The Machiavellian Moment

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First edition

The Machiavellian Moment is a work of intellectual history by J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton University Press, 1975). It posits a connection between republican thought in early 16th century Florence, English-Civil War Britain, and the American Revolution.

A "Machiavellian moment" is that moment when a new republic first confronts the problem of maintaining the stability of its ideals and institutions. Machiavellian thought was a response to a series of crises facing early 16th century Florence in which a seemingly virtuous state was on the cusp of destruction. In response, Machiavelli sought to revive classical republican ideals. Works like The Prince and those of some pre-English Civil War thinkers and a group of American Revolutionary personalities all faced similar such moments and offered related sets of answers.

Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century[]

In 1965, J.G.A. Pocock published "Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century" in the William and Mary Quarterly. In this article, Pocock interrogated Machiavelli's focus on armed militancy in the Discorsi as a recourse for temporal stability in polities subject to the whims of fortuna. In Pocock's estimation, "Polybius was the most representative among the ancients and Machiavelli--the Machiavelli of the Discourses--among the moderns." In the 1656 The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington retained armed militancy as secondary to landholdings for temporal stability in polities: "Harrington conveys what was to be perhaps his chief gift to eighteenth-century political thought: the discovery of a means whereby the county [from "county assemblies"] freeholder could equate himself with the Greco-Roman polites and profess a wholly classical and Aristotelian doctrine of the relations between property, liberty, and power...Harrington's citizen may or may not be an entrepreneur, but he is primarily a freeholder...the right to bear arms [from Machiavelli's Discorsi], and the propertied independence enabling one to provide one's own, become the tests of citizenship in Harrington's England as they had been in Athens or Rome." Pocock nuanced his previous interpretations of James Harrington's writings and allowed for the possibility of freeholder entrepreneurship, but still held that "government" was more manifest than "trade" in his ideas.[1]

Of course, during the Second World War and more than a decade before contributions to this research field by Pocock, literati Zera S. Fink demonstrated that Polybian and Machiavellian ideas, the latter primarily in il Discorsi, had been transmitted into (what Fink described as) "the classical republican" minds of seventeenth-century England--one in particular, Fink averred, was none other than James Harrington.[2] Both Pocock and Hannah Arendt claimed that Fink's 1945 book on a "Venetian vogue" for "stability" by mixed government, and the 1942 article in which Fink examined il Discorsi passages translated and quoted in the works of James Harrington, partially germinated their research.[3] Pocock especially credited Fink for beginning a study on Englishmen "impressed by the stability of Venetian constitutional reforms" and the classical ideas that spawned such reforms. Pocock wished to further research and elaborate on this project: "...what I propose to do is investigate the significance in the eighteenth century of a current of ideas that stems mainly from James Harrington, but can be traced additionally to the seventeenth-century theorists studied some years ago by Z. S. Fink under the name of the 'classical republicans'...[Caroline Robbins' Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman illustrated] how regularly recourse was made, throughout the century, to a group of writers essentially the same as Fink's Venetian theorists."[4] Pocock, more than Fink and Hannah Arendt, critically crystallized a purpose of Machiavelli's il Discorsi. The Machiavellian promotion of armed militancy became a possible recourse for temporal stability in polities, connected not only to "reversals of fortune," but to "revolution" as a technical problem solved only by multiple approaches to mixed government.[5]

The remainder of J.G.A. Pocock's article appraised politicos that the Cambridge School historian dubbed the "neo-Harringtonians." Pocock charted the consequences of an "increased awareness of the growing importance of monetary relationships." It was the eighteenth-century "neo-Harringtonians" who narrated a "Gothic commonwealth of freeholders...an economy of masters and servants, defined mainly in agrarian and traditional terms," that had been lost to the early modern "corruption" of "money in government: of public finance...[and] a well-financed court bureaucracy... a Marxist might say that this was a [neo-]mercantilist rather than an entrepreneurial consciousness." The "neo-Harringtonians," extant dissidents against the "mercantile court" and "coffeehouse intellectuals living by their wit," began to deride "standing army" excursions against the landed gentry in their remonstrances, ostensibly "to win support from country gentlemen discontented with the progress of court government." The "neo-Harringtonians" demanded the replacement of this "instrument of corruption" with "an ancient institution known as the militia...where Harrington contrasted the republic of armed proprietors with the feudal combination of monarchy and aristocracy, the neo-Harringtonians contrasted it with the professional army maintained by the executive power."[6] Pocock concluded that "if the armed force of the nation is embodied only in this form [a militia], there can be no threat to public liberty or the public purse; and the proprietor's liberty is guaranteed as much by his right to be the sole fighter in his own defense as by his ultimate right to cast a vote in his own government...it was a well-watered soil on which the ideas of Montesquieu fell, and out of which some of them grew."[7]

The Republican Position[]

