CFP: Pocockian Moments: A Symposium on the Centenary of J.G.A. Pocock – online, 20-21 May 2024

The voluminous work of the late J. G. A. Pocock (1924-2023) challenged, redefined, and fashioned multiple fields of study, offering successive moments of transformation in scholarship. The book that emerged from Pocock’s doctorate, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), was a landmark contribution that affirmed the pivotal role of historiography to politics, as he demonstrates in the debates of seventeenth-century England. Pocock is perhaps most famous for his theoretical and historical challenge to liberalism and capitalism, most notably in his commanding chef-d’oeuvre on civic humanism, the republican tradition, and political economy, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), a work inextricably tied to the co-creation and development of a contextualist history of political thought as well as a revived interest in republicanism within contemporary political theory. This self-reflexive ‘Cambridge method’ to investigating the past, orientated towards context and sensitive to theory, language, and historicity, has also been associated with Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Peter Laslett, and others. Pocock’s own contribution was groundbreaking in its scope, but also in its stress on the essential role of temporality in the history of political thinking and its discourse.

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