What Is a Republican?: Reflections on J. G. A. Pocock

In a 2019 interview, the historian Quentin Skinner declared that, if you ask an American what the state is, “they’ll have no notion of what you’re talking about.”¹ That seems a little harsh, but it’s clear what he meant. Skinner had in mind the state as Hobbes had influentially defined it: an “artificial” governmental body created to exercise the sovereign will of the people. But Americans, as we say nowadays, aren’t good at delegating. Like George W. Bush, they want to be “deciders,” and they don’t like entrusting faceless bureaucrats to do the job for them.

That might help explain the perennial appeal of messianic executives like Donald Trump (but also Ronald Reagan and Andrew Jackson), whom millions of Americans hope will execute their will outside—or even against—the state’s constraints. Hence, too, the need for brave citizens to drain the swamp, to shine the light of democracy into the “deep,” dark recesses of tyrannical bureaucracy. If the state were shal­lower, if we as citizens could see and supervise every decision that gets made in our name, then we’d be empowered to—what, exactly? At least the people will be in charge!

J. G. A. Pocock, who died last December, did more than anyone to uncover the history of this peculiar American outlook: this ideology of a virtuous citizenry standing up to defy a corrupt state apparatus of its own creation. He called the outlook “republican” and argued that it had roots in Renaissance Florence, in the writings of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Savonarola. Pocock’s writings on republicanism established his reputation in the United States, where he relocated in 1966 to take up a post at Washington University (and later at Johns Hopkins). An Eng­lishman by birth who trained at Cambridge under the eminent historian Herbert Butterfield, Pocock spent his youth (and much of his early career) in Christchurch, New Zealand, where his father was a professor of classics. In addition to his work on republicanism, Pocock wrote pathbreaking books on feudalism, on the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, and on the “oceanic” history of the British Commonwealth. Along with Quentin Skinner, he was a cofounder of the Cam­bridge school of intellectual history, which advocates studying political ideas in a way that’s mindful of the diversity of contexts in which such ideas are written down.

In the months since his death, Pocock has been remembered as a “historian’s historian.” That may be true, but it hardly does him justice because he is obviously a historian for non-historians as well. To read Pocock today is to put oneself in touch with a mind-bending learnedness that never seems parochial, an erudition of the kind that is rapidly disappearing from this earth.

The Republican Tradition

Pocock’s landmark book on the republican tradition, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), undertakes a centuries-deep excavation of the idea of Homo politicus in English and American political thought. Much as Aristotle had, Pocock’s republicans conceived of the political life as an active life: a kind of propertied virility (vir-tue) that empowered men to reassert the republic’s founding principles in moments of danger. On Pocock’s account, the republican tradition conceived of history in “sec­ular” and often cyclical terms. Human beings bring new, self-governing polities into being by their own collective will; but time, classically per­sonified as fickle Fortuna, brings these creations crashing to the ground, often with the help of the republic’s own wayward citizens. The life of any republic was an incessant struggle between virtue and corruption.

Pocock usually described republicanism as a “tradition,” rather than a party or political theory. This was in part because he wanted to trace it far back into time across national boundaries, but also because of his characteristically Cantabrigian insistence on studying “ideas in context.” By the standards of other modern Western societies, U.S. citizens said lots of unusual things about politics, and Pocock’s proposal was that republicanism was the “context” within which these strange assertions made sense as a unified political language. The republican tradition’s preoccupation with corruption, for instance, helped explain the appeal of political messiahs purporting to embody the ideals of the founders’ less corrupted age. And its long-standing obsession with virtue usefully contextualized Americans’ often schizophrenic attitude toward the military.

According to republican thinkers like Machiavelli, citizens had to be both propertied and armed. How else could they be expected to defend the republic, and thus prove their virtue as an independent people? This republican idea of virtuous citizenship made good sense in the city-states of early modern Italy, but by the eighteenth century it was mostly moribund in western Europe owing to the rise of debt-financed standing armies. When the American Revolution broke out in the 1770s, most people in England had long since grown accustomed to thinking of soldiers as professionals with a job to do. But the American colonists were different. In Machiavellian fashion, they imagined soldier-states­men like George Washington and Andrew Jackson as the living quintes­sence of citizenship itself.

