History Affairs

Political Theme in Every History Tales

Historians often aspire to present the past in its most balanced or unbiased light, but it's a hard challege.

Historians often aspire to present the past in its most balanced or unbiased light. Yet the reality, as many thinkers have shown, is that what historians choose to write about, how they interpret their sources, and even the tone or style they employ are all shaped by political context and personal perspective. This is especially true when it comes to foundational events, political ideologies, and episodes of nation-building. Few scholars have made this point more vividly than J G A Pocock (1924-2023), whose career underscored how ‘history’ and ‘politics’ intertwine in ways that are simultaneously subtle and explicit.

Below, we explore why history is always political through Pocock’s life and work, particularly his major study of republicanism, The Machiavellian Moment (1975). We examine how Pocock’s revisionist insights challenged or reinforced political identities in the United States, Europe, and beyond, and why he believed historians are, by definition, active political agents rather than neutral observers.

Defining J G A Pocock as a Historian and Political Actor

Today, to call a historian a ‘political actor’ might conjure images of someone who rummages through the past seeking tidbits to confirm a partisan agenda. Such a figure might be perceived as a mere commentator, offering ‘rapid-fire’ histories tailored to persuade public opinion or short-circuit nuanced debate. Pocock’s reputation as both a historian and a ‘political actor’ may thus require some careful unpacking, because he was not engaged in the superficial brand of historical writing that often surfaces in news commentary or op-ed debates.

Instead, Pocock demonstrated that history itself rests on an inherently political foundation. Writing history means selecting events, figures, and sources that appear most relevant or illuminating to the society in which one is rooted. Moreover, what is considered ‘important’ or ‘insignificant’ shifts over time, typically shaped by that society’s current moral, political, and cultural preoccupations. For Pocock, this does not mean that historians are cynically misrepresenting facts. Rather, it means that history is more accurately understood as a dynamic, ongoing conversation about the past, where multiple viewpoints and identities constantly emerge and evolve.

Pocock’s life story reinforces that point. He was born in London, raised in New Zealand, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He lived and taught primarily in the United States from the mid-1960s onward, but retained his New Zealand citizenship. His international, ‘unrooted’ perspective gave him a vantage point from which to critique nationalist and self-contained histories, whether British or American. Perhaps predictably, his global vantage led him to produce histories that unsettled prevailing narratives of identity and belonging – making him, willingly or not, a political actor.

The Machiavellian Moment: A Landmark Reinterpretation of Republicanism

Published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition has long been hailed as one of the most influential scholarly works on early modern and modern political thought. Pocock revealed how the concept of republicanism – derived substantially from ancient Greek and Roman traditions, as filtered through Renaissance Florence – found new life in 17th-century England and colonial America.

The book’s title references Niccolò Machiavelli, whose writings from Renaissance Florence illustrate the tension between virtuous, active citizenship and the forces of corruption threatening to destabilise a republic. Pocock famously described the “Machiavellian moment” as the precarious juncture at which a political community realises it must reconcile its ideals of civic virtue with the harsh realities of history, human nature, and time. Machiavelli’s Florence exemplified this predicament: how to maintain a flourishing civic life in the face of shifting alliances, external threats, and the personal ambitions of elites.

Pocock’s argument, however, is not limited to Florence. He traces how these same anxieties – the fear that all states, like all humans, would eventually succumb to decay – recurred in later contexts, such as 17th-century England and the founding of the United States. These societies inherited from classical republicanism a powerful vocabulary of virtue, liberty, and corruption, and believed that maintaining a republic entailed preventing its dissolution into tyrannical rule or moral decline. By situating the American Revolution and Constitution-making within this centuries-long historical tradition, Pocock deflated the then-popular notion that the American founding was an unprecedented new dawn of purely ‘modern’ ideas.

Republicanism vs Liberalism: The Core Controversy

Pocock’s extensive examination of Machiavelli, James Harrington, and the American Federalists generated swift and polarised responses. At the heart of the controversy was Pocock’s argument that 18th-century American founders drew heavily upon classical republican values – the virtues of active citizenship, moral restraint, and devotion to the common good – rather than exclusively upon modern liberalism.

