The unquestionable achievement of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was to describe the retention of pre-modern values in a modern society. Pocock was notoriously accused of decentring Locke and side-lining the Liberal Tradition. A more pertinent critique had it that he failed to articulate how civic humanism in the context of increasingly commercial societies produced more than Jeremiahs or Cassandras. This article explains how Pocock responded to his various critics by inventing the term “commercial humanism” in an effort (...) to clarify the way in which classical virtue was modified in modern commercial contexts, especially by natural jurists and republicans. Commercial humanism proved controversial but stimulated one of the most original scholars working in the history of political thought, István Hont, to undertake a prolonged engagement with Pocock's revisionist ideas, which ultimately allowed him to answer Pocock's critics better than Pocock, whose voice remained too in tune with those whose view of modern political thought he had rejected. For Hont, Pocock's labours in the history of political thought remained less relevant to present politics than they might become, once the depth of eighteenth-century analyses of the relationship between wealth and virtue was recovered. (shrink)

This article reappraises the political ideas of William Manning, and through him the trajectory of early modern republicanism. Manning, an early American farmer writing in the 1780s and 1790s, developed the republican distinction between and into a novel On this theory, it is the dependent, laboring classes who share an interest in social equality. Because of this interest, they are the only ones who can achieve and maintain republican liberty. With this identification of the interests of the dependent classes with (...) the common good, Manning inverted inherited republican ideas, and transformed the language of liberty and virtue into one of the first potent, republican critiques of exploitation. As such, he stands as a key figure for understanding the shift in early modern republicanism from a concern with constitutionalism and the rule of law to the social question. (shrink)

This article reconstructs J. G. A. Pocock's debt to Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in The Machiavellian Moment and argues that her presentation of classical politics in The Human Condition and her account of the secular nature of American foundation in On Revolution were important sources for Pocock's analysis of American liberal insecurity. However, a contextualization of The Machiavellian Moment within Pocock's immediate intellectual and professional milieu indicates that he placed himself in critical relation to Arendt's civic republican theory and located (...) her philosophy of history in the same spectrum as the American political tradition he sought to historicize. While they did share a similar perspective on the ethical and political value of locating oneself within a long historical durée, their different conceptions of the problem of continuity for secular political structures provides a crucial context for their disparate responses to the discourse of political crisis in the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s. (shrink)