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    The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
    The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
    The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
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    The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

    By John Greville Agard Pocock and Richard Whatmore

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    Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Pocock shows that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which Pocock calls the "Machiavellian moment."

    After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and he relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought.

    This Princeton Classics edition of The Machiavellian Moment features a new introduction by Richard Whatmore.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781400883516
    The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

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      The Machiavellian Moment - John Greville Agard Pocock

      THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

      THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

      Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

      J. G. A. Pocock

      With a new introduction by Richard Whatmore

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Princeton and Oxford

      Copyright © 1975 by Princeton University Press

      Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, NJ 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

      All Rights Reserved

      First paperback edition, 1975

      Second paperback edition, with a new afterword, 2003

      Princeton Classics edition, with a new introduction by Richard Whatmore, 2016

      Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17223-1

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945835

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Linotype Janson

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION

      [I]

      The Machiavellian Moment has awed and sometimes overwhelmed readers since its publication on May 21, 1975. Reviewers, even those who were critical, quickly identified the book as a masterpiece. For intellectual historians it confirmed that a new discipline had indeed been established. For scholars across the social sciences and the humanities, The Machiavellian Moment presented a model of historical practice. Over forty years its arguments and its method have been attacked and defended; the consequences of the book for historians and political theorists have been endlessly debated. It has attained the status of a classic and must be placed among the most significant works of history to have appeared in the later twentieth century, equivalent to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) or Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In many respects the book continues to define the practice of intellectual history and is the most recognizable example of intellectual-historical research, alongside Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). Reading The Machiavellian Moment is a rite of passage.

      A sense of how distinctive The Machiavellian Moment was can be gleaned by comparing it with a landmark work of 1975, the long-awaited Hume’s Philosophical Politics by Duncan Forbes. Forbes’s work transformed Hume studies. Pocock’s book altered the way the history of political thought was written. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison) was published in English and in French in April of the same year. Both works articulated new perspectives upon the past. Each author faced an array of negative responses. The Machiavellian Moment has stood the test of time in that scholars continue to use its categories and its conclusions, especially concerning ideas about politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This justifies a new edition of The Machiavellian Moment. The last appeared in 2002; its afterword by John Pocock supplied a history of the book’s reception and the response of its author to a variety of interlocutors, many of whom had misunderstood the book’s contents and its author’s intentions. The foreword to this edition adds to what we know by outlining a brief and partial history of the writing of The Machiavellian Moment. In so doing I have been aided by a number of intellectual historians, including John Pocock himself. Special thanks go to Quentin Skinner, who characteristically went beyond the call of duty in supplying me with copies of letters to him from John Pocock, written between 1968 and 1974. These are especially significant because most of John Pocock’s letters from this period appear to have been lost. The sole aim of the foreword is to persuade new readers to go further and read The Machiavellian Moment itself.

      [II]

      At some point during the Lent term of 1969, running from January to March of that year, John Greville Agard Pocock met Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner in the tearoom of the University Library at Cambridge. Pocock, then forty-five and on sabbatical from Washington University in St. Louis, had been in contact with Skinner since the early 1960s; Skinner, later professor of political science (1978) and Regius Professor of History (1996), was at the time lecturer in history at Cambridge and fellow of Christ’s College. Pocock knew Cambridge well. Born in London, he had moved at the age of three to New Zealand because his father, Lewis Greville Pocock, had been appointed professor of classics at Canterbury College. After graduating MA from Canterbury himself, John Pocock moved to Cambridge in 1948, where he completed a PhD under the supervision of Herbert Butterfield in 1952. After holding academic posts at Otago, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and at Canterbury, Pocock moved to Missouri in 1966 as the William Eliot Smith Professor of History. By this time he was well known among historians as the author of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, a book that had appeared to great acclaim in 1957.¹ The Ancient Constitution explained how the histories available to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and French jurists framed and influenced the politics they considered to be legitimate and practically realizable.²

      Pocock was also recognized for writing about how to undertake research into the history of political thought. Between 1960 and 1968, in a series of articles, he explained the method behind The Ancient Constitution and its application to other subjects that interested him, including ancient Chinese philosophy, civic humanism, Thomas Hobbes, and Edmund Burke.³ Pocock understood historic authors to have existed within communities of individuals using languages, or discourses, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and a set of assumptions that governed the understanding of ideas and their employment in practical politics. Scholars were advised to identify the discourses operating at a particular point in time, forming an ideological context or paradigm, and available to authors to frame, shape, and express their arguments. The next step was to work out how these discourses set limits to the political possibilities open to a writer. An author’s utterances were then interrogated to see how far they were confirming or modifying the discourses or paradigms they were operating within. Authors would engage with discourses and paradigms sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, and their interlocutors who received and engaged with their arguments did exactly the same.

