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THINGS FALL APART: J. G. A. POCOCK, HANNAH ARENDT, AND THE POLITICS OF TIME*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2013

MIRA L. SIEGELBERG
MIRA L. SIEGELBERG*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article reconstructs J. G. A. Pocock's debt to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and argues that her presentation of classical politics in The Human Condition and her account of the secular nature of American foundation in On Revolution were important sources for Pocock's analysis of American liberal insecurity. However, a contextualization of The Machiavellian Moment within Pocock's immediate intellectual and professional milieu indicates that he placed himself in critical relation to Arendt's civic republican theory and located her philosophy of history in the same spectrum as the American political tradition he sought to historicize. While they did share a similar perspective on the ethical and political value of locating oneself within a long historical durée, their different conceptions of the problem of continuity for secular political structures provides a crucial context for their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2013 , pp. 109 - 134
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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Footnotes

*

For their comments and encouragement I am very grateful to Peter Gordon, David Armitage, Samuel Moyn, Richard Bourke, and Andrew Jainchill, as well as the anonymous readers at Modern Intellectual History. J. G. A. Pocock generously responded to my queries when I originally formulated by thoughts on this issue and provided insights that were essential to getting my research under way. Thanks to Samuel James and Lauri Tähtinen for their incisive remarks at the Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, where I presented an early draft of the paper.

References

1 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 550Google Scholar. For references to the connection between Pocock and Arendt see Harvey Mansfield, “Bruni and Machiavelli on Civic Humanism,” in Hankins, James, ed., Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge, 2000), 223–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadon, Christopher, “Aristotle and the Republican Paradigm: A Reconsideration of Pocock's Machiavellian Moment,” Review of Politics 58/4 (1996), 677–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rahe, Paul, “Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Science,” Review of Politics 57/3 (1995), 449–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pangle, Thomas, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, 1990), 50–53Google Scholar. For a similar observations, though from a different perspective, see Perreau-Saussine, Emile, “Quentin Skinner in Context,” Review of Politics 69 (2007), 106–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 112; Passerin d'Entreves, Maurizio, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar, iv; Young, B. W., “Enlightenment Political Thought and the Cambridge School,” Historical Journal (2009), 235–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Canovan, Margaret, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge, 1992), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Samuel Moyn and David Marshall have also recently pointed out the connection between Pocock, J. G. A. and Arendt, Hannah. See Marshall, David L., “The Polis and Its Analogues in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Modern Intellectual History 7/1 (2010), 123–49Google Scholar; Moyn, Samuel, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” New German Critique 35 (2008), 71–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ellen Rigsby's study of both thinkers is the most thorough exploration of the connection but my analysis of this connection differs considerably. See Rigsby, Ellen, “The Failure of Success: Arendt and Pocock on the Fall of American Republicanism,” Theory and Event 6/1 (2002)Google Scholar.

2 Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967)Google Scholar, Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1998)Google Scholar. See Gould, Phillip, “Virtue, Ideology, and the American Revolution: The Legacy of the Republican Synthesis,” American Literary History 5 (1993), 564–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appleby, Joyce, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992)Google Scholar; Shalhope, Robert, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972), 49–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79/1 (1992), 11–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See the illuminating exchange between Pocock, John and Wood, Gordon. “Machiavellian Moments,” New York Review of Books 47/16 (2000), 68Google Scholar. There has been a range of criticisms leveled against The Machiavellian Moment and this literature is well documented in Pocock's own efforts to counter the diverse claims. For an exhaustive list see Pocock, J. G. A., “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53/1 (1981), 49–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, , The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republicanism and the Atlantic Republican Tradition: With a New Afterword by the Author (Princeton, 2003), 553–85Google Scholar; Appleby, Joyce, “Republicanism and Ideology,” in Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 277–91Google Scholar; Diggins, J. P., The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar; Kramnick, Isaac, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (1982), 629–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibson, Alan, “Ancients, Moderns and Americans: The Republicanism–Liberalism Debate Revisited,” History of Political Thought 21 (2000), 261–307Google Scholar; Isaac, Jeffrey C., “Republicanism v. Liberalism? A Reconsideration,” History of Political Thought 9 (1988), 347–77Google Scholar. For the limitations of Pocock's construction of an “Atlantic republican tradition” see Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2003), 87Google Scholar, 195–7; Barnouw, Jeffrey, “American Independence: Revolution of the Republican Ideal: A Response to Pocock's Construction of the Atlantic Republican Tradition,” in Korshin, Paul J., ed., The American Revolution and Eighteenth Century Culture: Essays from the 1976 Bicentennial Conference for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (New York, 1986), 31–73Google Scholar.

