” a six-volume study of the life and times of Edward Gibbon,
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Professor Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other like-minded scholars, known collectively as the Cambridge School, came to prominence in the late 1960s with a fresh approach to the study of political thought, characterized by an emphasis on context and an unwillingness to assume that all ideas and problems were viewed in the past as they would be viewed today.
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“Pocock rejected the idea that politics or philosophy addressed the same problems over time — what justice meant for Aristotle did not mean the same for Hobbes or for Rousseau,”
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The Cambridge School attracted devotees across the world in departments of politics, history, philosophy, literature and language — scholars who were admonished to set aside any modern-day assumptions and prejudices they might hold when delving into the past.
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“Readers, Christian or non-believing, who may find themselves involved in analyses of thought they consider obsolete or false, are asked to remember that they are studying the history of a time when such thinking was offered and read seriously,” he wrote.
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Professor Pocock’s first book, “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law,” made clear that he would not be a conventional historian. The book asked how people in the 17th century viewed their past, and he wasn’t satisfied with drawing on the go-to philosopher of the period, John Locke. As Colin Kidd wrote in The London Review of Books in 2008, the book “drove a bypass around Locke” and “concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady.”
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“The Machiavellian Moment” cemented Professor Pocock’s reputation among historians, and it continued to grow from there. The first volume of “Barbarism and Religion” came out in 1999, when Professor Pocock was in his mid-70s. Volume 6 appeared in 2015. He also edited or co-edited “The Political Works of James Harrington” (1977), “Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1987) and “The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800” (1993), among other books.
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“Pocock’s central contention,” the Oxford historian Keith Thomas wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1986, “is that a work of political thought can only be understood if the reader is aware of the contemporary linguistic constraints to which its author was subject, for these constraints prescribed both his subject matter and the way in which that subject matter was conceptualized.”
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its application to the history of political ideas forms a great contrast to the assumptions of the 1950s, when it was widely thought that the close reading of a text by an analytic philosopher was sufficient to establish its meaning, even though the philosopher was quite innocent of any knowledge of the period in which the text was written or of the linguistic traditions within which its author operated.”
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“Historians need to understand that the history of discourse is not a simple linear sequence in which new patterns overcome and replace the old,” he wrote in 1988 in a preface to a reissue of “Politics, Language and Time,” a 1971 essay collection, “but a complex dialogue in which these patterns persist in transforming one another.”