      The use of the term paradigm by Pocock underlined the influence on Pocock’s work of Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared as a book in 1962. Kuhn employed the term paradigm shift to describe the transition of knowledge within a scientific community from normal science, governed by an accepted set of beliefs, to another set of beliefs, incommensurable with the former normal science, but deemed to be more reflective of objective reality. Pocock was interested in the paradigms that operated in political communities, the accepted norms that imposed particular ways of thinking upon historical actors, and which could be seen to evolve and to be transformed in different circumstances, and sometimes to have collapsed and disappeared. At the beginning of 1969 Pocock was about to complete a major project, a collection of essays that appeared in 1971 as Politics, Language, and Time. This included six essays that had already been published in other places in the 1960s, and two new essays that framed the rest. The latter concerned the identity of political thought and the proper method to undertake research into it. These two essays, Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought and On the Non-Revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism and Afterpiece, reaffirmed Pocock’s view that the study of the history of political thought was itself undergoing a paradigm shift.⁴

      Other historians of political thought were coming to similar conclusions in the early 1960s about the proper method of studying historical texts. Two who articulated the approach in print, following Pocock’s The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry, were John Dunn, whose The Identity of the History of Ideas appeared in 1968, and Quentin Skinner, whose The Limits of Historical Explanations and Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas were published in 1966 and 1969, respectively.⁵ John Dunn, like Skinner, was working at the University of Cambridge. Pocock, Skinner, and Dunn shared the goal of revealing what an author of a particular text was doing in writing a text, and explaining how a writer’s intentions were received and modified by other authors engaging with an original text. One of the central consequences of the approach was to broaden the study of political thought beyond the presumed canonical texts; the original title of Skinner’s Meaning and Understanding was The Unimportance of the Great Texts in the History of Political Thought.⁶ The aspiration was to abandon approaches founded on the assumption that identical questions were being asked by significant writers throughout history. Equally, the meaning of a text was not to be worked out either from the study of the text as a stand-alone document, or by sole reference to the social and economic context of its production.

      Although Dunn and Skinner published their essays toward the end of the 1960s, connections between them and Pocock had been established earlier. The sense of shared endeavor, Pocock has written, was evident on the appearance of Skinner’s iconoclastic first published articles on Thomas Hobbes and on the English Revolution in 1964, 1965, and 1966.⁷ The same can be said of Dunn’s equally transformative work on Locke, appearing from 1967.⁸ Such work, Pocock has noted about Skinner, laid the foundations of an alliance between us, and with others, that nothing seems likely to shake.⁹ Skinner and Dunn too have acknowledged the kinship that they recognized on reading Pocock’s writings.¹⁰ New work was shared prior to publication. After Dunn sent two articles on Locke to Pocock, the latter responded by deciding "to send both of you that last bunch of scripts, because I wanted to show [Dunn] what I’d been doing in an effort to set up a model of political thought as an activity. The last bunch of scripts" was most of the contents of what became Politics, Language, and Time in 1971.¹¹ By the time Pocock was due to visit Cambridge from North America at the end of 1968, Dunn was in West Africa, and moving into new research fields.¹² To Skinner, on October 8, 1968, Pocock wrote, It sounds very much as if you were working on the same thing [political thought as an activity] from a standpoint less sociological and more philosophical than mine. He added, I wonder if we should consider some kind of a joint manifesto.¹³ Over the following years Pocock seriously contemplated writing a monograph on method to be entitled either The Cave of Speech or How to Do Things to People with Words.¹⁴ In a letter of December 1969 Pocock referred to the Kuhn-Skinner-Pocock approach. The question Pocock felt all three were addressing was How to Do Things to People with Words and How to Respond to People’s Attempts to Do Things to You. The difference was that Kuhn saw paradigms in scientific terms, as a mode of inquiry, and did not want to envisage them in political thought as a mode of rhetoric and persuasion. Pocock did, however, seek to involve Kuhn by writing to him, and sent to him a copy of Politics, Language, and Time inscribed, in acknowledgement of a debt he probably does not want acknowledged.¹⁵ Although Pocock did not receive a reply, they remained on good terms.

      The links between Pocock and Skinner were especially close in the late 1960s not only because of their similar view of how to undertake research into the history of political ideas. It was also because they shared an interest in the Commonwealth tradition of writings identified by Caroline Robbins, and in the implications for Robbins’s genealogy of Hans Baron’s perspective on Florentine republicanism.¹⁶ Pocock had submitted to Skinner drafts of the chapters of the large work he had been working on since the early 1960s, and received in return fulsome comment. An indication of Skinner’s importance to Pocock’s ongoing research during these years is that Pocock dedicated Politics, Language, and Time to Quentin Skinner, the University of Canterbury, and the literary scholar John M. Wallace.¹⁷ By the time Skinner and Pocock were planning to meet in Cambridge, Pocock was reporting that his large manuscript was in a curious state … I reached mid-point yesterday [October 7, 1968], in the sense that it’s in four parts: theoretical introduction, Florentine, French and English. Pocock stated that he had completed the theoretical part three years ago, in 1965. He had reached the end of the Italian section yesterday. He also provided a summary of the argument as it stood in the final months of 1968:

      The introduction lays down the idea that constitutional thought is thought about particular political systems existing in secular time, and that the history of Renaissance thought is the history of the struggle against the limitations of the conceptual modes they had—experience-custom-prudence, providence-apocalyptic-chiliasm, fortuna-humanism-republicanism—for talking about the particular and secular. I then go on to apply this scheme to Florentine thought, and it seems to me to work out very well; but it has involved me in writing the only full-dress study of theory during 1494–1530 which I’ve seen—at any rate in English—placing Savonarola, Guicciardini, Machiavelli and Giannotti side by side in a developing context (and I even throw Contrarini in at the finish, in order to bring out the Venetian element a little more clearly). The result does excite me: it plays hell with a lot of traditional ideas about Machiavelli, who comes out much closer to an Aristotelian context than he’s supposed to … Strange and exciting things do keep happening, but the trouble is that I must have about 120,000 words in manuscript already, and if I go on to deal with French and English thought on a comparable scale I shall end up with a book three or four times the size of The Ancient Constitution.¹⁸

      The full story needs to be told of how Pocock arrived at Cambridge at the end of 1968 with so much done and, by early 1969, so much still to do on what became The Machiavellian Moment. What follows are a series of points about some of the factors that led Pocock to write a book that vindicated the new method of approaching the study of the past.