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5 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 543, 548. For the reception of the book as contemporary commentary see Vasoli, Cesare, “The Machiavellian Moment: A Grand Ideological Synthesis,” Journal of Modern History 49/4 (1977), 661–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Paul Kahn, for example, has recently remarked that the United States “lives with a belief in the insecurity of its own existence.” See Kahn, Paul, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York, 2011), 10Google Scholar. And for a recent discussion on the cycles of lament recurring in American political culture see Fallows's, James “How America Can Rise Again,” Atlantic Monthly 305/1 (2010), 38–55Google Scholar.

9 Pocock, J. G. A., “‘Mito di Venezia’ and ‘ideologia Americana’: A Correction,” Il Pensiero Politico 12 (1979), 443–5Google Scholar.

10 J. G. A. Pocock, “Biographic and Intellectual Profile,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, John Hopkins University.

11 Keniston, Kenneth, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of the New Opposition (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Lingeman, Richard, “Domestic Containment: The Downfall of Postwar Idealism and Left Dissent,” in Carnes, Mark, ed., The Columbia History of Post-World War II America (New York, 2007), 201–26Google Scholar; Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution in the Age of Détente (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar.

12 See Pocock, J. G. A., “Preface, 1989,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar; and Pocock, “On the Non-revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism and Afterpiece,” in Politics, Language, Time, 273–91; Pocock, , “Review, John Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time,” History and Theory 8/2 (1969), 295–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Palonen, Kari, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: 2003), 65Google Scholar. The history of concepts of time was also a growing subject field by 1966. See Momigliano, Arnoldo, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starr, Chester, “History and the Concept of Time,” History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966), 24–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunnell, John, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, CT, 1968)Google Scholar.

13 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 606–19. Compare, on this point, Wood, , Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

14 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 550. Also see Pocock's 2003 afterword, where he discusses his application of Arendt's conception of the rise of the social to his study of the clash between virtue and commerce in the eighteenth century. Ibid., 573.

15 Charting the emergence of a new political and historical consciousness during the Florentine Renaissance followed the thesis set out in Hans Baron's 1952 study The Crisis of the Italian Renaissance. However, although Pocock kept to Baron's chronology by narrating the rise of a secular conception of history during the Renaissance, he minimized Baron's emphasis on the liberty of the republic against the tyranny of universal monarchy. See Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, 1955)Google Scholar.

16 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Princeton, 1957), 17Google Scholar. Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves developed his argument that Arendt was part of the civic republican tradition because of her emphasis on exercising agency based on reading The Machiavellian Moment. See d'Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, iv. See Markell, Patchen, “Arendt's Work: On the Architecture of the Human Condition,” College Literature 38/1 (2011), 15–44Google Scholar.

17 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 516.

18 Ibid., 538.

19 See ibid., 537. Compare Joyce Appleby's description of classical republicanism as “imbued with traditional notions of authority.” Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 163. On the particularity of Pocock's reading of Aristotle see Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 197; Nadon, “Aristotle and the Republican Paradigm,” 680. On the broader problem of the Cambridge school's inattention to the problem of social domination for Machiavellian republicanism see McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011), 8–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Others have observed the existentialist quality of The Machiavellian Moment. See McCormick, John P., “Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's Guicciardinian Moments,” Political Theory 31/5 (2003), 615–43, 620CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Palonen, Kari, Das “Webersche Moment”: Zur Kontingenz des Politischen (Wiesbaden, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Pocock, J. G. A., “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago and London, 1971), 202–32Google Scholar, 80.

22 Ibid., 96.

23 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York, 1963), 173Google Scholar. See especially on this point Moyn, “Hannah Arendt and the Secular,” 71–96.

24 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, vii; 73. Compare to Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957)Google Scholar. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 30. Pocock drew on the language of the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott when he described secular politics as an adventure on a “bottomless and boundless sea,” but went beyond Oakeshott in describing the republican view of politics as self-consciously untethered to a traditional way of relating to a problem. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 8. For an early reflection on this theme see Pocock, J. G. A., “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Inquiry,” in Laslett, P., ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1962), 183–203Google Scholar.