This contention clashed with the widely accepted narrative in mid-20th-century American historiography that John Locke and liberal principles of individual rights, property, and limited government served as the key ideological bedrock for the American founding. In works such as Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Locke emerged as a quasi-Founding Father, furnishing the young republic with notions of individualism, commercial freedom, and negative liberty. By contrast, Pocock portrayed an American Revolution that, for a time, was more concerned with preventing the corruption of virtue and civic commitment than it was with championing unbridled individualism or capitalism.

This was not an attack on liberalism alone. It was, instead, an invitation to consider that the United States was shaped by multiple, coexisting political languages: one that emphasised civic virtue and duty (derived from Machiavelli and classical republicanism), and another that championed individual autonomy and economic opportunity (often associated with Locke and liberalism). Where many historians saw the founding as wholly novel or liberal, Pocock saw continuity with Europe’s past, bridging classical antiquity, Renaissance Florence, and the emergent Atlantic world.

The Revisionist Approach to America’s Political Beginnings

Given that The Machiavellian Moment appeared during the 1970s – a time when US cultural self-confidence was being tested by Vietnam, Watergate, and civil rights movements – Pocock’s proposition carried particular force. If the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence were not purely liberal or brand-new, perhaps American identity was less of a triumphant break from Europe’s past and more of an extension, or partial reinvention, of older traditions. This prompted powerful debates about the uniqueness of the American experiment.

Compounding matters, Pocock was an outsider to US academia, having come from a New Zealand background and transplanted himself to the United States later in his career. Some critics on the Left accused him of diminishing the proud liberal heritage of the US. Others, particularly on the Right, worried that Pocock’s emphasis on Machiavelli and Harrington underplayed the distinctly modern, Lockean core of the founding. Either way, the final chapter of The Machiavellian Moment – “The Americanization of Virtue” – quickly turned into a focal point for these criticisms.

Some critics, like Leo Strauss and his followers, insisted that republicanism provided only a superficial gloss on what was fundamentally a Lockean (or liberal) political transformation. Meanwhile, historians such as Joyce Appleby, Isaac Kramnick, and John P Diggins decried Pocock’s approach for moving away from a narrative of individualism and commerce that they believed was more central to the cultural identity of the US. In their view, underscoring classical republican traditions risked suggesting that America’s political origins were deeply shaped by ideas that might be alien to its ‘true’ liberal core.

Pocock responded in essays such as “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology” (1981), clarifying that he did not see the American founding as wholly republican but rather a hybrid that included liberal, republican, and even feudal law elements. He stressed that these frameworks coexisted in the 18th century and could coexist today as well. Precisely because Americans debate who they are by debating the fundamental ideals of their government, he argued, they needed to realise that their identity has never been singular.

Political Reception Beyond the United States

Interestingly, Pocock faced an entirely different set of critiques in Europe, especially in Italy. Scholars like Renzo Pecchioli and Cesare Vasoli accused him of being an exponent of “ideologia americana,” a version of liberal imperialism that appropriated Florentine civic ideals to legitimise the US as the grand inheritor of republicanism. In this telling, Pocock was essentially rewriting European traditions to centre the American experience.

Pecchioli argued that by embedding Machiavelli and the Florentine Renaissance within an American trajectory, Pocock was diminishing the uniqueness of the European city-state tradition. In that sense, The Machiavellian Moment was seen as an ideological instrument for undercutting the singular power and complexity of Europe’s own republican past. Pocock’s reaction to this line of criticism was nuanced: far from promoting a narrowly American triumphalism, he was trying to show that the threads of republican thought wove together multiple contexts and time periods. It was precisely not a straightforward endorsement of liberalism or an effort to claim Machiavelli for the US.

What emerges from these mixed critiques is that Pocock was simultaneously accused of being too liberal and not liberal enough, too American and not American enough. This swirl of accusations underscores Pocock’s conviction that historical narratives are never ideologically neutral. Whether in the US, Italy, or Britain, debates about how to tell the story of republicanism – or any other tradition – are always debates about present political identities and future directions.

