Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History

by J.G.A. Pocock

In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J. G. A. Pocock announces the emergence of the history of political thought as a discipline apart from political philosophy. Traditionally, "history" of political thought has meant a chronological ordering of intellectual systems without attention to political languages; but it is through the study of those languages and of their changes, Pocock claims, that political thought will at last be studied historically.

Pocock argues that the solution has already been approached by, first, the linguistic philosophers, with their emphasis on the importance of language study to understanding human thought, and, second, by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , with its notion of controlling intellectual paradigms. Those paradigms within and through which the scientist organizes his intellectual enterprise may well be seen as analogous to the worlds of political discourse in which political problems are posed and political solutions are proffered. Using this notion of successive paradigms, Pocock demonstrates its effectiveness by analyzing a wide range of subjects, from ancient Chinese philosophy to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Burke.

Genres: History, Politics, Philosophy

299 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

John Greville Agard Pocock was a historian of political thought, best known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse. Pocock taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1966 until 1975, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 1975 until 2011.

Reviews

[Philip Chaston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pocock's final essay in this book is prescient on the current bind that political language faces. The fluidity of authority and a neverending reaction to its own establishment sets up a world which continually refuses to engage with its history, decries authority whilst wielding it and enters absurdity. Heinlein's crazy years! His key insight is that this can be identified as far back as romanticism and is a key theme that renews and refreshes itself with the discourse of revolution and politics.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read only the first essay in this volume, in which Pocock lays out his approach toward developing a proper "historical" understanding of "political" language. Pocock also discusses Quentin Skinner's more technical take on the matter (as influenced by the philosophy of Austin, Wittgenstein, et al.), yet seems at a further remove from it. While Pocock is not necessarily uninterested in or ignorant of the "hard" questions posed by the philosophers of language, he emphasizes that such an understanding of texts in their proper contexts emerges primarily from one's own close readings thereof (which of course Skinner does as well, albeit in a far more rigorous manner, in his short article "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts"). Part of the essay consists of a spirited defense of this "texts and context" method, which represented a major advance over the "Great Books" approach (of Leo Strauss et al.) to doing intellectual history.

[Kalev · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's simply no doubt that this book is incredibly important. In graduate school, I was assigned it by three separate professors, in two different institutions. So why the low rating? It's an excruciating read: pretentious, tedious, turgid. Pocock certainly has a knack for marketing a banality as a profundity. After all, this is the guy who managed to convince much of the modern academy that Harrington was worth listening to, and that Jefferson's interest in him wasn't just another eccentricity. I urge you no to fall for that.

Though I do admit that I have kept a copy of this book on my night stand for more than fifteen years. I pick it up when I can't sleep. Works almost everytime.