The Machiavellian Moment has come to represent the so-called republican synthesis, which warrants reconsideration. This reevaluation should include, but may or may not be limited to, debates over periodization for "the end of classical politics." Internal discordance seems manifest in the history of the idea of the Cambridge School, especially in regards to J.G.A. Pocock's dialectical call for both "global" contextualism as well as critical examination of the various "multiculturalism" iterations, and the subjective, if not potentially relative, contours of such contextualism.[8] Pocock's own contextualism has been linked to Michael Oakeshott, especially after the 1968 publication of a critical essay on the lessons of socio-historical linguistics espoused by the liberal-conservative philosopher. Pocock had already candidly argued in a 1958 essay (published in 1962) that, despite paralleling an Oakeshottian commentary on the unavoidable influences of past society on human utterances, much of the burgeoning contextualist methodology derived from the teachings and efforts of Peter Laslett.[9] In a recent response to an article on the history of the idea of the Cambridge School, Pocock was more bluntly political: "...in Cambridge during these years [1956-58] I was greatly attracted, though never quite converted, to the aesthetic conservatism of Oakeshott’s contention that the categories of discourse generated by a human society are...so numerous as to be incommensurable and their intimations for one another beyond analytic control."[10] In a 1981 methodological essay, Pocock critiqued deconstruction, expressed "surprise" at pundits and scholars who "denounced [him] as party to a conspiracy of American ideologues," and attempted to use Raiders of the Lost Ark character interpretations of the Ark of the Covenant to illustrate his approach to history. He thought it "clear that I am not supposing a state of things in which each idiom or paradigm defines a community of persons who speak in its terms and whose thinking is governed by its presuppositions." The aims of reconstructing discourse were to illuminate political thought, not to foreclose the possibility or probability of political thought independent of a given discourse.[11] In 2004, Pocock also confirmed that "[Quentin] Skinner and I agree in a certain sympathy for the 'positive,' or as will appear, the 'republican' position." The latter "position" usually, but not always, signified modes of government rather than, for example, industrial and post-industrial North American "progressive business" or collectivism in stateless societies and subcultures.[12] Mira Siegelberg maintains that the ideas of Hannah Arendt, rather than serving "as a source for the normative implications of his [later] argument—as some of his critics have claimed—Pocock placed himself in critical relation to her valorization of civic republicanism."[13]

J.G.A. Pocock mentioned Michael Oakeshott in a concluding passage of the 1965 article. The passage warned against wholesale synchronic classification of the "neo-Harringtonians" as "reactionaries" and their opponents as "conservatives," even in diachronic studies. The passage consisted of summary arguments from an article that he had published the previous year, "Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay on the Apparent Political Meanings of Ancient Chinese Philosophy" for Political Science. Pocock mused that readers would deem it "strange" to find "the conservative party repudiating [the neo-Harringtonian "schoolbook interpretation of"] history, and the opposition appealing to it...When the adversary by whom he [the conservative party member] is faced is a fundamentalist reactionary, advocating a return to things as (he says) they once were, it is not surprising that the conservative should argue, first, that things in the past were not as the adversary supposes, second, that the whole idea of appeal to the past is out of order. He can achieve the former by means of historical criticism, which is just as likely to be a conservative as a radical technique. The latter he can achieve in either of two ways. Like Hooker and Burke, he can appeal to tradition...or he can have recourse to a hard-headed empiricism, which scouts the whole notion of history as a court of appeal...These two arguments are not as different as they might appear. The ancient Chinese philosopher Hsun Tzu tried to unite them, and in that Oakeshotten isle of Albion they are, of course, found in many combinations."[14] On a related note, in his 2019 response to the Cambridge School article, Pocock further alluded to his 1975 The Machiavellian Moment as a " 'Cambridge' treatise [authored] in an American setting (suggested by Bernard Bailyn and Caroline Robbins)." This suggestion by Bailyn most likely derived from WMQ editorial comments on Pocock's 1965 article, but any impetus connected to Bailyn for Pocock's seminal study remains a subject of scholarly inquiry.[15]

References[]

  1. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 549–83.
  2. ^ Fink, Zera S. (1945). The Classical Republicans: An Essay on the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (1 ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. pp. 10-16 and 53.
  3. ^ Fink, Z.S. (September 1942). "The Theory of the Mixed State and the Development of Milton's Political Thought". PMLA. 57 (3): 705–736.
  4. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 551. doi:10.2307/1922910. JSTOR 1922910.
  5. ^ Edelstein, Dan (2022). "A "Revolution" in Political Thought: Translations of Polybius Book 6 and the Conceptual History of Revolution". Journal of the History of Ideas. 83 (1): 17–40. ISSN 1086-3222.
  6. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 549–83.
  7. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 566 and 581.
  8. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (January 2019). "On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought". Global Intellectual History. 4 (1): 1–14.
  9. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (1962). "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry". Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society: 183–203.
  10. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (2019). "A Response to Samuel James's "J.G.A. Pocock and the Idea of the 'Cambridge School' in the History of Political Thought"". History of European Ideas. 45 (1): 102.
  11. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (1981). "The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought". Modern Language Notes. 96 (5): 959–80.
  12. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (Fall 2004). "Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History". Common Knowledge. 10 (3): 542.
  13. ^ Siegelberg, Mira L. (2013). "Things Fall Apart: J.G.A. Pocock, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Time". Modern Intellectual History. 10 (1): 112.
  14. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 579–80.
  15. ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (2019). "A Response to Samuel James's "J.G.A. Pocock and the Idea of the 'Cambridge School' in the History of Political Thought"". History of European Ideas. 45 (1): 103.
  • J. G. A. Pocock. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton University Press, 1975.
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