I. INTRODUCTION
It has been frequently noted that J. G. A. Pocock's classic study of the anxiety experienced by republics when faced with their finitude, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, was indebted to the political thought of Hannah Arendt, a fact that Pocock himself underlined in the closing section of the book.Footnote 1 The nature of this engagement has generally been assumed rather than carefully reconstructed, though determining its contours remains crucial for establishing the precise limits of Pocock's reliance on Arendt's political and moral theory, as well for evaluating the status of the work as part of the so-called “republican synthesis” in anglophone historiography. Published in 1975, though completed two years earlier, The Machiavellian Moment has most famously been associated with the broader turn among historians toward an examination of the republican roots of the American Revolution and cited alongside Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic as part of a “triumvirate” positing that a concern for the corruption of public virtue, rather than individual rights and the social contract, informed the colonial break from Britain.Footnote 2
It is a famously troubled alliance, and Pocock has been embroiled in disputations over the thesis of the book since its publication.Footnote 3 As Daniel Rodgers pointed out over a decade ago, deep interpretive fractures divided the paragons of this school, particularly Gordon Wood and John Pocock, with distinct implications in each of their studies for the relationship between America's republican origins and the status of liberalism in the United States. In The Creation of the American Republic, first published in 1968, Wood argued that American political foundation eventually transcended its original republican preoccupation with public virtue and civic participation, inaugurating a “new science of politics” premised on the inevitability of liberal self-interest, though vestigial remnants of republican anxiety about personal corruption reappeared periodically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, Pocock's complex study of the revival of the classical republican tradition during the Florentine Renaissance, and its migration to seventeenth-century England and then eighteenth-century America, emphasized the persistence of the Machiavellian republican strain in American political and cultural life. Pocock's skepticism regarding the ultimate triumph in the United States of liberal confidence appeared most prominently in his 1972 review of Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, where he cited the public expressions of anxiety over the status of American political ideals as evidence that the contradictions present during American foundation remained enduring features of the cultural landscape:
To a newcomer during the 1960s, the American psyche, if not the governing structure, suggested less a nation of pragmatic Lockeans than one of tormented saints. The clamor of jeremiads, sick jokes, and enquiries as to what became of the dream at times became deafening and obsessive. And it seemed evident that the eighteenth-century quarrel between virtue and commerce, citizen and government, republic and empire was still going on in the twentieth century, and that historiography and political philosophy were still much involved in it.Footnote 4
These observations in turn became the point of departure for Pocock's analysis of the Atlantic republican tradition in eighteenth-century America and its legacies in the contemporary United States detailed in the closing chapters of The Machiavellian Moment. References to a “profound crisis in self-perception” and to the mournful public response to the Watergate scandal peppered the concluding chapter of the work.Footnote 5 Moreover, in the final section of the book on “The Americanization of Virtue,” detailing the relation between the Machiavellian republican tradition and American territorial expansionism, Pocock offered the more biting suggestion that the republican features of American political culture continued to contribute to its imperial practices, even while the turn from republic to empire was also a source of its discontent.Footnote 6
Drawing upon both published works and archival sources, I argue that Pocock's analysis of American anxiety was contingent upon his reading of Arendt's political thought. However, while Arendt's political writings—particularly The Human Condition and On Revolution—inspired central aspects of Pocock's reconstruction of the Atlantic republican tradition, he ultimately presented her civic republican theory as a manifestation of the compulsions of American political culture. Rather than Arendt serving as a source for the normative implications of his argument—as some of his critics have claimed—Pocock placed himself in critical relation to her valorization of civic republicanism. In detailing, then, this brief engagement during the period in which Pocock completed The Machiavellian Moment, this essay does not attempt to expose Arendt's hidden “influence” on Pocock, nor does it attempt to detail the construction of the book as a whole. Rather, it sets out to assess how Pocock proposed to explain the persistence of the American jeremiad tradition in the years following his emigration to the United States in the mid-1960s and the way in which Arendt became both a source and a subject of this analysis.
Were Americans in fact uniquely anxious about the status and future of their political institutions, as Pocock suggested in his review? And if they were, what were the sources of this anxiety? These important historical questions about the period as a whole are less significant for the purposes of this particular study than the question how Arendt and Pocock responded to the perceived threat of American decline, and how Pocock's subtle critique of Arendt in the conclusion of the book can be situated within the framework of their distinct responses to the problem of American political dissolution. The goal, therefore, in reconstructing the context in which Pocock read Arendt—and the American political mind more generally—lies not only in contributing to the intellectual history of a figure whose formation and significance have only begun to be explored, though this remains a vital task, but also in drawing out their distinct responses to American political anxiety during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 7 The roots of a particularly American concern about national fragility, and whether this characteristic is in fact “American” at all, are still in question and both Arendt and Pocock offered conditions for confidence in political continuity and permanence that demand new critical reflection in light of the recent preoccupation with America's imperial turn and the theological sources for its political institutions and practices.Footnote 8 At stake in both their writings and public statements on the threat of American political decline is the more fundamental question how political societies that refuse all forms of transcendence to ground their foundation theorize, and maintain faith in, their resilience and permanence.