      [III]

      Pocock’s intellectual journey began at Christ Church and at the University of Canterbury. It was at Canterbury that he first studied the principal forms of government and the history of political thought, the latter through George H. Sabine’s A History of Political Theory (1937), moving from the ancient city-states before Plato to Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism.¹⁹ When Pocock arrived at Cambridge in 1948, his work became greatly influenced by his supervisor, Herbert Butterfield. Butterfield, in The Englishman and His History (1944), had become interested in Robert Brady and the controversy over the origins of the House of Commons. This led Pocock to work on seventeenth-century constitutionalism. By the time Pocock was ensconced in Cambridge, however, Butterfield had moved on to research that became The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (1949) and George III, Lord North and the People (1949). Despite increasingly divergent interests, Butterfield fully supported Pocock and was instrumental in the first steps of Pocock’s career. Butterfield arranged a research fellowship at Durham University, where Pocock completed the writing of his dissertation, in addition to helping Pocock toward his first publication.²⁰ Butterfield also supported Pocock’s return to Cambridge in 1956 as a research fellow at St John’s College. Encouraging Pocock to go his own way was undoubtedly key, and their relationship was good but never close.²¹ Peter Laslett influenced Pocock’s approach to political thought more profoundly. Pocock has always acknowledged this, saying that he was present at the creation of Laslett’s innovative approach to the study of historical texts.²²

      After war work at Bletchley Park, where he decoded Japanese naval intelligence, Laslett returned to Cambridge as a research fellow at St John’s College and began studying the gentry in seventeenth-century Kent.²³ He became interested in political ideas that were frequently circulated among gentry families in manuscript form. One of these texts, he discovered, was the Kent gentleman Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the natural power of Kings.²⁴ Laslett was certain that Filmer wrote the work for friends who discussed politics in their manors, forming what Laslett termed a dispersed university.²⁵ Laslett’s edition of Filmer’s Patriarcha and Other Political Works appeared in 1949, revealing the different context of the writing of the text and its posthumous publication.²⁶ The point was that the Filmer who mattered to the history of political thought was the Filmer whose work appeared in the 1670s, when the writer of the manuscripts had been dead for almost two decades. Laslett was appointed lecturer in the Faculty of History in 1953; by this time he was already delving into the history of another case where delayed publication altered the reception of a text and therefore its received meaning: John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.²⁷ Laslett’s definitive edition of 1960 revealed for the first time that Locke’s work was an exclusion tract, written around 1681, rather than a revolution tract justifying the events of 1688/89.

      Pocock has written that it was Laslett who revealed the mystery of contextualisation.²⁸ When Pocock met Laslett, he had already become aware of the complexities of contextualization, more so than Laslett himself. Pocock introduced himself to Laslett because he had discovered a manuscript at the Inner Temple of a letter of James Tyrrell’s to William Petyt, mentioning Patriarcha, and exhorting the latter to reply to Filmer’s Freeholder’s Grand Inquest. The appearance of Filmer’s works long after his death generated responses written in idioms as diverse as Locke’s Two Treatises, Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government, William Petyt’s The Ancient Rights of the Commons of England, and Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus. Filmer’s meaning was understood by each author to have different implications for politics, yielding a more detailed and more nuanced portrait of the controversies of the time.

      When Pocock met Laslett again at Cambridge in 1956, Laslett had changed focus. He was now interested in the capacity of a linguistic philosophy inspired by logical positivism to address societal problems. This was reflected in the series of books he edited from 1957 entitled Philosophy, Politics and Society. Few of the contributors had a sense of history, and the dominant attitude was that no statement had a meaning beyond the criteria it appealed to. Although Pocock contributed to the series in 1962, he had already heard a version of the approach Laslett now favored at Canterbury in 1945, where Karl Popper gave the lectures that became The Open Society and Its Enemies, asserting the claim that every statement must contain means for its own falsification. Laslett later underwent a further intellectual evolution when he became fascinated by the extent to which patriarchal social structures in the family and in the state mirrored the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century reality. The investigation of social structures through the techniques of historical demography, he decided, was more important than the study of the works of individual thinkers using contextual analysis. This led to the publication of his best-known work, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (1965).

      Other figures at Cambridge impressed the young John Pocock. One was Michael Oakeshott, who had been appointed university lecturer in history at Cambridge in 1933. In the same year he published Experience and Its Modes, which described independent and self-consistent worlds of discourse, each the invention of a human intelligence. On returning to Cambridge after the war, Oakeshott completed his "Introduction to Leviathan," took over the general editorship of the Cambridge Journal between 1947 and 1954, and there published the essays Rationalism in Politics (1947) and Rational Conduct (1950). In 1949 he moved to Nuffield College, Oxford, and in 1951 to a professorship at the London School of Economics. Oakeshott’s distinctive skepticism and historicism were very much in evidence in the later 1940s. Pocock wrote several essays for Oakeshott at this time and later contributed to the festschrift presented to him on his retirement in 1968. He has written that Oakeshott has a good deal to do with my sense of history. Another influence upon him was Duncan Forbes, whose The Liberal Anglican Idea of History was published in 1952, and who had begun to publish significant articles in the Cambridge Journal and the English Historical Review. The most important, for Pocock, were to be those concerned with Scottish thought and scientific Whiggism.²⁹ Pocock noted in the revised edition of The Ancient Constitution (1987) that in 1957, the date of the original edition, the Scottish Enlightenment "was known to me mainly through a series of articles by Duncan Forbes in the Cambridge Journal."³⁰

