Knowledge of universal maxims reside in “this self-contained quality that timelessness largely. The maxims of republicanism are informed by these universal truths, because they transcend the immediate and the fleeting. They are self-evident and self-contained. Thus, universal principles are by their very nature not contingent. Because they are universal, they are, by definition, outside of space and time. The other realm of knowledge is informed by universal maxims-true everywhere, for all human beings, regardless of recognition. For Pocock, this is where the political world resides, as does human history. It is momentary, contingent, and connected to material existence.

Particular knowledge is defined by its place within time and space. He casts the realms of these opposing concepts by treating them as contrasting forms. This is a fascinating discussion involving epistemological thought. Rather quickly, Pocock sets the scene-in the abstract-by noting the crucial difference between the knowledge of particulars versus the knowledge of universals. The philosophical underpinnings of this work are central to its aims and to its understanding. His desire to, in fact, go beyond the sixteenth century (later in the book) and draw together the history of modern republican participation is even more extraordinary. Pocock’s The Machiavelli Moment (1975) attempts to capture something quite ambitious, and that is ”to reconstruct a scheme of ideas within which the sixteenth-century mind sought to articulate the equivalent of a philosophy of history… the idea of active citizenship in a republic-must struggle to maintain itself” (Pocock, 4). This Princeton Classics edition of The Machiavellian Moment features a new introduction by Richard Whatmore.The first five chapters of J.G.A. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and he relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought. Pocock shows that Machiavelli’s prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which Pocock calls the “Machiavellian moment.”Īfter examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America.

Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought.

Pocock the machiavellian moment