In order to reconstruct Pocock's engagement with Arendt's political thought it will be necessary to first assess his explicit use of Arendt's conception of the vita activa to explain Machiavellian republicanism and the enduring features of American political culture that he noted in his review of Wood's Creation of the American Republic. The second section establishes that in spite of this intellectual relation, Pocock was ultimately critical of Arendt and identified her with a way of relating to historicity prevalent in the United States that, in his view, represented only one secular mode of relating to history and contingency. Finally, in setting out the specific contours of this intellectual relation, it will also be necessary to demonstrate the way in which both Arendt and Pocock shared a common commitment to the ethical implications of locating oneself within historical duration. But here, too, they would arrive at different conclusions about the fragility of present-day political institutions and the methods for sustaining confidence in the durability of secular political structures.
II. HANNAH ARENDT AND THE SECULAR SOURCES FOR AMERICAN ANXIETY
Shortly after the publication of The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock described himself as a “witness to the crisis of American thought and values in the late 1960s.”Footnote 9 After completing his doctorate on British historical thought in 1952 under the supervision of Herbert Butterfield at Cambridge University, Pocock taught political science at the University of Canterbury from 1959 to 1965 before leaving his native New Zealand to become a professor of history at Washington University in St Louis.Footnote 10 By the spring of l968 there were multiple arenas of protest in the United States and Europe, and even after student protests were quelled a more radicalized group of left revolutionaries remained active.Footnote 11 Pocock was, and remains, primarily an intellectual historian of the early modern period and he described The Machiavellian Moment shortly before its publication as centrally concerned with “the character of Renaissance constitutional thought.” Nevertheless, the rise of radical social movements seemed to be a target of Pocock's methodological essays in the late 1960s and remarks in The Machiavellian Moment referencing recent events in the United States focused on the anxious public response to social and political upheaval that he had noted in his review of Wood's Creation of the American Republic in 1973.Footnote 12
Pocock's explanation of the way in which the republican conceptualization of time and political stability continued to inform expressions of American anxiety depended both on his particular reading of Aristotle's original political model of the polis and the existentialist dilemma faced by political societies acutely conscious of their contingent foundations. Where Wood portrayed the republican political ideology as “premodern” because of its preoccupation with public virtue and a perfectly harmonized mixed government, Pocock presented the persistent anxiety about the corruption of the republic over time as an intelligible response to a polity's awareness of the contingency of its fixed moment of foundation and the consequent threat to personal independence that civic participation promised.Footnote 13 Both of these elements were, in turn, shaped by Hannah Arendt's presentation of the Aristotelian model of political action as well as her description of the particularly secular nature of Machiavellian republicanism and American foundation. Indeed, Pocock himself stated clearly in his conclusion that he had drawn upon insights “borrowed from or suggested by the language of Hannah Arendt” to narrate “the revival of the zoon politikon who affirmed his being and virtue through political action” and whose “antithesis is the homo credens of the Christian faith.”Footnote 14
As scholars have noted, Pocock's reading of Aristotle's model for the polis, presented in The Machiavellian Moment as the major historical source for the political mode that Machiavelli and others developed in Renaissance Florence, hewed closely to Arendt's appropriation of Aristotle in The Human Condition.Footnote 15 In her 1957 work, Arendt defined the vita activa as political action distinct from productive work or necessary labor. Only the growth of mass-market economies in the eighteenth century, she argued, broke down the integrity of a distinct public space that was the essential preserve of human spontaneity.Footnote 16 Pocock's reconstruction of the original republican model emphasized public recognition of individual distinctiveness as the beating heart of republican thought, and his description of Aristotle's social vision bore clear affinities to Arendt's articulation of human plurality in The Human Condition. Echoing Arendt's portrayal of the value of the Greek polis, Pocock argued that in the essential republican model civic participation ensured that citizens could come to know themselves and each other through the way they that they appeared to others in the public arena.Footnote 17 Pocock stated, “it is pointed out in the Politics that when men are treated as all alike, we fail to take account of them in those respects in which they are not alike.”Footnote 18 Following this line of reasoning and Arendt's own chronology for the “rise of the social” in the eighteenth century, he argued that the emergence of a new standard of comportment prior to the American Revolution positing commerce and civility, rather than direct political action, as the proper human end would be seen as threatening the public recognition of individual distinctiveness and serve as an original source for American discontent.Footnote 19