Into the twentieth century, Americans seemed to see soldiers as the vicarious executors of their freedoms. This was true, Pocock sug­gested, even on the antiwar left, where protesters “reproach themselves . . . with exercising the ‘tyranny of a free people’ and imposing the empire of virtue on those who are not to receive full citizenship within it.”² Across the political spectrum, Americans seemed to feel that their moral stand­ing as citizens depended on what the U.S. military was or wasn’t doing on the frontiers of the “free world.” This was (and remains) a conception of citizenship profoundly ill-adapted to seeing U.S. military power for what it had become: a professionalized adjunct to a colossal admin­istrative state that carries out most of its work despite most citizens neither noticing nor caring.

Tunneling

Pocock’s writing exhibits an intensity of focus that is quite extraordinary, even by the standards of the Cambridge school. In one 1979 arti­cle, he described his method as “tunneling.” The Machiavellian Moment was “a tunnel history, a mining of the republican seam from Machiavelli to Madison which opens up no lateral galleries.”³ This makes history sound like an archaeological search for the foundations of political thought—perhaps, even, the foundations of the intellectual structures that we ourselves inhabit. This was how Quentin Skinner described what he was up to in his monumental two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), which ranks with The Machiavellian Moment—and John Dunn’s 1969 book on Locke, and Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories (1979)—among the great achievements of the Cambridge school.

Pocock, for his part, would never have written a book with the title Foundations of Modern anything. To supply readers with “founda­tions,” as Skinner set out to do, was by nature a disciplinary endeavor designed to help people think about politics in a more coherent, less mystified way. This endeavor was supposed to be liberatory: a practice of academic-cum-ethical “enlightenment” of the kind described by Im­manuel Kant and later Michel Foucault. “If you knew your history, then you would know where you coming from,” the great reggae moralist Bob Marley sang in “Buffalo Soldier” (1968). Something like this was and remains the modus operandi of Skinner, the preeminent disciplinarian of the Cambridge school.

Pocock’s project was different. He never tried to provide his readers with “the foundations” of their political thought, as if those were something they might be missing. His tunnels weren’t archaeological excavations so much as wormholes between epochs: a Pocockian tunnel, in his words, “opens up no lateral galleries.” When successfully execut­ed, this kind of writing is altogether more psychedelic—or perhaps the word is Miltonic—than anything else on offer from the Cambridge school: a “pursuit” of ideas “through realms of consciousness” in which the world as we know it assumes an unfamiliar aspect.

This, at least, was the language Pocock used to sum up The Machiavellian Moment in its fifteenth and final chapter, “The Americanization of Virtue.” There may be a grain of truth to the scholarly truism that this is the only part of the book that most people read. (It’s probably also the chapter that’s reread most often, even by those brave souls who have ventured through the whole tome.) In any case, for anyone seriously interested in the political ideas behind the U.S. founding, it’s hard to imagine a more exhilarating fifty pages. It’s here that Pocock defends the thesis that won him glory and notoriety among U.S. historians: the emergence of the American republic was the last, and in some sense greatest, political event of the Renaissance.

Pocock’s reinterpretation of the American founding comes into focus around the figure of Alexander Hamilton, for whom Pocock made a strong case as one of “the most sophisticated thinkers of the century,” alongside Montesquieu, Hume, and Adam Smith (sorry Rousseau and Kant!).⁴ As Pocock notes, all of Hamilton’s most characteristic traits as a statesman—his advocacy of a strong executive, a debt-financed standing army, and a permanently expansionist foreign policy; his general moral and cultural bias toward metropolitan commercialists and against the rural yeomanry—would have made him a Tory across the Atlantic; and he was often slandered as one by Jefferson and his allies. In the decades and centuries after the Constitution’s ratification, these same traits secured Hamilton’s reputation as the most modern of the American founders, in the sense of being the most liberal, the most capitalist, and the least pious of his contemporaries.