      Pocock returned to New Zealand once more in 1958, having an offer of a permanent position at Canterbury. Here he was tasked with developing a new department of political science, although the subject had been taught at Canterbury for many years. His first appointments were Austin Mitchell, later well known in British politics; Jim Flynn, an Aristotelian from Chicago who became famous for his interpretation of IQ tests; and Richard Kennaway, who worked on foreign policy in New Zealand. Pocock also worked alongside the Canterbury historians, whose strongly Namierite eighteenth-century specialists included Neville Phillips, Marie Peters, John Owen, and John Cookson. It was at Canterbury, between 1958 and 1965, that The Machiavellian Moment was first planned, and it was there that some of the chapters were drafted: those concerning court and country ideology, concerning standing armies and the mixed constitution, the assertions about which Pocock called neo-Harringtonian (chapters 11 and 12 in the final version). When Pocock moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1966, it might be said that in scholarly terms he moved from the world of Caroline Robbins to that of Hans Baron, from the controversy generated by the Commonwealthmen to the Florentines of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

      Pocock spent a summer at Columbia University at the medievalist Norman Cantor’s invitation in 1964, and Cantor asked him to write about European constitutionalist thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a series Cantor was editing for John Wiley and Sons. Pocock, alongside historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Douglas Adair, was already being associated with the republican synthesis, because of his long-standing interest in Harrington and because of his 1965 article in the William and Mary Quarterly, Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century. The Aristotelian and Florentine background to the story of the foundation and survival of republics took shape at Washington University.

      [IV]

      When Pocock wrote the original preface to The Machiavellian Moment in November 1973, he noted that the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously … over the whole scene. This was without [Baron’s] prior knowledge. The work evidenced the influence of a number of well-known scholars, including Felix Gilbert, whose Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence had appeared in 1965; William Bousma, whose Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation was published in 1968; Donald Weinstein, the reader of the manuscript submitted by Pocock to Princeton University Press, and the author of Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (1970); Gordon Wood, whose The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 appeared in 1969; and Jack Hexter, then expected to be completing his own study of Machiavelli, which became The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel (1973). Also notable was the influence of Washington University colleagues, including Peter Riesenberg, whose Inalienability of Sovereignty in Medieval Political Thought had appeared in 1956; John Murrin, an expert on colonial and revolutionary history; and the political theorist Richard Flathman. Such colleagues would have aided Pocock in the early 1970s when he was rewriting early drafts concerning Florence. In November 1971 Pocock reported to Skinner that The Machiavellian Moment is now up to 375 pages of holograph and typed extracts from the Florentines and will hit 500 before it is done. This was the time when he was trying to get that chapter on Giannotti and Contrarini into shape. Pocock had also worked out what the final sections of The Machiavellian Moment were going to be. The sections on the Florentines would lead into the final section, ‘Value and History in the Pre-Revolutionary Atlantic’—two chapters on the Anglicisation of the republic, and one on the Americanisation of virtue.³¹

      In the spring of 1972 Pocock considered himself to be within two chapters of completion. On the book’s plan as he then conceived it, that meant that there would be thirteen chapters in total. Pocock wrote to Skinner that one night he had awoken shaken with hysterical laughter at the realization that there will be thirteen chapters in all, thus demonstrating the veracity of Straussian number-mysticism. The tenth and eleventh chapters dealt with English material at the moment of Harrington’s advent. These were organized under a modes of consciousness scheme. The final chapters were then to cover the neo-Harringtonian, American and (obliquely at least) French eighteenth-century stuff. As long as he could avoid the Scylla of rehashing and the Charybdis of breaking new ground, he expected to be finished by May, leaving the summer of 1972 for his new edition of Harrington that Cambridge University Press planned to publish. Although Pocock admitted he was a little troubled at flinging the reader into the huge prairies of Anglo-thought, after so many chapters of intense analysis of the Florentines, he could not imagine a better way of covering all the ground.³² In early May 1972, however, he reported still having two chapters to go, and being faced with the difficulty of how to recount the survival of civic humanist values in a world where they can’t be explained as grounded on the limitations of medieval epistemology.³³

      It took until October 12, 1972, for Pocock to declare that the Machiavelli book is now finished. He now began to look for a publisher and at first approached W. W. Norton. The final parts of The Machiavellian Moment had changed. Between May and October 1972 Pocock added two chapters. He had made a series of discoveries when working over the sections of the book concerned with early eighteenth-century English thought, illustrating the widespread fears of the consequences of commercial society for the human personality. The eighteenth-century predicament was to be saddled with [a political] language that defined value as static and history as necessarily involving movement away from it. Pocock described to Skinner a process of scales falling from his eyes, noting in passing that the result did further damage to C. B. Macpherson’s theory of the rise of possessive individualism during the seventeenth century (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: from Hobbes to Locke, 1962):

      All this [revision] was blown open by my discovery, in working through things like Defoe’s Review [of the Affairs of France, 1704–13] in search of origins for the Court thesis, of a presentation of Credit (public paper credit) as an inconstant female figure and irrational historical dynamic, unmistakeably none other than Fortuna (and to a lesser degree Fantasia) under a new name. So I had to rewrite my whole interpretation of the debate under William and Anne, using the title Neo-Machiavellian political economy and arguing for an eighteenth-century version of the Machiavellian Moment in which (1) the virtue-fortune-corruption pattern is repeated as virtue-commerce-corruption (2) early capitalism is apprehended, in a thoroughly un-Lockean and un-Macphersonian way, under the paradigm of credit-fantasy-passion-honour, so that an eighteenth-century version of false consciousness appears and we get the beginning of the sort of thought later to become Marxian.