However, beyond Pocock's explicitly stated application of Arendt's political philosophy to his historical narrative, the depiction in The Machiavellian Moment of republican governments forced to confront their finitude resonated with the existential quality of Arendt's presentation of secular political communities in The Human Condition and On Revolution.Footnote 20 Pocock first referenced On Revolution, her idiosyncratic work from 1963 analyzing the modern revolutionary phenomenon, in his essay “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” which was first presented as a paper on “The Dimension of Time in Systems of Political Thought” in 1967 and served as Pocock's entrée into American historiography.Footnote 21 Pocock cited On Revolution—in which Arendt already pointed out the possibility of linking Machiavelli, Harrington, and Jefferson as part of the same republican political tradition—as a work already beginning to lay the foundation for the study of the formation of the classical period of American thought.Footnote 22 Pocock's account of the “secular” break from all prior forms of political authority in The Machiavellian Moment, and the acceptance of historical contingency in turn mirrored Arendt's claim that it was only the decision to “venture forth into an enterprise entirely of their own” that led the American colonists, unguided by theology or history, to discover the “elementary grammar of political action”.Footnote 23 Pocock generalized this thesis by arguing that the act of creating a political community that did not rely on any transcendent sources of authority to forge a durable political order formed the basis of the republican self-consciousness and its acute awareness of political finitude. Unmediated by divine command or traditions of behavior, republicans were thrown back on the basic problem of managing interpersonal relations without predetermined customs or theological structures to theorize social continuity.Footnote 24 His analysis thus established a line between the traditional response to domesticating novelty, which located all new acts within a predetermined mode of historical understanding, and the attitude of republicans toward the act of political foundation, including American foundation, which asserted principles rather than precedents to legitimate their enterprise.Footnote 25 Those who could successfully break away from a political model that domesticated novelty into received experience or eschewed the city of man altogether would have to be, in Pocock's words, “toughly and secularly civic minds indeed.”Footnote 26
It was both these features of the Machiavellian republican tradition that Pocock claimed contributed to the frequency of anxious public outcry in the United States over the corruption of political principles and, in a counterintuitive twist, to the American impulse toward territorial conquest. Pocock argued that it was “the complex history of the vita activa” that formed the peculiarities of the American mind and its frontier mythology, which saw unceasing creation and expansion as one way to avoid confronting the fact that their political society faced the uncertainties of the future without the grounding of history or divinity to shroud the novelty of their political acts. Even before leaving New Zealand Pocock had gestured toward the historical link between the English reception of Machiavelli in the seventeenth century and American populism and frontier culture.Footnote 27 In The Machiavellian Moment the fear of American decline was portrayed as a consequence of its self-conscious novelty rather than its theological heritage, although the fear of decline could be articulated in millennial language or in the traditional jeremiad form.Footnote 28 Through his analysis of the continuities between the Machiavellian political tradition and America's frontier culture, Pocock showed that civic republicanism understandably persisted as the nagging conscience of the nation even after the rise of political parties and interest-group politics since it promised both personal autonomy and political permanence.Footnote 29 As Machiavelli had claimed, the republic was fated to decline either through imperial overstretch or by remaining stagnant, and citizens could only work to forestall decline by bearing arms and forcibly preserving the glory of the republic through conquest.Footnote 30 Pocock explained that the republic “faced the dilemma, born of its finitude, that it could not escape expansion nor the corruption that followed expansion.”Footnote 31Pace Louis Hartz's thesis about the absence of social conflict in the United States leading to liberal consensus, the historical dialectic had manifested in a romantic drive to transform territory in order to sustain the republic through time and to forcibly maintain a condition of public liberty.Footnote 32 In Pocock's reading, if American efforts to transform the frontier—or to “liberate Asia” through the Vietnam War—failed, they would once again be subject to history and to a condition of social dependence. This anxiety further manifested in modern-day laments about the impending loss of personal political agency through the “military–industrial complex,” or of becoming a “lonely crowd,” in David Riesman's popular terminology, where the loss of personal independence followed the decline of civic engagement.Footnote 33 Arendt's conception of the zoon politikon thus provided a context for why the move toward representative government and away from civic participation during the debates over the American Constitution would be received as a permanent threat to the temporal stability of the republic and play out in regular displays of public penitence.
