J. G. A. Pocock
John Greville Agard Pocock (1924-2023) was a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of civic humanism in the early modern period, his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and Enlightenment historiography in general, and, in historical methodology, for his contributions to the study of political discourse.
Republics and Revelation: Some patterns in the Shaping of Western Historiography (2010)
The history of European historiography includes a number of grand narratives of systemic change emerging at various times, which give it a character of its own. This lecture will trace the interactions between two of them: that focused on the republic, or Mediterranean city-state, and that focused on divine revelation – specifically, in its Christian version – occurring at the moment when republic gives way to empire. It will examine the birth of a narrative first Renaissance and then Enlightened in character, and ask whether we have any conception of a history based on any other narrative.
Lecture delivered on 2 March 2010 at the Centre for Intellectual History, University of Sussex.
The Anglican Enlightenment and Christian Revelation - The Reception of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (2010)
In 1776, two chapters of Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' on the spread of Christianity; they aroused such controversy that it is still supposed that he wrote his history as an attack on religion. In this lecture, Professor Pocock argues to the contrary that the two chapters were prematurely written, and that the controversy is to be understood in the setting of the Church of England's need to reconcile a civil religion with the belief in Christian revelation.
Edward Gibbon – The Roman and British Empires: A Study in the Concept of Empire (2013)
Lecture delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, 2 October 2013.
