(iPoster) Pocock and the Émigrés: Revisiting the Atlantic Republican Tradition

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory III & Comparative Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory III

Abstract

"When I seek to name those scholars whose work has meant most to me in writing this study," J.G.A. Pocock wrote in the introduction to The Machiavellian Moment (1975), "the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously if controversially...over the whole scene." Nearly three decades later, Pocock recounted that Baron responded with “disappointment” to the author copy he sent. The elder historian was apparently displeased with his refusal to endorse the critical chronology of The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance—namely, Baron’s assertion that Renaissance “civic humanism” emerged suddenly during Florence's confrontation with Milanese tyranny in 1400-1402. As Pocock noted in his afterword, this was a recollection of a letter he apparently lost. Yet, Baron’s reply, held as a carbon copy in his papers, reveals a more striking claim: Pocock had successfully articulated an interpretive vision Baron conceived during his desperate search for employment following emigration to the United States in 1938. The "original plan" for the Crisis, Baron confessed, "had been quite similar to the edifice" Pocock constructed; it intended to trace “civic humanism” as it emerged in Bruni's Florence, moved through Harrington's England, and eventually migrated across the Atlantic, ultimately influencing the American founding. Professional precarity ultimately constrained his focus. Baron abandoned the ambitious transatlantic project, limiting himself to Renaissance Florence—"the portion of the project for which alone I was fully equipped."

This paper examines how two German-Jewish émigré historians of the Renaissance, Hans Baron and Felix Gilbert, provided much of the intellectual foundation for Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment and the practice of Cambridge School contextualism. Pocock arrived in the United States in 1966 precisely as republican revisionism was coalescing across Renaissance and American historiography. Baron's revised Crisis appeared in 1966, Gilbert's Machiavelli and Guicciardini in 1965, and Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967. As the paper demonstrates, Pocock appropriated Baron's substantive civic humanism framework while rejecting his chronological obsessions, instead opting towards Gilbert's contextual methodology and sustained attention to linguistic paradigms. Drawing on published works and private letters recovered from the émigrés’ archives, it revisits the often acknowledged yet still inadequately appreciated indebtedness of Pocock to these two celebrated Renaissance historians. The “Machiavellian Moment,” it turns out, was not only the product of Pocock’s encounter with America in the late 1960s, but also the insights offered by displaced scholars who sought to reconstruct European intellectual traditions on American soil.

Author

• Andrew P. Gibson, University of Florida