25 For a comparable discussion of the premodern experience of time and the “typological” mode of historical reasoning in both Jewish and Christian theology see Yerushalmi, Yosef H., Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1996)Google Scholar.

26 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 80; Pocock also cited Saint Augustine's emphasis on the irrationality of earthly temporality as an important source for the republican anxiety about permanence. See Augustine, Saint, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. Dyson, R. W. (Cambridge, 1998), 969Google Scholar; Pranger, M. B., “Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta,” in de Vries, Hent and Sullivan, Lawrence E., eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York, 2006), 113–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Pocock's contribution to the 1969 convention of Machiavelli, , “Custom and Grace, Form and Matter: An Approach to Machiavelli's Concept of Innovation,” in Fleisher, Martin, ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, 153–84. For an alternative to Pocock's reading of Machiavelli's republicanism see McCormick, , “Machiavelli against Republicanism,” 615–43. Revised in McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Pocock, J. G. A., “The Onely Politician: Machiavelli, Harrington, and Felix Raab,” Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand 12/46 (1966), 265–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Pocock, , “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ, 4th ser. 22 (1965), 549–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On the place of political theology in American political culture compare Lilla, Mark, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. Though his own description of tormented saints in America sounds theologically inflected, Pocock suggested that a similar conceptual structure underlay all modes of thought—both religious and secular—that sought to explain particular as opposed to eternal phenomena. See especially Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 48. On the use of theological language for antisectarian ends see J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, 148–202. By connecting the American jeremiad tradition to a secular source, Pocock went against the conventional theological interpretation positing that the polity feared that it had lost the perfection embodied in God's promise, which Sacvan Bercovitch would popularize in The American Jeremiad (Madison, 1978). This thesis was cited earlier in Robert Shalhope's essay on the “Republican synthesis.” See Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” 49–80. Compare to Pocock, J. G. A., “States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,” in Ball, Terrence and Pocock, J. G. A., eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Kansas, 1988) 55–77, 72Google Scholar.

29 Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” 119–34.

30 Armitage, David, “Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,” in van Gelderen, Martin and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2002), 29–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Machiavelli: Selected Political Writings, ed., David Wootton (Indianapolis, 1994), 211; Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 524.

32 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. On the relationship between republicanism and imperialism see Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Hörnqvist, Mikael, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.

33 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 538–42. Also see the interview with John Pocock in the Melbourne Historical Journal in which he described Watergate as a constitutional crisis. Anson, Stan, Duckworth, Mark, and Goodman, David, “Interview with J. G. A. Pocock,” Melbourne Historical Journal 15 (1983), 4–18Google Scholar.

34 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, x, 550; Fuss, Peter, “Hannah Arendt's Conception of Political Community,” Idealistic Studies 3/3 (1973), 252–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Peter Fuss, 1964–1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. A personal letter to this author indicates that Fuss told Pocock about Arendt's appreciative remarks. J. G. A. Pocock, personal letter, 11 Oct. 2009.

36 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 550.

37 In “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited,” 49–72, Pocock underlined the connection between Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin as “neo-conservative” and “neo-Hellenic” thinkers whose arguments inadvertently converged with Marxism. On Arendt's “pessimist historicism” see Pocock, , “Foundations and Moments,” in Brett, Annabel, Tully, James, Hamilton-Bleakley, Holly, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 37–50, 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Pocock, J. G. A. “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 601–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, , “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary,” American Historical Review 104 (1999), 490–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977); Armitage, David, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?”, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 427–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bourke “Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” 747–70.

40 Pocock, “Biographic and Intellectual Profile,” Pocock, “Mito di Venezia and ideologia Americana, a correction,” 443–5.

41 J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli: The Republican,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. Also see Pocock, , “The Classical Theory of Deference,” American Historical Review 81 (1976), 516–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 J. G. A. Pocock, “The American People in British History,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

43 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Varieties of Conservatism: British and American,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. Pocock has continued to emphasize the important historical consequences of the United States as a “foundationalist” culture. See Pocock, “The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,” 72. Also see Pocock, “Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds,” paper presented to the The Cambridge Moment: Virtue, History and Public Philosophy International Symposium, National Chiba University, Tokyo, 10–13 Dec. 2005, page 19 of typescript. On the British indifference to the loss of empire see Bourke, “Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” 747–70. On the pervasiveness of the “paranoid style” of politics outside the United States compare Wheen, Francis, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s, the Golden Age of Paranoia (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

44 Pocock, “Biographic and Intellectual Profile”; Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957)Google Scholar; Butterfield, Herbert, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge, 1944)Google Scholar.

