Background
John Greville Agard Pocock was born on March 7, 1924 in London, United Kindom, but spent most of his life in New Zealand. In 1966, he came to the United States. He was born to Lewis Greville and Antoinette (Legros) Pocock.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
Pocock received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge in England in 1952.
John Greville Agard Pocock
John Greville Agard Pocock
109 Clyde Road, Fendalton, Christchurch 8041, New Zealand
Pocock attended Medbury School from 1932 to 1937.
20 Kirkwood Avenue, Upper Riccarton, Christchurch 8041, New Zealand
Between 1942 and 1946 Pocock earned both bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Canterbury.
Private Bag 4900 Rolleston Avenue, Christchurch Central City, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand
Pocock attended Christ's College in Christchurch, New Zealand, from 1937 to 1941.
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Constitution-Feudal-Law/dp/B0043KP5PS/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_2?dchild=1&keywords=John+Greville+Agard+Pocock%2C+The+Ancient+Constitution+and+the+Feudal+Law%3A+a+study+of+English+Historical+Thought+in+the+Seventeenth+Century&qid=1592816532&s=books&sr=1-2-fkmr2
1957
(In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J...)
In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J. G. A. Pocock announces the emergence of the history of political thought as a discipline apart from political philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Language-Time-Political-Thought/dp/0226671399/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=John+Greville+Agard+Pocock%2C+Politics%2C+Language+and+Time%3A+Essays+on+Political+Thought+and+History&qid=1592816711&s=books&sr=1-1
1972
(The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the conseq...)
The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J. G. A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment."
https://www.amazon.com/Machiavellian-Moment-Greville-Agard-Pocock/dp/0691100292/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=John+Greville+Agard+Pocock&qid=1592815932&sr=8-2
1975
(In this collection of essays, a group of distinguished Am...)
In this collection of essays, a group of distinguished American and British historians explores the relations between the American Revolution and its predecessors, the Puritan Revolution of 1641 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-British-Revolutions-Princeton-Library/dp/0691615837/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&qid=1592816363&refinements=p_27%3AJohn+Greville+Agard+Pocock&s=books&sr=1-2&text=John+Greville+Agard+Pocock
1980
(This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned p...)
This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521276608/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i10
1985
("Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - i...)
"Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the notion of any one "Enlightenment" and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LY9S3MQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
1999
(This major intervention from one of the world's leading h...)
This major intervention from one of the world's leading historians challenges the notion of any one "Enlightenment" and posits instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. The first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion were warmly and widely reviewed, and won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. In the third volume in the sequence, John Pocock presents a historical introduction to the first fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work, recounting the end of the classical civilization Gibbon and his readers knew so much better than the worlds that followed.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521672333/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i9
2003
("Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - i...)
"Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of a sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. In the fourth volume in the sequence, first published in 2005, Pocock argues that barbarism was central to the history of western historiography, to the history of the Enlightenment and to Edward Gibbon himself.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TU7CV6/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i4
2005
(The Discovery of Islands consists of a series of linked e...)
The Discovery of Islands consists of a series of linked essays in British history, written by one of the world's leading historians of political thought and published over the past three decades. Its purpose is to present British history as that of several nations interacting with - and sometimes seceding from - an imperial state. The commentary presents this history as that of an archipelago, expanding across oceans to the Antipodes.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DM284IM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i5
2005
(John Pocock is arguably the most original and imaginative...)
John Pocock is arguably the most original and imaginative historian of ideas of modern times. Over the past half century he has created an audience for his work which is truly global, and he has marked the way in which the history of political thought is studied as deeply and personally as any historian of the period. The essays in this major new collection are selected from a lifetime of thinking about political thought, and how we should study it in history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521714060/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7
2009
(This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed se...)
This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence of works on Barbarism and Religion examines Volumes II and III of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carrying Gibbon's narrative to the end of empire in the west. It makes two general assertions: first, that this is in reality a mosaic of narratives, written on diverse premises and never fully synthesized with one another; and second, that these chapters assert a progress of both barbarism and religion from east to west, leaving much history behind as they do so.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WMRPEMS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3
2015
John Greville Agard Pocock was born on March 7, 1924 in London, United Kindom, but spent most of his life in New Zealand. In 1966, he came to the United States. He was born to Lewis Greville and Antoinette (Legros) Pocock.
Pocock attended Medbury School from 1932 to 1937 and Christ's College in Christchurch, New Zealand, from 1937 to 1941. Between 1942-1946 he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Canterbury. In 1948 he returned to England to obtain a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge. He completed the degree in 1952.
From 1946 to 1948, Pocock worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Later, from 1953 to 1955, he worked as a history lecturer at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and then, from 1956 to 1958, he was a research fellow at St. John's College in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
From 1959 to 1965, Pocock held the position of a senior lecturer and professor of political science at the University of Canterbury and worked as a professor of history and political science at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, from 1966 to 1974. In 1973, Pocock also was a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. After teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Pocock joined the Faculty of History at the Johns Hopkins University in 1974. He retired with the title of a professor emeritus in 1994.
Pocock has finished six volumes of a projected six-volume study of Gibbon called "Barbarism and Religion."
("Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - i...)
1999("Barbarism and Religion" - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - i...)
2005(This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed se...)
2015(In this collection of essays, a group of distinguished Am...)
1980(The Machiavellian Moment is a classic study of the conseq...)
1975(The Discovery of Islands consists of a series of linked e...)
2005(This major intervention from one of the world's leading h...)
2003(This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned p...)
1985(John Pocock is arguably the most original and imaginative...)
2009(In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J...)
1972Pocock's deep studies - many of them investigating the foundations of modern political thought - range across classical Greece and Rome, early modern Europe, the nascent American republic and New Zealand, the country of his boyhood.
Pocock led the way in a new approach to the history of political ideas. His central contention is that a work of political thought can only be understood if the reader is aware of the contemporary linguistic constraints to which its author was subject.
Pocock has pioneered the idea of "contextualism," which calls on historians to study canonical works in the intellectual contexts of their eras, and not as the products of single minds. Pocock's contribution to this "Cambridge school" of historiography is the concept that "political languages" underlie the texts of an era and are unconsciously shared by historians of that time. Among these shared "linguistic universes" in the 17th and 18th centuries, for instance, were concepts of the common law and classical republicanism - defining ideas that inform the rhetoric of James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others.
Pocock is a member of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Historical Society, American Historical Association and American Political Science Association.
Quotes from others about the person
"Of all the scholars who currently study the history of Western political thought, no one is more fertile, eloquent and ingenious than J. G. A. Pocock." - Keith Thomas
On March 27, 1958, Pocock married Felicity Willis-Fleming. They have two children: Stephen Greville and Hugh Edward.