III. A CRISIS OF THE REPUBLIC?
As we have seen, Pocock's analysis of the sources of American discontent and territorial expansionism in The Machiavellian Moment built upon Arendt's presentation of civic republicanism. However, contextualized within Pocock's immediate intellectual milieu in St Louis in the late 1960s and early 1970s it becomes clear that in his conclusion Pocock located Arendt's political thought within the same tradition that produced the impulse to lament the direction of American history, and that he cast her as one of the “tormented saints” he set out to historicize. Pocock and Arendt never met, but during the period in which he developed the final section of The Machiavellian Moment, his presentation of Arendt was shaped by the work of his colleague Peter Fuss on The Human Condition. After immigrating to the United States in 1966, Pocock taught history and political science at Washington University in St Louis, and in 1967 founded the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. Fuss, a professor at the University of Missouri, was Pocock's colleague in the St Louis Chapter of the Conference, and in his reference to Arendt's notion of the vita activa, Pocock cited both Arendt's chapter on “the rise of the social” in The Human Condition and Fuss's essay “Hannah Arendt's Conception of Political Community,” which was published in the journal Idealistic Studies.Footnote 34 Fuss began corresponding with Arendt in 1964 and his letters to her convey both his deep admiration for her writing and his numerous efforts to bring Arendt to St Louis to lecture and, even more urgently, to meet John Pocock. He sent her one of Pocock's lectures and she in turn responded in a letter from 1973 that it was “excellent” and that she “knows something of him, and have been aware for quite a while that he is certainly among the very best historians of his generation.”Footnote 35 Fuss's high regard for Arendt is apparent in their correspondence, but in the essay that Pocock cited as a source for his reading of Arendt, Fuss had concluded that the agonal conception of politics presented in the Human Condition, where political actors meet in the public sphere to perform rhetorically and be seen and heard by others, was ultimately absolutist in its insistence on political participation.
Pocock's final statement on Arendt's political thought likewise implied that her conception of politics concealed a rigid dogmatism. In his closing remarks in The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock asserted that there is “a freedom to decline moral absolutes, even those of the polis and history,” echoing Fuss's reading of the compulsive dimensions of Arendt's conception of the vita activa.Footnote 36 These final suggestive remarks further equated the Hegelian emphasis on transforming history, which Pocock had argued was endemic to the American frontier drive, with the compulsions of political participation in the polis. Though Pocock drew upon Arendt's non-Marxist account of the rise of political economy in the eighteenth century and its clash with the ancient vision of citizenship and liberty, he suggested that beneath the vast differences separating Arendt from Marx lay a structurally similar way of relating to change in history.Footnote 37 We can only conclude, then, that the moral offered at the conclusion of Pocock's lengthy study was that Arendt's emphasis on civic engagement, too, was aligned with the ideology that produced the American jeremiad, as well as the national proclivity for violence and conquest.
Pocock's critical engagement with Arendt in The Machiavellian Moment is further evident viewed from the perspective of his other professional activities during this period. In the years leading up to and immediately following the publication of The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock was not only intent on demonstrating that the American Revolution belonged to a wider Atlantic history but also in outlining for his American audiences the contours of a peculiar American sonderweg that made its historical trajectory distinct from that of Great Britain. In 1973 Pocock famously called for a new subject of British history after Britain's decision to enter the European Economic Community, which threatened New Zealand's economy as well as its self-perception as part of the broader Commonwealth project.Footnote 38 A crucial context, then, for his intervention in the historiography of American foundation was his more central project during the period of developing a distinct field of British imperial history at a moment when the broader British Commonwealth community began to unravel.Footnote 39 While Arendt argued in On Revolution that the American founders had provided a unique example of how contingent and groundless origins could become a source for stability through time, Pocock proposed the surprising thesis that the United States, rather than Britain, was the true inheritor of Machiavellian empire since its ideology dictated that it would need to expand territorially to preserve its capacity to confront geopolitical entropy.