45 For Pocock's discussion of tradition and custom as ways of relating to the past that are neither ancient nor modern see Pocock, J. G. A., “Review, John Gunnell's Political Philosophy and Time,” History and Theory 8/2 (1969), 295–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Cambridge historian Peter Laslett, who was one of Pocock's supervisors and influences at Cambridge, also suggested in his review of On Revolution for The Guardian that Arendt had missed the British case of revolution in emphasizing the contrast between the French and American revolutionary models. See Reviews, On Revolution, 1964, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

46 Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Arendt, , “Home to Roost,” in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Kohn, J. (New York, 2003), 257–77, 257Google Scholar. Originally published in Warner, Sam Jr, ed., The American Experiment: Perspectives on 200 Years (Boston, 1976), 61–77Google Scholar; Bates, David, “Enemies and Friends: Arendt on the Imperial Republic at War,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010), 112–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Arendt, Human Condition, 199; Arendt, “Home to Roost,” 257.

48 Bates, “Enemies and Friends,” 112–24.

49 Tom Wicker, “The Lie and the Image,” New York Times 25 May 1975. Arendt received numerous letters from readers requesting copies of her speech after the column appeared, including from Senator Joseph Biden. See Bicentennial Forums, Boston, MA, reaction to speech, 1975, Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

50 Ferguson, Niall, “Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the Global,” in Ferguson, Niall, Maier, Charles S., Manela, Erez, and Sargent, Daniel, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 1–25Google Scholar.

51 For the historical and economic context for social malaise see Charles S. Maier, “‘Malaise’: The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s,” in Ferguson et al., The Shock of the Global, 25–49.

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53 See Bates, “Enemies and Friends,” 112–24, Warner, The American Experiment; Starn, Randolph, “Meaning Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline,” History and Theory 14/1 (1975), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See Horowitz, Daniel, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst, MA, 2005)Google Scholar. And earlier, on the Cold War version of the jeremiad, see Roosevelt, Eleanor, “What Has Happened to the American Dream?”, The Atlantic (April 1961), 46–50Google Scholar.

55 Shklar, Judith, “Rethinking The Past,” Social Research 44/1 (1977), 80–90Google Scholar.

56 See Glazer, Nathan, “Hannah Arendt's America,” Commentary 60/3 (1975), 61Google Scholar. Shklar developed a more sanguine view of the future of the American state, arguing that the republican theorists of the eighteenth century lost their Machiavellian anxiety about the inevitable demise of the republic and embraced innovation and change. See Shklar, Judith, “Montesquieu and the New Republicanism,” in Bock, Gisela, Skinner, Quentin, and Viroli, Maurizio, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1993), 265–81Google Scholar.

57 In his essay on civic republicanism in American historiography, Daniel Rodgers argued, “Arriving in St. Louis from New Zealand with The Machiavellian Moment half-formed in 1966, he had a hard time dispelling an outsider's sense that the United States was barely modern at all.” See Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” 19.

58 Pocock, “Machiavelli the Republican,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. In his address at Hebrew University in 1985, Pocock stated that “to be modern is to quarrel with one's modernity”—this is also illuminating on this point. J. G. A. Pocock, “Modernity and Anti-modernity in the Anglophone Political Tradition,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

59 See Pocock, J. G. A., “Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Ancients and Moderns,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2/3 (Fall 1978), 93–107Google Scholar.

60 Pocock, “Biographic and Intellectual Profile,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Special Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

61 Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” 119–34.

62 Isaac, “Republicanism v. Liberalism,” 347–77; Nadon, “Aristotle and the Republican Paradigm,” 677–98; Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, 50–3.

63 On the importance of “the public” in Arendt's work see Villa, Dana, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.

64 On the apparent contradiction between Pocock's republican sympathies in The Machiavellian Moment and his embrace of the “moderate moderne” in Barbarism and Religion see Muthu, Sankar, “The Politics of Enlightened History,” Political Theory 31 (2003), 302–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Joyce Appleby has also argued that “one sometimes gets the impression that Pocock entered the world of civic humanism as a scholar and remained as a partisan.” Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 133. On the consistency of his outlook also see Pocock, J. G. A., “Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian,” Daedalus 105/3 (1976), 153–69Google Scholar.

