John Greville Agard Pocock

Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

The Machiavellian Moment

Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Pocock shows that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which Pocock calls the "Machiavellian moment." After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and he relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought. This Princeton Classics edition of The Machiavellian Moment features a new introduction by Richard Whatmore.

John Wyon Burrow

In the summer of 1994, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Gibbon's death, a group of scholars gathered in Oxford to commemorate and explore his achievement, producing this volume of essays. Eighteen years earlier, in 1976, there were similar gatherings for the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of The Decline and fall, likewise producing published collections of essays. Comparing the present volume with its predecessors, how has scholarship devoted to Gibbon changed in the intervening years? The dominant theme of Gibbon studies during this recent period has been 'disaggregation', and this can be understood in two senses. Firstly, there has been textual disaggregation. Works which earlier scholars were content to treat as 'un ensemble' are today scrupulously delaminated: manuscripts are compared, different editions collated, separate instalments discriminated, successive drafts juxtaposed. It seems safe to say that no modern study of Gibbon could gain a hearing unless its author was evidently a master of the relevant textual bibliography. The result of this renewed interest in bibliography has been a much sharper awareness of the complexity of Gibbon's writings as literary artefacts. Secondly, disaggregation has also occurred in the contexts, both English and European, within which Gibbon's work demand to be read. The Enlightenment itself is now apprehended as a congeries of movements and events that attracted men of divergent aims and beliefs. In this freshly complicated setting, Gibbon's life and work emerge as key points, through which swirled many of the most important intellectual currents of the day. The essays collected in this volume exemplify and extend these trends in Gibbon scholarship.

Bicentenary Essays

Edward Gibbon

Donald Robertson

Carlo M. Cipolla

Rudolph Binion

Lynn Townsend White

R. R. Palmer

John William Ward

George F. E. Rudé

Thomas G. Barnes

Vivian Hunter Galbraith

Joseph Richmond Levenson

Jan Vansina

Robert Brentano

Raymond K. Kent

Laurence W. Levine

Original Essays by Sixteen Historians

The Historian's Workshop

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. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

1641, 1688, 1776

Three British Revolutions

John Greville Agard Pocock

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