      The additional chapters served as the ideal prelude to the final chapter on the Americanization of virtue, which served to put Jeffersonian classicism and messianism together under the same Machiavellian-Harringtonian umbrella, and in effect to tackle the American problem of the retention of pre-modern values in a post-modern society. Pocock then noted that completing The Machiavellian Moment had been immense fun. One downside was that he could no longer make a jest in the text at the expense of the Straussians. He was, however, about to enjoy a sabbatical in Canberra, where he would be meeting another visitor, Crawford Brough Macpherson. Pocock was already relishing flinging all this at him.³⁴ But despite being poles apart in terms of their view of political thought, the two got on well.

      In January 1973 W. W. Norton rejected The Machiavellian Moment, on the grounds that such a large book could be published only by a university press. Pocock approached Princeton University Press. By April a report had arrived on the manuscript.³⁵ Pocock was immediately aware that the anonymous reviewer was Donald Weinstein. Weinstein’s criticism focused on the first two sections of the work, arguing that rhetoric played too small a role in the section on the Florentines, and that the account of medieval thought was unduly Augustinian; the latter ought to be further broadened to include figures such as Eusebius. Pocock managed to deal with such criticisms to the satisfaction of the Press. At the same time he was apprehensive. Once again he turned to Skinner. He was especially concerned about the relationship between the first part of the book and the subsequent contents. Pocock wrote that the conventional reader will always be bothered by the fact that a book largely about Machiavelli starts at such a distance from him.³⁶ Pocock went so far as to ask Skinner whether he minded being thanked in the acknowledgments for his contribution to The Machiavellian Moment. While it was the case that no one has read the whole damn thing, the extent of Skinner’s long-standing advice on chapter after chapter put him at risk of being partly held responsible for the book. Pocock wondered whether Skinner might prefer not to be mentioned at all. As he had throughout their correspondence, Skinner boosted Pocock’s confidence concerning the book and underlined the fact that in his view there was no disjunction between the sections.

      On December 6, 1973, the final manuscript of The Machiavellian Moment went off in the mail to Princeton. Skinner had pressed Pocock to enlarge the scope of the argument, and Pocock confessed that he had again revised the final section, and provided Skinner with a summary of what he had and had not done:

      I looked back towards Locke from a rather Arendtian standpoint I found I’d got into, in order to remark that nobody seems to have much idea what became of [the] labour theory of value between Locke and Adam Smith. On the premise that we’re looking at the genesis of the later Marxian concern with reification, etc.; homo faber is clearly important, but I can’t find him in the earlier eighteenth century. Incidentally, I have an Augustan seminar going on, and Mandeville is coming through as a very striking person: his self-liking—a form of false consciousness—seems to be well beyond Hobbes’ glory, and his commerce similarly ahead of Locke’s property. But I haven’t tried to get that into the book.³⁷

      Such sentences indicated that for Pocock himself, as for subsequent readers of The Machiavellian Moment, the book was a call for new work on a myriad of subjects newly illuminated by its contents. Pocock was invigorated. Finishing The Machiavellian Moment coincided with a time of personal change for Pocock and his family. After long periods of uncertainty about whether to leave Missouri, he finally determined to accept a long-standing offer from Johns Hopkins, where he became professor of history in 1974.

      [V]

      When he was writing The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock saw the work as vindicating a method for the study of political thought defined as a multiplicity of linguistic acts performed by language users in particular historical contexts. Pocock’s sense of context was always broader than that of other historians working on similar territory. This shaped the structure and content of the book and contributed to the grandeur so many readers felt on finishing it; they had been engaging with a singular historical imagination characterized by unparalleled depth and vision. Despite the acknowledged debts to a large number of historians, it was always the case that Pocock was doing something different. Part of this comes across in a partial outline of The Machiavellian Moment that survived in the papers of Donald Weinstein, an outline written by Pocock in 1968 describing what made Renaissance political ideas distinctive:

      I began some years ago to construct a study of Renaissance constitutional thought, and was led early on to ask myself the question what constitutional thought might be defined as being. I formulated the idea that it was political thought aimed at the understanding of particular political systems—Florence, Venice, France, England—rather than political society as an abstract universal. This led next to the reflection that late scholastic thought was very well equipped with concepts for dealing with universals, not too badly off for concepts relating the particular to the universal, but far from well supplied with concepts for understanding the relation, notably the succession or sequential relation, of one particular to another. By particular I mean, first, the particular phenomenon or event, next the particular decision aimed at regulating the phenomenon or event and ordering it within a social structure, and finally the particular national or municipal governing system viewed as built up from the tissue of particular decisions and the institutional structures to which they gave rise. I found evidence that fifteenth-century minds were by no means unaware of this perspective upon politics, but encountered great difficulty in reducing it to rationality, largely because reason, as they understood the term, was concerned with universal, abstract and timeless categories; which suggested the further reflection that the particular was seen very much as time-bound, as that which had a beginning and came to an end in time, and that time itself was viewed largely as the dimension of this very imperfectly understood particularity.³⁸

      Pocock went on to explain that following such an approach to past ideas led inexorably to viewing Renaissance constitutionalist thought as late-medieval historicism:

      It followed therefore that the kind of intellect I was defining tended to see the succession of particular events and actions in time as non-rational but that such means as it did possess of rendering the particular intelligible were also the means available to it of understanding the sequence of events in time and of rendering political actions viable and political structures stable in time. At this stage a study of late-medieval or Renaissance constitutionalism had turned into a study of late-medieval historicism; and, rather enjoying the prospect, I proceeded to construct a model of those means of understanding the particular and time which appeared to me to have been available. These are, basically, the languages or paradigmatic structures which I shall be employing.