Though he would later claim that the final section of The Machiavellian Moment on “The Americanization of Virtue” was merely an afterthought, Pocock's speeches from this period indicate his zeal to show the distinctiveness of the American political experience and its implications for American violence.Footnote 40 In academic talks from the late 1960s and the 1970s, Pocock suggested that a constitutive feature of American political culture compelled the republic to pursue empire but that this same characteristic led to performances of public anguish and regret. The nation thus doomed itself to be borne ceaselessly into the past, and to keep expanding territorially, if it did not stop rehearsing the signs of its declension. At the American Historical Association meeting in 1969, Pocock emphasized that the United States had inherited Florentine republicanism's constitutive expansiveness as well as its historical pessimism, continuing its tradition of valorizing the “citizen warrior” who could impose order upon temporal flux. Concluding his speech on a solemn note, Pocock suggested that this model of virtue might need to be reevaluated, as it might itself be a source of corruption.Footnote 41 A few years later, at a public talk given at Towson State University, Pocock argued that the American Revolution and the act of American political union belonged to the wider context of British history, but that American continental expansion represented a definitive departure from this historical arena. Pocock informed his audience: “You are—or at any rate you have been—an imperial people in a way the British never were . . . it was only in leaving the sphere of British history that the United States became the most effective and durable empire ever founded upon British political institutions.”Footnote 42 And in that same year at Arizona State University, in a talk on “The Varieties of Conservatism: British and American,” Pocock located the source of American anxiety in the fact that America was founded on principles rather than precedents, which entailed a state of permanent revolution. He stated that this accounted for “the strange—and to me unconservative—character of America as the only major political guilt culture, in which the failure of its dreams or the end of its innocence has been regularly lamented since the national beginnings.” Britain and its dominions had, by contrast, “never been dedicated to a proposition.”Footnote 43 American historical consciousness had thus developed counter to British political and historical thought, which Pocock had historicized in his early career in his first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, following the example set by his supervisor, Herbert Butterfield.Footnote 44 Whereas the conception of history displayed by theorists of the common law like Edward Coke and Edmund Burke emphasized the continuity of the British political tradition, American historical consciousness worked to undermine trust in the continuity of its traditions and institutions.Footnote 45
Looking at Arendt's writing on the problem of impermanence in the modern age, and her analysis of American empire in the 1960s and 1970s, it becomes clear that Pocock was not off the mark in suggesting a link between her emphasis on secular permanence and her anxiety about the future of the United States. Arendt's political thought in both The Human Condition and On Revolution exhibited the peculiar anxiety about impermanence and institutional decay that Pocock claimed was constitutive of the republican tradition. In both works, and even earlier in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt insisted that protecting the fragile boundaries keeping political societies unmediated by tradition or theology from collapsing into an undifferentiated mass required the cultivation of permanent political structures. Her endeavors to diagnose and criticize the overextension of American power and the emergence of what she termed “an imperial republic” reflected this theoretical conviction. In her Crisis of the Republic from 1972, Arendt addressed the problems of American empire, leadership, war and democracy. Moreover, her speech at the Boston Bicentennial conference on 20 May 1975, celebrating the “American Experiment,” touched on many of the themes that Pocock had identified as emblematic of the republican jeremiad tradition.Footnote 46 Invoking the threat of “public opinion,” and of the Madison Avenue executives who sought to manipulate public opinion, her speech provided an illustration of Pocock's depiction of republican paranoia in The Machiavellian Moment.Footnote 47 She further suggested that the postwar “crisis” in America, which she argued began with Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist trials, had led to reasonable doubts as to whether the American form of government could survive into the next millennium. The fact that Arendt argued both in On Revolution and again in her speech that the founding generation could still serve as a model to illuminate “darker times” demonstrated the way that she, too, held up the examples of the past to castigate the trajectory of the republic and to offer the point of foundation as a source of comfort and confidence. Significantly, her account of the precipitous position of the United States suggested that imperial overextension was a central cause of the corruption of the republic, where Pocock argued that its republican heritage was also the source of its expansiveness.Footnote 48 Of course, this is not to suggest that Pocock responded to Arendt's particular utterances. However, her political commentary underscores their distinct responses to the wider American discourse of decline and lends support to Pocock's reading of Arendt's thought as structurally related to the broader American psyche that he had set out to diagnose.
