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“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and the ...”

“... when it comes to the forces of change. Bourke approvingly quotes a piece by the historian J.G.A. Pocock on the student protests of the 1960s, in which he warns that the lurch towards absolute freedom results in terror. It is hard to see student demands for revamped syllabuses leading to heads in baskets. In any case, the contemporary world isn’t bursting ...”

“... and too provocatively called ‘British history’ was generated by political circumstance. J.G.A. Pocock established its parameters in 1973, in a paper read in New Zealand just after the UK had turned its back on the Commonwealth in order to join the EEC. With a chapter in the history of Empire ending, it seemed right to investigate how a dynamic state-system ...”

“... group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled syntax of the Second ...”

“... the Hartz thesis crumbled. From the mid-1960s the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock demonstrated that the revolution and constitution owed more to a participatory language of virtue, duty and civic activism derived from the Ancients via Machiavelli and late 17th-century English Commonwealthmen than to the rights-based idioms of ...”

“... politics.’ The need for low wages was considered to be common sense, not ideology. J.G.A. Pocock, on ground which he has made very much his own, shows that ‘the political limits to pre-modern economics’ lay in the basic assumption that the citizen was also a warrior. In practice, of course, he was not. In England even the aristocracy, the ...”

“... Hill. The other heroes of Hexter’s book, Carl Becker, Wallace Ferguson, Hiram Hayden and J.G.A. Pocock, were, I have to admit, infinitely less familiar to me. Thus it is thanks to Hexter that I have learnt that, around 1930, Becker was a relativist, just as Raymond Aron was to become one on our side of the Atlantic a few years later. In the aftermath of the ...”

“... Everyone agreed there had been a Scottish Enlightenment, but sceptical historians, such as J.G.A. Pocock, asked if there had ever been an English one. People still write about the Enlightenment as experienced in a single country but they are now once again aware that ideas know only linguistic barriers. This is a lesson that Israel has learned. The second ...”

“... republican tradition of political thought, which has been traced in the important work of J.G.A. Pocock. Simpson’s emphasis throughout is on ‘a whole litany of retractions’ which accompany Wordsworth’s allegiance to agrarian idealism. These retractions, to Simpson, embody a recognition of existing social and political complexities, and add to the ...”

“... that ‘bourgeois humanist’ politics is simply a disguise for laissez-faire capitalism, J.G.A. Pocock and other historians have been pointing to abundant evidence that the ethos of commercial consumption and the ethos of politically activist republican virtue have been in long-standing contention with each other over the centuries. In English cultural ...”

“... and chronological boundaries. Others, more daringly, have denied its essential unity. J.G.A. Pocock, in his ongoing study of the intellectual worlds of Edward Gibbon, insists on the existence of multiple Enlightenments, some of them remarkably conservative, religious and devoted to erudition. The most radical critics of all have gone far in the other ...”

“... 1640’. In recent decades the ‘new British history’ – first summoned into being by J.G.A. Pocock – has transformed our understanding of the English past. You can’t understand England without appreciating how the interactions of the four nations influenced the course of its history. Historians have sometimes paid less attention to the invidious ...”

“... narrow dogmas of 19th-century economics. Many articles here point out the puzzle, but, as J.G.A. Pocock states, solving it will mean rewriting a long stretch of complicated intellectual history. There is a lot of good stuff in this volume. It opens with the two editors on ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations’; one part of this essay traces ...”

“... the ideas behind empire. As scholars such as David Armitage, Peter Miller, Anthony Pagden, J.G.A. Pocock and Richard Tuck have reminded us repeatedly in recent years, the absence of mind which was sometimes in the past attributed to imperialism was, rather, a characteristic of some of its historians. Pagden reinforces this message in Lords of All the World, a ...”

“... colonialism in the 18th century, when Europeans consolidated, in the words of the historian J.G.A. Pocock, their ‘conceptual dictatorship on the rest of the planet, judging all other peoples by their understanding of themselves’. Older categories of savage, barbarian and civilised gave way in the 19th century to the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages of ...”