      The final sentence is significant because it underlines what has made Pocock’s work unique. Many historians and political theorists were coming to the conclusion that understanding ideas in time entailed identifying the plural languages in which they were formulated. Pocock made the point that one of these languages constituted historical argument, establishing with other languages what Pocock has termed a discourse of history or historiography. For Pocock this established a gap between political thought or political theory and philosophy, the consequence being that history or historiography became a form of political thought and central to its enunciation through time. While Quentin Skinner and other leading historians of political thought were reconstructing the legal and political philosophies that led to the modern conception of the state and the civil and political rights of its citizens, Pocock continued to study historiography and civil society. This led him to chart the political limits to premodern economics, and the gradual adaptation of political thought and history to commercial society, through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.³⁹ Undertaking such a task led Pocock to demand a paradigm shift within British history.⁴⁰ It also set him on the course of revealing the full extent of Edward Gibbon’s mental world, in the remarkable Barbarism and Religion series, published in six volumes between 1999 and 2015.

      Richard Whatmore

      ¹ As Caroline Robbins put it, No more stimulating study of a seminal period in Atlantic history has appeared during the last decade. Review of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 2 (1958): 223–25.

      ² J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; 1987).

      ³ Pocock, Burke and the Ancient Constitution—A Problem in the History of Ideas, Historical Journal 3, no. 2 (1960): 125–43; The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry, in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd ser., ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 183–202; The Origins of the Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach, Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 2 (1962): 209–46; Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay on the Apparent Meanings of Chinese Philosophy, Political Science 16 (1964): 3–31; Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (1965): 549–83; Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes, in The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield, ed. J. H. Elliott and H. G. Koenigsberger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding, in Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Michael Oakeshott, ed. Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

      ⁴ Pocock, Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought and On the Non-Revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism and Afterpiece, in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3–41, 273–91.

      ⁵ John Dunn, The Identity of the History of Ideas, Philosophy 43, no. 164 (1968): 85–104; Quentin Skinner, The Limits of Historical Explanations, Philosophy 41, no. 157 (1966): 199–215; Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53.

      ⁶ Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrjämäki, "Quentin Skinner. On Encountering the Past," Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6 (2002): 34—63.

      ⁷ Skinner, Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan,’ Historical Journal 7, no. (1964): 321–33; History and Ideology in the English Revolution, Historical Journal 8, no. 2 (1965): 151–78; The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought, Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966): 286–317; Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England, Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 2 (1966): 153–67.

      ⁸ John Dunn, Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke, Historical Journal 10, no. 2 (1967): 153–82; Justice and the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory, Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 68–87.

      ⁹ Pocock, Foundations and Moments, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39; see also Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History, in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 123–42. The essay was originally published in Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 532–50.

      ¹⁰ Quentin Skinner, A Reply to My Critics, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 233; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 101, 143.

      ¹¹ Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

      ¹² Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

      ¹³ John Pocock to Quentin Skinner, October 8, 1968, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ¹⁴ Pocock, Verbalising a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech, in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method, 33–50. The essay was originally published in Political Theory 1, no. 1 (1973): 27–44.

      ¹⁵ Pocock to Skinner, July 12, 1971, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ¹⁶ Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955; 1966). Skinner published The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole, in Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa, 1974), and had plans to write a book that went as far as 1800. See Mark Goldie, "The Context of The Foundations," in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3–19.

      ¹⁷ John M. Wallace, professor of English at Chicago, was the author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

      ¹⁸ Pocock to Skinner, October 8, 1968, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ¹⁹ On New Zealand and Sabine’s book, see Pocock, Working on Ideas in Time, in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method, 20–32.

      ²⁰ Pocock, Robert Brady, 1627–1700: A Cambridge Historian of the Restoration, Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1951): 186–204.

      ²¹ John Pocock, private correspondence, November 11, 2015.

      ²² Pocock, Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds, International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006): 7–17.

      ²³ Peter Laslett, The Gentry of Kent in 1640, Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 148–64.

      ²⁴ Laslett, Sir Robert Filmer: The Man versus the Whig Myth, Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 523–46.

      ²⁵ Laslett, The Gentry of Kent in 1640, 149, and later in The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner, 1973), 192.

      ²⁶ Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949).

      ²⁷ Laslett, "The 1690 Edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: Two States," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 1, no. 4 (1952): 341–47.

      ²⁸ Pocock, private correspondence, November 18, 2015.

      ²⁹ Duncan Forbes, "Historismus in England," Cambridge Journal 4 (1951): 387–400; James Mill and India, Cambridge Journal 5 (1951): 19–33; The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott, Cambridge Journal 7 (1953):, 20–35; Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar, Cambridge Journal 7 (1954): 649–51.

      ³⁰ Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect, 371.

      ³¹ Pocock to Skinner, November 5, 1971, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³² Pocock to Skinner, March 29, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³³ Pocock to Skinner, May 10, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³⁴ Pocock to Skinner, October 12, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³⁵ Pocock to Skinner, January 26, 1973, and April 27, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³⁶ Pocock to Skinner, July 26, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³⁷ Pocock to Skinner, December 6, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

      ³⁸ Pocock, A Method, a Model, and Machiavelli, History Colloquium at Princeton, November 19, 1968, J.G.A Pocock Papers, Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful to Beverly Parker for identifying and sending this paper to me.

