Volume 33, Number 3 · February 27, 1986
Politics as Language
By Keith Thomas
Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century
by J.G.A. Pocock
Cambridge University Press, 321 pp., 12.95 (paper)
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, currently professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Over the past thirty years he has published a remarkable sequence of books and articles which, though disparate in subject matter and visibly influenced by the changing intellectual fashions of the day, constitute an oeuvre of formidable consistency.[1] His writings advance our knowledge of political thought and argument in Italy, England, and America between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. More important, they provide an exemplary model of how historical study is the indispensable precondition for interpreting the political texts of the past.
Review, 4129 words
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