But how widespread, really, was the sense that the republic faced the possibility of extinction? Arendt's message certainly reached a wider audience when a columnist at the New York Times, Tom Wicker, paraphrased her speech in his column on 25 May 1975. Her doleful reflections on the state of the republic also seemed to resonate with a diverse array of readers.Footnote 49 Though it has been suggested that the sense of crisis was intensified in the American academy, where student unrest combined with falling salaries, the idea that the United States was experiencing a genuine period of instability was not unique to Arendt or to a few stray scholars.Footnote 50 Pocock's eye was clearly trained on those who insisted upon the fragility of the republic and the precariousness of its future.Footnote 51 For these individuals, the lessons of the oil crisis, Nixon's downfall in 1973, and the decline of American industry were clear: the stability and permanence of the American experiment were far from guaranteed. Other speakers at the Bicentennial conference in Boston, for example, were similarly pessimistic about the future of the polity. The historian Thomas Cochran's address at the American Historical Association meeting in 1973 referred to the period beginning in 1960 as one of “unusual social problems and basic readjustments.”Footnote 52 And in an article published in 1975 on the theme of historical decline, Randolph Starn noted, “there is room to wonder about a theme probably as old as civilization and as close to the doubting mood of the present.”Footnote 53 Starn's essay in turn highlights the academic interest in the historical conceptualization of temporality at the moment when Pocock published The Machiavellian Moment, but more importantly, it marks just one of the numerous moody reflections on the pervasive sense of doubt in the durability of political institutions from the period. The perception of widespread insecurity reached its political and popular height when Jimmy Carter famously identified a “crisis of confidence” as the central national problem in his “Malaise Speech” from 1979.Footnote 54
However, even if there was debate throughout the 1970s over the security of American political foundations, other intellectuals were critical of Arendt's emphasis on the fragility of the republic. Their responses to her statements emphasizing the basic insecurity of the American republic indicate a broader cultural clash in this period over how to interpret signs of American decline, or at least its stagnation. The liberal political theorist Judith Shklar, for instance, argued in her review of On Revolution from 1977 that Arendt manifested a particularly American concern for political dissolution. She stated, “the book shows a patriotism that was not merely a refugee's gratitude. To complain of unceasing declension is the deepest impulse of American patriotism, and Miss Arendt evidently shares it.”Footnote 55 The noted sociologist Nathan Glazer likewise understood Arendt's writing on the state of the republic to mean that the foundations of the republic were in jeopardy. Despite America's failed intervention in Vietnam, as well as domestic crises like inflation, unemployment, and the rise of the crime rate, he argued that “many of these problems have nothing to do with our form of government and the state of our institutions of liberty.”Footnote 56 This wider context does not indicate that at the time he wrote The Machiavellian Moment Pocock sought to position himself within a broader cultural debate among American commentators about the future of the United States, but rather that he, like others, sought to identify the root causes of what may have seemed at the time like a peculiarly American impulse to lament the failure to adhere to guiding principles.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to suggest the conditions for the various responses to the sense of crisis in the United States, but it is clear that Pocock's analysis had more to do with his thinking during this period about the diverse ways one could relate to historical transformation. On this point, it has been suggested that in The Machiavellian Moment Pocock presented the United States as failing to break through to the modern age because it remained tied to a model of cyclical crisis rather than linear progress.Footnote 57 As we have seen, however, the advantage of Pocock's presentation was that it made sense of the enduring presence of anxiety about the ability to sustain a republic through time without claiming that the roots of this concern were necessarily theological or “premodern.” Pocock has been explicit in his writing and public speeches about the ambivalence built into the concept of “modernity” and the diverse ways of relating to the consciousness of contingency and historicity. In his talk “Machiavelli: The Republican” at the American Historical Association Meeting in 1969, he in fact argued that the Machiavellian, and later the Harringtonian, emphasis on land and arms as requirements for political independence and virtue pointed back to a classical past, but forward to a particularly modernist discourse against the idea of progress. As Pocock described the Machiavellian tradition, “Its most classical and at the same times it most modern feature is its insistence that virtue, that the unity and harmony of the personality itself, is corrupted when the republic is corrupt, and therefore threatened by the forces of historical growth.”Footnote 58 Later, in an essay from 1978, he made the distinction between two different forms of relating to “modernity.” At its most general, he explained, “modernity appears only when there are secular means of knowing oneself to be a different sort of secular being from an antique man . . . but there is a profound difference between a historicism which presents history as a secular flux ruled by fortune, and one which presents it as secular process and transformation.”Footnote 59 In providing a historical survey of the variety of modes of relating to the problem of political foundation, Pocock demonstrated that there were alternative ways of relating to the future and historical change that did not require the same regular displays of anguish over the integrity of political institutions.
The fascinating implication of these remarks was that a version of modernism prone to cultural pessimism was partially constituted by the ancient conception of liberty. Pocock thus offered alternative conceptions of “modernity”—one of which was exemplified by the fear of political dissolution and the loss of moral personality present in Arendt's thought but also discernible in Rousseau, Marx, and the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. “Modernity” thus arose out of the consciousness of the gap between the past and the present, but Pocock suggested that there were diverse ways of relating to this awareness. In a later self-assessment of his career in an unpublished “bibliographic and intellectual profile,” Pocock insisted that it was part of his thesis in The Machiavellian Moment that American intellectuals are “so much involved in detailing the nature of their foundation.”Footnote 60 The fact that Arendt was an object of this argument as much as she helped provide the analytic language in The Machiavellian Moment is crucial for understanding the moral offered at the conclusion of the work, and the way in which Pocock positioned himself in relation to American scholarship during a period of perceived crisis.