Yet Pocock saw something else in Hamilton. Far from a crypto-Tory or a liberal globalist avant la lettre, Pocock’s Hamilton was the most hardcore republican of all the American founders. Surveying the histo­ries of commonwealths ancient and modern, Hamilton derived the Machiavellian lesson that a republic’s survival depends on the self-assertion of well-armed citizens prepared to forestall the corruption that inevitably beset all earthly polities. His genius was to recognize that a military-industrial complex under strong executive control was not eo ipso a source of corruption in America the way it was in England, where the “country” Whigs defended the rights of Englishmen against the excessive centralization of state power under Robert Walpole and George III.

For Hamilton (unlike Jefferson and even Madison) the centralization of power in the federal government was an inevitability in a country as vast as the United States. How else could sectional strife be avoided? So was a far-reaching spoils system wherein access to political power was largely a matter of patronage. Hamilton knew this would get ugly and that, in a way, was the point. The United States was an overgrown, juvenile upstart of a republic. The threat of corruption was everywhere, so why not introduce a certain amount of it into the country by design, thus placing the burden squarely on statesmen to bring the Republic’s foreign and domestic enemies to heel? Jefferson’s yeoman republic of morally upstanding gentlemen was hopelessly unrealistic. Yet some hope might be reserved for republican raison d’état: for Machiavelli’s’ virtù if not Cotton Mather’s (or even Ben Franklin’s) “virtue.”

In a way, all this is classic Cambridge school. In order to think about political ideas historically, you have to know not just what thinkers said, but also who they were arguing against and why; hence a political proposal deserving the label “Tory” in one context could rightly be seen as arch-republican in another. Skinner described this method as de­scending from the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin: political ideas are meaningful as “moves” in language games; as performative speech acts, they are designed to bring about concrete social and political effects in determinate (and evanescent) historical situations.

In practice, the results of this approach were often deflationary, sometimes spectacularly so. John Dunn’s Political Thought of John Locke, for instance, wreaked havoc with the historiography of political philosophy by showing how much of Locke’s Second Treatise—general­ly understood as the key source-text for Anglo-American constitutionalism—only makes sense if one reads it as a fundamentally theological squabble with the B-list pamphleteer John Filmer. It really is quite bizarre, Dunn compellingly argued, that such a text should have any relevance to our political lives today, including the academic discipline of political theory. Books like Dunn’s earned the Cambridge school its reputation as a kind of scholarly police force. The disciplinary autonomy of the history of political thought had to be secured by debunking the facile intellectual “histories” spun out of thin air by theoreticians seeking to buttress their normative proposals with the authority of Great Books.

Pocock’s work could definitely strike this deflationary tone, but he also pushed the history of political thought beyond the history of “lan­guage games” and into the phenomenological domains of consciousness and perception. In his discussion of Hamilton and his world, Pocock is not merely asking what argumentative “moves” it was possible for the U.S. founders to make, why they made them, and against whom. That couldn’t be the only question, because the whole argumentative land­scape was much more one-sided in America than it was in England, where the likes of Edmund Burke could “go into opposition” in support of American liberty. In the American colonies, by contrast, everyone was in opposition; it was just a question of degrees. In politics, as in Christianity, America was awash in “the dissidence of dissent,” as Burke brilliantly put it.⁵

Pocock said it a bit differently: the Americans “were not face to face with modern government as a force they must and could find means of living with.” Once the Crown and Parliament assumed the guise of a hostile conspiracy in the 1760s, many American Whigs came to see the state itself as a source of political corruption. Having subsisted for a century and a half largely on their own terms, the colonists had little to gain, and everything to fear, from the reawakened British sovereign—whence the characteristically American paranoia about “power” as something intrinsically corrosive to liberty. In his classic Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Bernard Bailyn undertook the pathbreaking work of reconstructing this neurotic strain of American Whiggery from the Revolutionary pamphlet literature: this fear of power, which “creeps by degrees and quick subdues the whole,” which “converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office,” which “is like the ocean, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it.”⁶ But it was Pocock who made it possible to see why the whole “perception of reality obtaining in the colonies was so much more fragile” than it was across the Atlantic, where Big Government (by eighteenth-century standards) was a fact of everyday life.⁷

Political Power and the Structure of Time

Perhaps the greatest advantage Pocock gained by studying political “consciousness” and “perceptions of reality,” as distinct from “language games,” was the ability to capture how differently people experience time: how different political communities make sense of their collective past; how they feel threatened or empowered in the present; and what they feel entitled to expect in the coming days, months, and years.