      ³⁹ Pocock, The Political Limits to Pre-modern Economics, in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990), 121–41.

      ⁴⁰ Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

      INTRODUCTION

      THIS BOOK is in two main parts, and the complexity of its theme must be the justification of its length. In the first half—subdivided into Parts One and Two—I attempt a treatment of Florentine thought in the era of Machiavelli, which groups him with his contemporaries and peers—Savonarola, Guicciardini, Giannotti, and others—in a manner not previously attempted in English; and I do this by seeking to situate Florentine republicanism in a context analyzed in the three chapters composing Part One. I here presume that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment. Further, I presume that the European intellect of this period was possessed of a limited number of ways of rendering secular time intelligible, which I discuss in the first three chapters and group under the headings of custom, grace, and fortune. The problem of the republic’s existence in time had to be dealt with by these means and no others; and it is the way in which the Florentines of the first quarter of the sixteenth century—Machiavelli in particular—stated and explored the problem thus posed which gives their thought its remarkable character.

      The Machiavellian moment is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. In the first place, it denotes the moment, and the manner, in which Machiavellian thought made its appearance; and here the reader is asked to remember that this is not a history of political thought, whatever that might be, in the last years of the Florentine republic, or a history of the political experience of Florentines in that era, designed to explain their articulation of the ideas studied. The moment in question is selectively and thematically defined. It is asserted that certain enduring patterns in the temporal consciousness of medieval and early modern Europeans led to the presentation of the republic, and the citizen’s participation in it, as constituting a problem in historical self-understanding, with which Machiavelli and his contemporaries can be seen both explicitly and implicitly contending. It became crucial in their times and remained so, largely as a result of what they did with it, for two or three centuries afterwards. Their struggle with this problem is presented as historically real, though as one selected aspect of the complex historical reality of their thought; and their moment is defined as that in which they confronted the problem grown crucial.

      In the second place, the Machiavellian moment denotes the problem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, this was spoken of as the confrontation of virtue with fortune and corruption; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how Machiavelli and his contemporaries pursued the intimations of these words, in the context of those ways of thinking about time explored in the earlier chapters. In seeking to show that Machiavelli was one of a number of greater and lesser men engrossed in the common pursuit of this problem, I hope also to show that this is an appropriate context in which to study his thought, and that to study it in this way may diminish the amount of magniloquent and unspecific interpretation to which it has been subjected.

      It is further affirmed that the Machiavellian moment had a continuing history, in the sense that secular political self-consciousness continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of Western thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode. To these continuing problems Machiavelli and his contemporaries, Florentine theory and its image of Venetian practice, left an important paradigmatic legacy: concepts of balanced government, dynamic virtù, and the role of arms and property in shaping the civic personality. In the second half of the book—Part Three—I pursue the history of the Machiavellian moment into English and American thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and seek to show that the English-speaking political tradition has been a bearer of republican and Machiavellian, as well as constitutionalist, Lockean and Burkean, concepts and values. The crucial figure here, it is asserted, is James Harrington, who brought about a synthesis of civic humanist thought with English political and social awareness, and of Machiavelli’s theory of arms with a common-law understanding of the importance of freehold property. The first three chapters of Part Three are devoted to a consideration of how a classical republican presentation of politics came to appear appropriate in the otherwise unlikely setting of Civil War England, where the conflict of Tudor monarchism with Puritan religious nationalism and sectarianism ensured the presence of many more competing styles and languages of thought than seems to have been the case in Florence. The steady growth of a neoclassical conception of politics, as in some sort an heir to Puritan millennialism, and its ascendancy in eighteenth-century England and America, is a phenomenon that requires exploration, and this the remainder of the book seeks to provide.

      The Machiavellian moment in its eighteenth-century form provides the subject of the concluding chapters, whose emphasis is increasingly American. The confrontation of virtue with corruption is seen to have been a vital problem in social and historical philosophy during that era, and its humanist and Machiavellian vocabulary is shown to have been the vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism, grounded in awareness of the elaborate conventions of public credit rather than of the more direct interchanges of the market. The role of fortune was increasingly assumed by the concepts of credit and commerce; but while this led thinkers to perceive secular time more as dynamic and less as merely disorderly, the antithesis of virtue with corruption—or virtue with commerce—continued to operate as the means of expressing the quarrel between value and personality on the one hand, history and society on the other, in its first modern and secular form. This quarrel culminates, so far as the eighteenth century is concerned, with the beginnings of a dialectical perception of history in Europe, and of a utopian perception of global space in America, where an essentially Renaissance awareness of time is seen to have endured into the nineteenth century. What started with Florentine humanists as far back as Leonardo Bruni is affirmed to have played an important role in the shaping of the modern sense of history, and of alienation from history.

      The book originated when Norman F. Cantor asked me to write a study of European constitutional thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a series he was then editing. It has developed far from his or my original intention during nearly ten years; but I must not neglect to acknowledge his initial encouragement, or the generosity of his then publishers (John Wiley and Sons) in releasing me from obligations which I had formed.