65 McKenna, George, “Bannisterless Politics: Hannah Arendt and Her Children,” History ofPolitical Thought 5/2 (1984), 333–60Google Scholar.

66 See Arendt, Hannah, “Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Arendt, Hannah (Harcourt, 1968), 49Google Scholar.

67 Arendt, The Human Condition, 54. This appears clearly in her discussion of the basis for moral judgment in Kant's philosophy. Arendt argues that for Kant, the concept of “humanity” implies that human beings share the globe both simultaneously with others, but also diachronically “in the succession of generations.” See Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Beiner, Ronald (Chicago, 1989), 76Google Scholar.

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69 Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 49–147, 100.

70 J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, Institutions, Action” in Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, 233–73, 238. First printed in Parekh, Bikhu and King, Preston, eds., Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of his Retirement (Cambridge, 1968), 209–39Google Scholar. This contention is restated in Pocock, J. G. A., “The Politics of History: The Subaltern and the Subversive,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6/3 (1998), 219–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Arendt in fact nearly contributed to the same festschrift for Oakeshott but did not end up participating. See Hannah Arendt papers, General, 1938–1976, n.d. Parekh, Bhikhu 1964–1972.

71 Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, iv; Pocock, “On the Non-revolutionary Character of Paradigms,” 273–91. For the civic responsibility to maintain a linguistic connection to the past in Pocock's work see Hampsher-Monk, Iain, “The Political History of Thought,” in Castiglione, Dario and Hampsher-Monk, Iain, The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), 159–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Pocock has continued to insist that the historian should be committed to the idea that “others beside himself have existed” and that this is the precondition for the “open society.” Pocock, “Biographic and Intellectual Profile.” Also see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Owl Reviews His Feathers: A Valedictory Lecture,” 11 May 1994, John G. A. Pocock Collection, Special Collection, Milton Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

73 See Pocock's recent discussion on the value of the Aristotelian definition of liberty as equality, defined as “a friendship between equals” that in turn “becomes a necessary way of asserting one's humanity.” Pocock, “Foundations and Moments,” 46.

74 On this feature of Arendt's political philosophy see Markell, Patchen, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

75 Pocock, “Time, Institutions, Action,” 243.

76 In her essay “What Is Authority” Arendt referred to permanence as a “miracle”. See Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority,” in Arendt, Between Past and Future, 91–142, 127. Arendt's message in her final work The Life of the Mind suggests that she grew less convinced of the danger of feeling outside the duration of human history. There, after recounting the same discussion about the Founding Fathers as in On Revolution, she faulted the founders for not embracing the “abyss of pure spontaneity” by interpreting the novelty of their actions as a “re-statement of the old.” See Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (New York, 1978), 216Google Scholar.

77 See Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), 438Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A. “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Journal 3 (1960), 125–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, , The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Reissue with Retrospect (Cambridge, 1987), 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Pocock's introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1987), vii–xlviii.

78 J. G. A. Pocock, “Review, John Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time,” 295–301.

79 Pocock, “The Varieties of Conservatism: British and American,” John G. A. Pocock Collection, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

80 See Pocock, J. G. A., “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48/2 (1987), 326–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the best expression of Pocock's self-presentation as someone who has overcome the modernist anxiety about antifoundationalism see his valedictory address at Johns Hopkins from 1994. Pocock, “The Owl Reviews his Feathers.”

81 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 573. Even more recently, Pocock commented in an autobiographical paper from 2005 that in his work on the advent of the language of commerce in the eighteenth century, “If there is a twentieth-century political philosopher with whom I am in accord when writing about it this is Hannah Arendt, with her thesis of the rise of the ‘social,’ challenging the primacy of the ‘political’ during the eighteenth century, though I am less interested in the political philosophers who responded to this challenge than in the great historians and theorists of the historical process, who studied how civil society had come into being.” See Pocock, , “Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds,” page 17 of typescript. Printed in International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006), 7–17Google Scholar.

82 For an analysis of the American Supreme Court's conceptualization of its continuity with the early republic see Croix, Alison La, “Temporal Imperialism,” University Of Pennsylvania Law Review 158/5 (2010), 1329–74Google Scholar.