History and Politics: Pocock’s Methodological Vision

In addition to his major substantive works, Pocock produced a series of essays on historiography and methodology, most notably in Politics, Language, and Time (1971), Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985), and The Discovery of Islands (2005). Although these texts may seem more abstract or geared toward specialist audiences, they offer crucial insight into why Pocock saw history as an inherently political enterprise.

Pocock insisted on the importance of “political languages,” a term he used to describe the distinct vocabularies and idioms that structure how people talk about power, law, economy, or virtue in any given period. These languages can overlap or compete, and they can migrate across cultures and eras. When individuals in one context adopt a concept from another (for instance, American founders adopting Machiavellian or Harringtonian ideas), they often transform those ideas along the way. To study the history of political thought is thus to study the dynamic interplay of languages that shape political consciousness and action.

Underpinning Pocock’s approach is the view that historians do not merely reconstruct a stable, fixed ‘truth’ about the past. Instead, they piece together partial accounts, emphasising certain connections over others, always in light of the interests, insights, and controversies of the present. Pocock believed that historiography is the most powerful mechanism through which a society constructs and reworks its own identity. If a society cherishes liberal ideals, or if it cherishes republican ideals, the presence or absence of that ideal in its historical narrative helps to sustain – or challenge – what that society believes about itself today.

Historians as Political Actors: Contesting and Shaping Identity

In “The Historian as Political Actor in Polity, Society and Academy” (1996), republished in Political Thought and History (2008), Pocock asked two pointed questions: “What kind of political phenomenon is a history?” and “What kinds of political reflection, or theory, may the various forms of historiography constitute?” His answers emphasise how historical narratives and political reflection are inseparable. A political community typically defines its legitimacy and boundaries by referencing its past, which must be constantly reinterpreted to maintain relevance. That process of reinterpretation is the historian’s domain – making the historian a key figure in shaping how society imagines itself.

For Pocock, the role of a historian is not to become a mere advocate for a particular political agenda. Rather, it is to be aware of how every historical interpretation implies a political stance or impetus. Histories that claim to be purely ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ overlook the deeper reality that each narrative implicitly justifies (or contests) certain national myths, certain moral frameworks, and certain directions for the future. Even a quiet academic historian, sequestered in a library, cannot escape this dynamic, because the choice of topics, evidence, and argumentation already reflects political assumptions or impulses.

Pocock applied these insights to multiple contexts. The controversies around The Machiavellian Moment are an example of what happens when historical scholarship touches a raw nerve in a nation’s political self-image. When Pocock reframed the founding of the United States within a transatlantic tradition of republicanism, he touched on questions as fundamental as “Who are Americans, really?” and “Is the US the product of a sharp, liberal break with Europe, or part of a continuous, evolving line of political thought?” Because history is so deeply implicated in identity, it was inevitable that critics would accuse him of various ideological transgressions – an outcome that Pocock himself acknowledged with mixed feelings of discomfort and intellectual curiosity.

Multiple Histories, Plural Identities

Pocock’s emphasis on the plurality of histories underscores his commitment to a robust political pluralism. In The Politics of Historiography (2005), he contends that societies create their own “myths” in the sense of shared narratives that sustain the community’s coherence and sense of legitimacy. These myths can, and often do, conflict with each other. In fact, they need to conflict in order for public debate to flourish, because that is how citizens articulate, negotiate, and refine their visions of the public good.

Instead of lamenting that such debates produce ideological confusion, Pocock suggested that they are the essence of active civic life. If the histories used to ground a community’s identity were not contested, the society would be locked into a monolithic, potentially stagnant version of itself. The existence of multiple historical narratives fosters an ongoing process of redefinition, allowing new voices to emerge and new social or moral questions to be addressed.

