Pocock: the history of political thought is made by languages, not ideas

For a long time the history of political thought was written like this: Plato thought this, Hobbes thought that, Locke thought the other. Texts were lined up as answers to undying questions — what is justice, what is the source of power.

J. G. A. Pocock argued that this way of writing was a mistake. And the notion he put in its place changed the rules of the field: political languages.

Born in New Zealand, Pocock spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins University and died in 2023. But the method he left behind is the framework that almost everyone now writing the history of political thought reaches for.

Where the idea came from#

Pocock's 1962 essay "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry" is generally taken as the first manifesto of what would later be called the Cambridge School.

In those years three men at Cambridge were, loosely, looking in the same direction: Pocock stressed languages, Quentin Skinner the author's intention, John Dunn the biography. They founded no school; the name was applied afterwards.

Pocock's own conceptual debt comes from an unexpected quarter: his doctoral supervisor Herbert Butterfield, and his interest in the history of historical writing. The method, in other words, was born of historiography rather than the philosophy of language.

What does "language" mean here?#

A political language in Pocock's sense is not a language in the way that Turkish or English is.

In his own formulation it is a set of idioms, rhetorics, specialised vocabularies and grammars which together make up a single but many-layered community of discourse.

Take a concrete case. In seventeenth-century England there were several distinct ways of talking about politics:

• The language of the common law: rights descend from ancient custom and usage. The king too is subject to that tradition.
• The language of divine right: power comes from God; to resist is a sin.
• The language of republican virtue: liberty is preserved by the active participation of citizens in public life.

These three languages construct the same event — a dispute over taxation, say — in wholly different ways. And, crucially: a thinker cannot say anything that lies outside the languages available to him in his own day.

The likeness to Kuhn — and the difference#

Pocock first considered calling these structures "sub-languages", "vocabularies", "rhetorics"; for a period he borrowed Thomas Kuhn's term paradigm. In the end he settled on the plainest label of all: languages.

The likeness is real. Just as Ptolemaic astronomy or Galenic medicine settled what could be asked within them, a political language settles what can be asserted.

But there is an important difference. In Kuhn, paradigms succeed one another: one is overthrown and the next takes its place. In Pocock, languages coexist and compete. A text can speak in more than one language at once, and may even win its argument by shifting from one to another.

That makes the method more supple, and closer to historical reality.

Two great applications#

The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957)#

Pocock's first major book showed how common-law thinking in seventeenth-century England constituted a discourse of its own — and how tightly it was bound up with the historical writing of the period.

The finding was this. When English lawyers defended their rights, they appealed not to a philosophical principle but to a historical claim. To say "these rights are ancient" is to speak a different language from "these rights are natural", and it yields different consequences.

The Machiavellian Moment (1975)#

Pocock's best-known book. And the word "moment" in the title carries the argument.

The Machiavellian moment is the moment at which a republic confronts its own instability in time. Republics, on Pocock's account, are fragile things, open to corruption: let civic virtue weaken and the republic dissolves. This is Machiavelli's real subject.

The book's most contested and most influential claim is the next one: that this republican language travelled from Florence to England and thence across the Atlantic — and that the American Revolution can be read as the last great act of Renaissance civic humanism.

The thesis was a direct challenge to the settled account, which explained the American founding in the Lockean language of individual rights. There followed decades of argument — the republicanism-versus-liberalism debate.

We take up this reading of Machiavelli in a separate piece today: Five hundred years of misreading Machiavelli.

What the method costs#

Pocock's approach has not gone unchallenged.

The commonest objection: if every text is to be read within its own language, has it anything left to say to us? If we read Hobbes purely as a document belonging to seventeenth-century England, has political philosophy not been reduced to historiography?

The Cambridge School's answer begins by conceding the point. Yes, texts do not answer us directly. But that is exactly why they are useful. Seeing that a text was written in a language other than our own makes us notice that ours is a language too — that is, that it is not necessary.

This is where Pocock intersects, unexpectedly, with Foucault. The same move was at work in our Foucault piece yesterday: to show that what is given is historical is to show that it can be altered.

Why we need this now#

Pocock's concept can be applied directly to the political arguments of the day.

Watching a political dispute in Turkey or anywhere else, one question is usually more illuminating than any question about its content: which language are the parties speaking?

The language of rights, of security, of development, of identity, of law? Because constructing the same fact in different languages makes different things sayable — and keeps other things unsayable.

The reason disputants so often fail to reach agreement is not that they disagree about the facts; it is that they are not constructing the same fact in the same language.

That is Pocock's legacy: when reading a political text, ask not only what it says but which language it is speaking — and what that language renders unsayable.

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Pocock's principal works: The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), Politics, Language and Time (1971), The Machiavellian Moment (1975), Virtue, Commerce and History (1985), Barbarism and Religion (6 vols, 1999-2015), Political Thought and History (2009).