In Pocock’s view, a fundamental shift in the western European (but not the Anglo-American) perception of time coincided with the advent of William of Orange, a truly “revolutionary actor” in English history. Following the emergence of William’s “military-fiscal state,” it no longer made sense to conceive of citizenship in terms of setting aside one’s workaday duties in order to take up arms in the republic’s defense. Gone too—pace your undergraduate political theory syllabus—was the political world of Hobbes and Locke, with their conjectural histories that described the creation (or dissolution) of governments in terms of authorization, conscience, consent.⁸

With the Glorious Revolution in the rearview mirror, thinkers like Defoe and Hume made peace with the idea of entrusting their liberties to more-or-less professionalized soldiers and MPs. With commerce and public debt firmly established as the “reinforcing reality” of British life, there emerged an “ideology of administrative reform” that, by the end of the eighteenth century, had come to define English Whiggery.⁹ For all his idiosyncrasies, a Rockingham Whig like Edmund Burke was, in Pocock’s schema, a quintessentially “modern” thinker since he saw history as an arena for incremental improvements in human affairs. Burkean conservatism could only emerge after political time became “homogenous,” as Benedict Anderson described the temporality of emergent nation-states where solidarity was mediated by daily newspapers and other mass media.¹⁰ Within this homogenous medium, a nation’s history was a matter of gradual accretion over passing centuries.

The emergence in metropolitan England of this new way of perceiving time helps explain why a thinker like Burke—probably the best-informed and arguably the most incisive observer of American politics in the Revolutionary period—could never have sprung up among the North American provincials. The conditions for homogenous, empty time didn’t yet exist in republican America, where history was still seen as the stalking ground of Machiavellian Fortuna in the guise of “arbitrary power.” This basically premodern perception of time also explained the failure of “dialectical” (i.e., post-Hegelian) forms of historiography—and their attendant class politics—to take hold. If “messianic populism” seemed impervious to the “ethos of historicist socialism” in the United States, this was because “[H]omo faber . . . is seen as conquering space rather than transforming history,” rendering the American workforce “even less willing than the European to see itself as a true proletariat.”¹¹ From the standpoint of the republican obsession with virtue and corrup­tion, collective political action created the conditions of the republic’s self-destruction. But no American living prior to the Civil War, with the possible exception of a few fringe Unitarians in Boston, counted on this dialectic to add up to historical progress.

Of course, Pocock wasn’t the first to describe American political culture as dispositionally nonsocialist. In the 1970s, historians of U.S. political thought still had to contend with the Harvard political theorist Louis Hartz and his formidable Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz’s claim was that the United States, which had experienced neither feudal­ism nor the advent of a hegemonic bourgeoisie, was born into a new Lockean world as if ex nihilo. History was over before it even began.

But whereas Hartz saw a salutary absence of class politics owing to America’s geographical and intellectual isolation, Pocock saw U.S. polit­ical culture as a portal through space-time linking capitalist modernity back to Medicean Florence, or even the late Roman empire. The American “perception of reality” was haunted by Machiavelli and, back of him, Augustine. Politics was a condition of secular vagabondage. The City of God was not to be found here below.

Pocock’s “tunnel history” of the republican tradition left some ob­servers (a few of whom may also have been readers) with the impression that he was a kind of anti-Hartz, or even a republican apologist. Pocock despised such caricatures. He was adamant in later years that his was not a “normative project for the institution of modern republicanism.” His stridency on this score probably had something to do with goings-on among his former Cambridge colleagues. In the 1990s, Skinner would join forces with the philosopher Philip Pettit in a bold rearticulation of the “republican conception of liberty” that was, avowedly, normative. This was a surprising move for Skinner, given his earlier efforts to erect a wall of disciplinary separation between political theory and the history of political ideas. But it was a move that Skinner thought was allowed—and in some sense required—by the “language game” in which he found himself. As he artfully put it in a 2001 lecture delivered before the British Academy, prevailing scholarly definitions of liberty “suffer from a serious limitation of coverage”: they are too narrow to capture how we talk about freedom and unfreedom in ordinary language.¹² If we define freedom as the absence of interference, like Hobbes and later liberals, we’ll miss out on the fact that our liberty is also compromised by the mere presence of another person’s arbitrary will. A slave who’s never bothered by a benevolent master might attain a measure of happiness, Skinner argued, but still remains unfree.