There is, however, a caveat: this embrace of pluralism is not a descent into relativism. Pocock maintained that historians still operate under rigorous methodological standards. Documentary evidence must be scrutinised. Arguments must be constructed carefully. Just because multiple histories exist does not mean ‘anything goes.’ Instead, it means that no single narrative is likely to capture all relevant facts, leaving room for others to examine what has been left out or underplayed.

Pocock’s Global Perspective and Postcolonial Dimensions

An additional layer in Pocock’s understanding of history’s political power relates to his postcolonial perspective. Although he lived much of his life in the United States, Pocock described himself as a product of the British Commonwealth – more specifically, New Zealand – which shaped his recognition that what is known as ‘British’ history actually involves the interlinked experiences of multiple peoples around the globe.

This stance highlights that concepts of sovereignty, autonomy, and identity are rarely confined to the neat boundaries of a single nation-state. If British history extends to North America, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand, then stories of independence or revolution (like the American Revolution) are simultaneously stories of the changing nature of empire, settlement, and global forces. Thus, Pocock’s approach to the American founding is partially an outgrowth of his conviction that one cannot fully grasp the meaning of US independence without understanding the broader transformations of what he called the “British peoples.” History and politics, then, are not just contested in a single country’s memory but across continents and oceans.

Historians and the Future: Embracing Complexity

Pocock’s work also bears on how we see the link between history and the future. Many commentators and politicians demand a simplified historical narrative: lessons that can be quickly gleaned, repeated in speeches, and used to justify policy agendas. Yet Pocock believed that “rapid-fire” or superficial usage of history at the expense of historical accuracy does more harm than good. A truly civic-minded society, by his account, must learn to live with complex, even contradictory interpretations of its past. Rather than forging a single, tidy narrative, the healthiest political cultures allow multiple interpretive frameworks to cohabit, fueling vibrant debate.

In that sense, Pocock’s presence in public discourse served as an antidote to the desire for absolute certainty or univocal origin stories. His revision of the American founding narrative – seeing it as partly indebted to older republican traditions – was both a scholarly intervention and a political act. It broadened the conversation about which ideals shaped the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, offering new angles for reflection on citizenship, corruption, virtue, and the public interest. Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Pocock’s conclusions, the point is that such critical revision aids, rather than undermines, democratic discourse.

Conclusion: Contesting History, Enriching Civic Life

J G A Pocock’s long and distinguished career underscores that contesting history is part and parcel of a robust civic life. Far from being a purely academic pastime, writing and interpreting history is always a political act. Narratives about events like the American Revolution, the development of liberalism, or the survival of republican ideals inform how contemporary citizens perceive themselves and their obligations to one another. Because different historians emphasise different threads of the past – including those that have been sidelined or suppressed – these interpretations necessarily alter the cultural and political landscape.

At the heart of Pocock’s message is a stirring call to embrace the multiplicity of histories, instead of imposing uniformity. If “what explains the past legitimates the present,” then there can be no single version of the past, because no single explanation can, or should, hold exclusive sway over present-day identities. Contestations over how to tell history are therefore not a sign of chaos; they are a sign of life and engagement, proof that citizens and scholars alike are wrestling with who they are and who they aspire to be.

Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment serves as a paradigmatic case study in how a historian can transform political discourse. By demonstrating that the American founding rests on multiple genealogies, including classical republicanism, Pocock rattled entrenched assumptions about liberal hegemony. He was, in effect, both historian and political actor, placing the seeds of new debate in the public arena. The controversies that ensued reflected the power of historical narratives to challenge orthodoxies and provoke new forms of collective self-understanding.

In the end, Pocock’s own method and experiences reveal why history is never ‘just history.’ Because our ability to interpret and reinterpret the past profoundly shapes our present and guides our future, we rely on historians, wittingly or not, to show us the complexity, contradictions, and continuities in our common story. This dependence gives them formidable political significance, for to rewrite a people’s past is, ultimately, to suggest a new way of being together in the world. If we accept Pocock’s insights, we can embrace the inescapably political dimension of history as both a challenge and an opportunity – one that can enrich civic life through the contested retelling of who we are and who we might yet become.

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