Jeffrey Pocock

This essay presents J. G. A. Pocock reflections on Gibbon’s fourth volume and the shift it marks in the Decline and Fall towards a narrative we might consider ‘Byzantine’. It is the work of Gibbon’s chief historian, venturing into territory left unexplored by Barbarism and Religion. Pocock observes that, after 395 CE, Gibbon begins to tell two distinct stories: the fall of the Western empire into barbarism, and the Eastern empire’s descent into what he called ‘premature and perpetual decay’. That phrase, Pocock argues, signals a historiographical rupture: Eastern Rome no longer rest on classical virtue and follows a different narrative logic. Tracing Gibbon’s treatment of Constantinopolitan culture, the Persian and Gothic wars, and the Incarnation controversies, Pocock casts the Justinian–Heraclius era as the final chapter of undisrupted Roman agency in the Decline and Fall. The followers of Muhammad will take the centre stage in the next volume. Gibbon’s narrative weaves together an increasing number of historiographical registers to capture the shifting geographies of power and meaning, framing a late antiquity no longer centred at Rome but increasingly Eurasian in scope. Pocock’s essay is prefaced by an introduction that provides a summa of Gibbon’s first three volumes, and of Pocock’s Gibbonian enterprise.

Written in memory of the historian J. G. A. Pocock (1924 – 2023), this essay revisits a series of exchanges in 2004 and 2005 between the editor of Common Knowledge and Pocock, a founding member of the journal's editorial board. In the first exchange, Pocock drew a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, professional academic specialists like himself and, on the other hand, intellectuals such as read and write for Common Knowledge and who, “interested in themselves,... questioning themselves,” are ultimately philosophers rather than scholars. He then defined history, for the instruction of that idiosyncratic audience, as a record of what has actually happened. The editor, who is also the author of this memorial essay, responded in the journal by applying Pocock's definition of history with earnest interest to a new symposium he was introducing. Pocock then wrote, clarifying his position, that history is a “multiplex condition” and that among the “historical facts” to which historians must attend are constructed histories whose claims have already been invalidated. The editor's reply was that these were postmodern notions that belied Pocock's previously submitted definition. Looking back after twenty years, he now reflects on why Pocock criticized a journal he had helped to found, only then to write a sort of treatise in support of the journal's own views. He concludes that Pocock made the claim that his approach to scholarship and that of Common Knowledge were becoming incommensurable as a test of the journal that became, in the process, a test of his own liberality and open mind.

In 2021 J.G.A. Pocock read a short essay by Jess Whatmore which criticised Kenneth Pomeranz’s ‘Great Divergence’ thesis, that the alternative historical trajectories of Europe and Asia, signalled by the former’s dominance of the global economy from c. 1800, could be traced to ecological factors. Pomeranz wanted to shift the explanation for divergence away from claims about the natural superiority or greater liberty of Europeans. Whatmore’s essay argued rather that divergence depended upon European military superiority, which in turn could be traced to the cultural roots of European military success that derived from ‘edge-of-empire’ discourses. Pocock’s response, in one of his final letters, engaged with the themes of the edge of empire thesis.

ABSTRACTThe Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said of Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century.

This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State, which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a number of nation-states, inhabiting a number of histories of their own, all of which are now simultaneously present. But the Euro-American terms empire and nation-state, which increasingly pervade Chinese perceived realities, lack precise Chinese equivalents. Meanwhile, the terms that the Chinese use in referring to the same historical transition, tianli and gongli, are obscure to the Euro-American mind. The reviewer asks whether the Chinese, now facing a plurality of histories, wonder if there may be a plurality of li, as well, or at least if there can be a li that is “universal” in the sense that it is common to them all. The problem here, the reviewer argues, in part derives from Wang's binaries being Hegelian, while the breakdown of the nation-state in Europe projects a postpolitical order in which human communities are incapable of state-based action or of determining their own li. The review ends by questioning whether China is capable of following this path and, in any case, whether Wang's vocabulary is able to encompass it.

ABSTRACTThis essay is speculative in character. It is the work of a historian who has completed a study, written on certain principles, of the first three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and does not intend to advance to a similar study of the second three. He does, however, believe that such a study would differ profoundly from that he has constructed of the first trilogy and wishes to offer hypotheses as to why this should be so. All hypotheses invite falsification, and he will make statements about the second trilogy and its hypothetical construction which invite research with results to which they may or may not stand up. To do this will be an exercise in the history of historiography, a sub-discipline still in progress of establishing itself. It will also give the author the opportunity of extending certain generalizations he was led to advance in writing and completing his study of Gibbon’s first trilogy, and of enquiring whether they remain valid in the light of a study of the second – given that this study is still at a hypothetical stage.

ABSTRACTJohn Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald Weinstein until his death in 2015, when it was identified by his widow Beverly Parker as being of importance. The text is especially revealing about Pocock’s attitudes to the history of ideas/intellectual history in the late 1960s and more especially the state of the grand project that became The Machiavellian Moment some years later.