IV. IN THE SUCCESSION OF GENERATIONS: POCOCK AND ARENDT ON THE ETHICS OF LOCATING ONESELF IN TIME
We are now in a position to understand the precise scope—and clear limits—of Pocock's use of Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt remains an important interlocutor and she is crucial to understanding his engagement with the American discourse of decline in the 1970s. In his review of Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, Pocock indeed suggested that both American historiography and political philosophy remained engaged in the eighteenth-century “quarrel” between virtue and commerce, and we might now see Arendt as the silent subject of this remark.Footnote 61 It is necessary, however, to separate Pocock's critique of Arendt's valorization of the vita activa in The Human Condition from the convergent tendencies in both their writings to suggest that historical consciousness could serve as a stabilizing substitute for the absence of either custom or religious sources of authority to ground an ethical basis for human community. Pocock's critics have generally used his connection to Arendt to criticize the historical validity of his conclusions or to suggest that he inadvertently smuggled a communitarian-inflected, even Heideggerian-inflected, philosophy into his work through her writings.Footnote 62 On closer inspection, however, Pocock's similarity to Arendt derives from the point at which Arendt departed from Heidegger and celebrated the importance of being seen and heard by others in the public arena.Footnote 63 Both suggested in their work that imaginatively placing oneself within a space of time that preceded and would transcend one's life could serve as a training exercise for respecting difference and an ethical foundation absent transcendent sources of authority.Footnote 64
The deep sense of urgency expressed throughout Arendt's writings about the loss of concern in the modern age for creating immortal political structures went far deeper than her admiration for classical politics and its glorification of active citizenship. Though it has been claimed that Arendt separated morality from politics, much of her political work explicitly entertained the question of moral guidelines in the absence of metaphysical foundations.Footnote 65 The problem of permanence is a red thread throughout her writings and the presentation of modernity as the condition of being cut off from tradition, and the consequent need to forge a sense of earthly permanence by locating oneself within the longue durée of human history, cut across her postwar oeuvre. While Arendt did not suggest that it would be possible to reconstitute the certainties that used to secure the moral foundations of communal existence, she argued that it might be possible to simultaneously begin a political community and preserve the sense of living in a continuous stream of human history by expressing gratitude for one's place within a vast temporal span. This prescription for overcoming the loss of any metaphysical grounding went beyond her well-known analysis of Walter Benjamin's method of extracting illuminating fragments from the past like a “pearl diver.”Footnote 66 Instead, her work continually exhibited a concern for developing concrete strategies for preserving the sense of continuity with generations of people who preceded, or would outlive, one's individual life. In describing the concept of human plurality in The Human Condition she wrote, “it is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.”Footnote 67 Though Arendt famously argued that totalitarianism had revealed the depth of the rupture with the past in modern Western history, the solution she offered was to re-create a sense of existing within an eternal human community that could serve as a sort of stabilizing substitute for a transcendent source of authority and legitimacy.Footnote 68 This conjecture reappeared in a lecture on moral philosophy from 1965, where Arendt defined “moral personality” as nothing more than the capacity to think and develop “self-grown roots.”Footnote 69
Pocock, too, identified the moral dimension of cultivating an awareness of existing in a continual stream of human history, and his own normative convictions are discernible in his methodological commitment to situating political speech acts within a diachronic historical context. He suggested that the very recognition that our language and intellectual concepts are inherited could mitigate politically radical impulses by demonstrating our rootedness within historical contexts. In an essay written in honor of Michael Oakeshott in 1968, he wrote, “both in the seventeenth and in the twentieth centuries it has been salutary to be reminded that society is indeed immemorial, and further that our knowledge of the social usages that have preceded us is inherited from those usages themselves, from the assumptions they encourage us to make and the intimations they permit us to pursue.”Footnote 70 Here, as well as in later essays and speeches, Pocock suggested that setting oneself within history and pregiven linguistic structures circumvented the violence of the Hegelian model of recognition by establishing a dialogic relation with others both past and present. Against the student radicals who sought to assert their identity over his own, he offered the idea of speech as a “counterrevolutionary strategy” since it manifested the fact that human beings were necessarily born into a community and a language that they did not create.Footnote 71 It implied that being historically conscious, and aware that the meaning of utterances escapes individual control, was a crucial part of being a member of a democratic society.Footnote 72 It is not clear to what extent Arendt's own meditations on the obligation to imaginatively place oneself within a longer historical durée informed Pocock's own reflections, but we can conclude based on the commonalities in their moral theory that if they shared any normative commitments it was their common emphasis on the ethical implications of locating oneself within historical duration.Footnote 73 For both, the practice of situating one's actions and speech in history could be the route to better democratic citizens who would not try to assert their sovereignty over others.Footnote 74
Yet when Pocock directly addressed the revolutionary movements of the 1960s he exhibited a far more lax attitude to the problem of political novelty and contingency that provides a critical context for the way he set himself against those anxious about the possibility of American political dissolution. In his essay “Time, Institutions, Action” from 1968, he argued that “charismatic” traditions, or institutions that were clearly derived from human creation at particular moments in time, much like the American republic, could also become part of the unexamined “furniture” of the social order.Footnote 75 The skeptical final note of The Machiavellian Moment, in which Pocock insisted on the freedom to resist all moral absolutes, ultimately followed from this conviction since the fact that American foundation occurred at a fixed point in time did not necessarily imply that its ability to sustain itself would be a perennial problem. By contrast, Arendt's work conveyed the uncanny quality of institutional continuity and she remained in awe of the durability of secular political institutions. Though she described the American founders in On Revolution as modern innovators for attempting to institute a permanent secular polity, she reinscribed precariousness into this formula by pointing out that the capacity to remember and re-create a sense of historical continuity had to begin anew with each generation and thus required constant vigilance and renewal.Footnote 76 On this score, it is also revealing to compare their contrasting conclusions regarding the present-day relevance of Edmund Burke's conservative philosophy. While Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism that Burke's conception of tradition and common sense lost its hold with the radical break in history wrought by the advent of mass society and imperialism, Pocock insisted that Burke's conception of the way in which tradition can remain a powerful anchor in modern society had succeeded in Great Britain and continued to mark the “British,” in contrast to the “American,” relation to temporality.Footnote 77 The capacity to imaginatively place oneself within a historical continuum did not, for Pocock, then, necessarily require the force of will, as it did for Arendt, but could become an implicit form of historical consciousness as it had in nineteenth-century Britain, even if a sharp observer like Edmund Burke was able to comment on this modern phenomenon.Footnote 78 By contrast, and at least in Pocock's analysis, the practice of looking back to original foundations and principles—which Arendt sought to do in On Revolution and urged in her Boston speech—could perpetuate the sense of futurity as a form of crisis.