      When I seek to name those scholars whose work has meant most to me in writing this study, the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously if controversially (and entirely without his prior knowledge) over the whole scene. Among those whose works and conversations I have more immediately consulted, the names of Felix Gilbert, Donald Weinstein, William J. Bouwsma, John M. Wallace and Gordon S. Wood stand out in a host of others; and closer still to the historian’s workshop, J. H. Hexter (Yale), Peter Riesenberg and John M. Murrin (Washington University), Richard E. Flathman (University of Washington), and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge) have read and criticized various sections of the manuscript at various stages. They of course bear no responsibility for its contents. Mr. Skinner even suggested the title, though he is not to be blamed for what I have made of it. I should also like to thank Peter Fuss, Max Okenfuss, and Henry Shapiro, my colleagues in the St. Louis chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, who endured a great deal at my hands; and my dear wife, who organized the index at a time when we had many other things to do. And the Graduate School and History Department of Washington University have been an unfailing source of material, moral and intellectual support for eight years.

      J.G.A. POCOCK

      Washington University, St. Louis

      November 1973

      PART ONE

      PARTICULARITY AND TIME

      The Conceptual Background

      CHAPTER I

      THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

      A) Experience, Usage and Prudence

      [I]

      A SUSTAINED INTENTION throughout this book will be that of depicting early modern republican theory in the context of an emerging historicism, the product of the ideas and conceptual vocabularies which were available to medieval and Renaissance minds—such as C. S. Lewis called Old Western¹—for the purpose of dealing with particular and contingent events and with time as the dimension of contingent happenings. The republic or Aristotelian polis, as that concept reemerged in the civic humanist thought of the fifteenth century, was at once universal, in the sense that it existed to realize for its citizens all the values which men were capable of realizing in this life, and particular, in the sense that it was finite and located in space and time. It had had a beginning and would consequently have an end; and this rendered crucial both the problem of showing how it had come into being and might maintain its existence, and that of reconciling its end of realizing universal values with the instability and circumstantial disorder of its temporal life. Consequently, a vital component of republican theory—and, once this had come upon the scene, if no earlier, of all political theory—consisted of ideas about time, about the occurrence of contingent events of which time was the dimension, and about the intelligibility of the sequences (it is as yet too soon to say processes) of particular happenings that made up what we should call history. It is this which makes it possible to call republican theory an early form of historicism, though we shall find that many of the connotations of our word history were at that time borne by other words and their equivalents in various languages—the words usage, providence, and fortune among them. Well-developed conceptual vocabularies existed in which the implications of these and other terms were expanded, and these vocabularies to some extent cohered with one another; so that it is possible, and seems not improper, to reconstruct a scheme of ideas within which the sixteenth-century mind sought to articulate the equivalent of a philosophy of history. This, with its many difficulties and frustrations, constituted the conceptual framework within which the doctrine of the vivere civile—the ideal of active citizenship in a republic—must struggle to maintain itself; and that struggle is the subject of this book.

      The next three chapters therefore consist of an exposition of what appear to have been the chief of these vocabularies, the principal modes of rendering the particular phenomenon, the particular event in time, as far intelligible as possible. The assumption throughout will be that this was difficult: that the late medieval and Renaissance intellect found the particular less intelligible and less rational than the universal; that since the particular was finite, it was local both in space and time, so that time became a dimension of its being and consequently shared in the diminished rationality and intelligibility of the particular. The language employed suggests that this assumption is susceptible of a philosophical explanation. The vocabularies which will be isolated, and around which this book will be organized, will be seen to have been of a sub-philosophical nature and to have offered means of rendering time and the particular intelligible on the assumption that they were less than perfectly rational; and hypotheses will be put forward concerning late medieval philosophy, designed to show why this imperfect rationality may have troubled men’s minds.

      The following generalizations may be advanced. Medieval philosophy tended to debate whether the sole true objects of rational understanding were not universal categories or propositions which were independent of time and space. The process of arriving at knowledge of them had indeed to be carried out within time and space, but recognition of their truth or reality was grounded upon perceptions independent of either; there was a self-evidence which was timeless and non-circumstantial. Reality of this order consisted of universals, and the activity of reason consisted of the intellect’s ascent to recognition of the timeless rationality of universals. The truth of a self-evident proposition was self-contained and did not depend upon contingent recognition of some other proposition, still less upon evidence transitory in time and space; it was in this self-contained quality that timelessness largely consisted. In contrast, the knowledge of particulars was circumstantial, accidental, and temporal. It was based upon the sense-perceptions of the knower’s transitory body, and very often upon messages transmitted to his senses by other knowers concerning what their sense-perceptions had permitted them to sense, to know, or to believe. Both for this reason and because propositions concerning particular phenomena had to be constructed by moving through a dimension of contingency, in which one proposition was perpetually dependent upon another, knowledge of particulars was time-bound, just as the phenomena of which it was knowledge, localized by particularity in space and time, were time-bound themselves.

      If we use history as a name for this time-dimension, we can say that a scholastic philosophy of history emphasized its contingent and sub-rational character; but there are several senses in which we can say that the scholastic intellect did not offer a philosophy of history at all. By history we normally mean successions of events taking place in time, social and public rather than private and subjective in character, which we try to organize, first into narratives and second into processes; but this was not an objective which the scholastic intellect greatly valued. Narrative, the mere telling of a tale, it followed Aristotle in considering inferior to poetry, as poetry was inferior to philosophy, because it was inferior in bringing to light the universal significances of events; and these were best arrived at by thinking which abandoned the particular event altogether and rose above it to contemplation of universal categories. As for processes and time as the dimension of process, the process of change which the Aristotelian intellect singled out was that by which a thing came to be and then not to be: physis, the process by which it fulfilled its end, perfected its form, realized its potential, and then ceased—all of which are extensions of the idea of coming to

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