Pocock, for his part, never felt called upon to defend any single conception of liberty, nor even did he claim that republican liberty (or Machiavellian virtù) was the beating heart of American politics. He agreed with Hartz that the United States was liberal and modern; he just thought it was also republican and premodern. Americans spoke multi­ple political languages: “ways of talking, often profoundly at variance,” which nevertheless “do not typically succeed in excluding one another.”

The American historian Daniel Rodgers once called Pocock’s approach a kind of “soft structuralism,” akin to that of Thomas Kuhn, the theorist of “paradigm shifts” in the history of science.¹³ Yet it seems to me that Pocock’s intellectual approach had less in common with structuralists like Kuhn or Claude Lévi-Strauss than it did with more philologically-minded thinkers like Erich Auerbach and, above all, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It was Bakhtin, after all, who first gave a name to the “heteroglossia,” or many-voiced-ness, of literary texts; and who made it possible, with his theory of the “chronotope,” to distinguish between linguistic representations of space-time, much as Pocock did. Bakhtin was interested in the socio-linguistic structuration of written discourse, but he was hardly a structuralist in the sense of insisting that verbal structures (as opposed, say, to human agency) were the proper objects of “serious” knowledge. This also seems true of Pocock, with his profound—one might even say Augustinian—sym­pathy for human beings who, time and again, commit themselves to liberty by following pathways charted in the past.

The National Point of View

Pocock thought people were being obtuse when they labeled him a “republican”; “nationalist,” however, suited him fine. In a 2000 review essay in New Left Review, Pocock staked out his own peculiar brand of Euroskepticism that defined nationality in terms of a “capacity for self-definition.”¹⁴ Like his fellow Cantabrigian Richard Tuck, Pocock saw the EU as a deeply antidemocratic institution whose primary purpose was to repress national sovereignty on behalf of global capital. But whereas Tuck’s Euroskepticism was motivated primarily by his concern for popular sovereignty in a Rousseauian (i.e., majoritarian) sense, Po­cock’s emphasized what might be called the “first-personal” dimension of political life: nationality was a question of self-definition, self-under­standing, self-actualization.¹⁵ He would have agreed with Frederick Douglass that “the coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event,” since the creation of a new nation involved the creation of a new point of view on the world. The possession of a national point of view was, for Pocock, essential to political life as such. And the question is: why? What kind of nationalism is this, exactly?

Following Aristotle and Machiavelli, Pocock saw nations as fragile organisms clinging to life in an unpredictable, often hostile environment. Every nation has to deal with shocks to the system arising from external threats or internal disorder, but a healthy nation deals with such shocks in a very specific way: by changing as much as it needs to—often quite drastically—without losing track of its fundamental identity. This pic­ture of nationhood has roots in Aristotle’s metaphysics: specifically, in Aristotle’s definition of a substance as a being possessed of “accidental” and “essential” attributes, only the last of which can never change so long as the being in question remains the being it is. This theory of substance was what allowed Aristotle to explain why substances (like dogs, horses, human beings, and polities) are able to “take on contraries.” I was toothless at birth, but now I have a whole mouthful. Yesterday my breakfast was cereal, today it was nothing. With respect to my identity as a substance, these things are “accidents.” They change, but I stay me.

Machiavelli thought a similar argument applied to states, which could play host to a series of regimes (from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy) without changing their essential nature.¹⁶ So too, Pocock suggested, a nation was at its most “national” when it demonstrated its capability to undergo and survive drastic changes, to “take on contraries” while retaining its identity.¹⁷ Brexit was a good thing because it proved that the British nation was capable of surviving its brief affilia­tion with the European anti-sovereign. The volkisch ideal of Englishness (or Britishness) was of secondary importance, as was the democracy so dear to majoritarians like Tuck. Brexit was about sovereignty pure and simple: about Britain’s capacity to seize political opportunity in a self-determining way.