Indeed, in his lectures from the 1970s Pocock seemed to revel in his status as an outsider uniquely accommodated to the ceaseless rise and fall of the human artifice. Pocock stated explicitly in his lecture in Arizona in 1977 that coming from New Zealand, a British settler society founded in the nineteenth century, afforded him a unique perspective both on the myth of an immemorial British society and on the insistence that America is a new civilization because, as he stated, “I come from a newer one.”Footnote 79 And in his later reflections on his study of the civic republican tradition Pocock asserted that he brought with him to the United States “an Antipodean kind of historical consciousness for that culture to assimilate.” By “Antipodean” he meant the consciousness that developed from living in a far-flung part of the planet, and he suggested that this geographic experience had left him more intrinsically comfortable with the contingency and the arbitrariness of history—a quality that set him apart from other émigré observers of the American political experience.Footnote 80
V. CONCLUSION: CONDITIONS FOR CONFIDENCE IN POLITICAL CONTINUITY
In a recent reflection on The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock noted that as a historian concerned with the “dialogue between ancient and modern liberty,” it was “unsurprising that the recent political philosopher whose work has the greatest resonance for me should be the late Hannah Arendt.” But he rejected the claim that he had simply converted Arendt's philosophy into history. “The life of the mind,” Pocock states, “is neither as simple nor as muddled as that.”Footnote 81 Taking this formula as a provocation, this essay has sought to set to rights our understanding of Pocock's engagement with Arendt's political philosophy and to identify the immediate historical context in which he drew upon her work. It has further been argued that Pocock did not view the political culture in the United States as “premodern” due to its preoccupation with its own corruption, but rather as exemplary of a certain way of relating to the past and to social continuity that represented only one option among other secular modes of relating to history. Arendt's political thought—and as we have seen, her statements as a public intellectual—exhibited the concern for political permanence in the United States that Pocock set out to historicize. Understanding Pocock's engagement with Arendt's analysis of modernity and her anxiety regarding political permanence thus provides an alternative interpretation of his role in developing a “republican synthesis” in anglophone historiography. Beyond demonstrating some of the non-liberal sources of American political thought, the nation's republican origins could help explain the psychic apprehension Americans in particular seemed to be experiencing during a period of global upheaval. Moreover, in self-consciously presenting himself as an exponent of the “New British History,” and as a historian concerned with the conceptualization of history and tradition, Pocock set himself against other émigrés like Arendt and diagnosed their particular pathology. While Arendt asserted that immortal political structures were the fragile precondition for ethical co-existence, Pocock's work implied that tradition and precedent remained functional methods for dispelling existential anxiety in Britain and its former dominions. “Machiavellian moments” could pass and become domesticated into a prescriptive way of relating to political origins. Whether or not the question of institutional continuity and permanence is necessarily “theological,” as some have claimed, it is clear that Pocock's implication in The Machiavellian Moment, as well as in his public discussions, was that it was precisely the contradictions built into secularization that led Americans to question their capacity to resist political entropy and their pursuit of empire. This is not to suggest that Pocock's analysis of political culture in the United States was necessarily accurate, but rather that reckoning with, and revising our understanding of, the sources and meaning of his complex study direct our attention to the diverse ways scholars have sought to explain the persistence of the American declension narrative. Indeed, as we continue to debate the sources of American political anxiety, considering the conditions for confidence in political continuity will only become more urgent.Footnote 82