Here in the United States, we might be tempted to think of Donald Trump—undoubtedly the biggest shock to the national organism since 2008—through the same historical lens, with America “surviving” Trump the way Britain survived its Euro-fiasco and the denouement thereof. But I doubt Pocock would have been satisfied with this analogy. What, after all, does it mean to speak of an elected official like Trump—whom so many Americans so plainly adore—as a shock to a nation that purports to be a democracy?

Had Pocock weighed in on Trump in 2016, I suspect he would have observed that the real shock to the American system wasn’t Trump so much as his voters. It’s a fact that’s perfectly obvious in our political discourse, yet somehow difficult to say out loud: since 2016, Americans have been living under the suspicion that the people are the enemy, an element of the hostile environment from which the fragile Republic must be saved. This situation has furnished fertile ground for a certain strain of Machiavellian ideation, and the pundit class hasn’t hesitated to let their fantasies run wild. The masses beyond one’s faction, we hear, are creatures of Fortuna: they are inherently unreliable and possessed of a basically foreign perspective on the world, if they have a coherent perspective at all. They must be controlled and manipulated—or, better, criminalized—or they will control you with their lawless tyranny. The loss of an election portends the end of America as we know it.

This paradoxical shift in public opinion against the American peo­ple—which afflicts Trump’s supporters, of course, just as much as his critics—might befit a Machiavellian prince seeking to retain power at the masses’ expense. But it’s hard to see how it’s supposed to work in a democracy. It’s no coincidence that our present-day “save democracy” rhetoric rarely has much to say about citizenship, since citizenship has no relevance when the value of a commonwealth is seen as reducible to that of the administration du jour. As Aristotle argued, citizens (like republics) are capable of taking on contraries, since they know that life in a functioning polity involves “ruling and being ruled in turn.”¹⁸ Yet it’s far from clear how many American citizens see things this way. During Trump’s first term, the question on the left wasn’t, “how could our nation have chosen this path?”; it was, “why is MAGA trying to destroy the Republic?” As David Bromwhich has argued, the watchword among defeated voters in the post-Trump era has been “resist,” not “oppose”; this, supposedly, is the posture one needs to adopt in order to save something called “American democracy.”¹⁹

Pocock’s point would be that democracy, while exceedingly worthy of esteem, is not a nation. It is a type of regime, not a political point of view. He would diagnose the breakdown of referential coherence within American political discourse—with democracy’s self-styled saviors per­ennially contesting electoral outcomes—not as a failure of civic educa­tion or basic political theory, but rather a cultural (or, per Bakhtin, chronotopic) collapse of the political “we”: of the desire to be collectively self-determining in company with one’s fellow citizens. I suspect Po­cock would lay this collapse at the feet of what he called “post­modernism,” a term he used to describe a kind of gratuitous voluntarism about which identities we belong to.²⁰ Be that as it may, part of what makes Pocock’s writing on nationalism so thought-provoking is his reticence about the value of belonging to a national “we” in the first place. This reticence speaks all the louder since Pocock, like Machiavelli—and unlike present-day republicans seeking to build economic policy on the foundation of good old-fashioned virtues—expressed such a strong distaste for moral absolutes.²¹

Some Pocock glossators have tried to speak over their hero’s silence by misreading him as a kind of Burkean. In truth, though, Pocock never said that national identies inherited from the past should take precedence over those we’ve made up more recently. Pocock was raised in New Zealand, a pretty young nation by “Western” standards, and one whose founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), linked the sovereignty of the colonial state to that of the Māori peoples whose lands the British settlers had taken. Pocock admired this “exceptional” arrangement and insisted that it be upheld.²² But it’s hard to imagine Burke endorsing such a radical innovation in constitutionalism, one which no other nation founded in settler colonialism has ever thought to emulate.

Pocock called himself a lot of things over the years—an intellectual historian, a Cambridge historian, a historian of political thought, a historian of political languages, a “historian of historiography”—but one thing he wasn’t was a genealogist. He didn’t think the value of having a national identity depended on the stories we tell about where such identities come from. His view, finally, seems to have been that if you just stop and think about it, you’ll see that your own self-realization is bound up with that of the nation in which you live, since belonging to a nation is the best way humans have so far devised for acting upon history. A lot hinges on whether this is really true.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 4 (Winter 2024): 195–207.

Notes