J. G. A. Pocock

In a new article in January 2019, Pocock answered parts of the criticism against the contextualism of the "Cambridge School": "The beginnings of the ‘global’ critique are well known and may as well be accepted as common ground. They reduce to the assertion that ‘Cambridge’ scholarship in this field is ‘Eurocentric’ [...] This is obviously true, and calls for reformation."

Pocock concludes that the issue of New Zealand's sovereignty must be an ongoing shared experience, a perpetual debate leading to several ad hoc agreements if necessary, to which the Māori and Pākehā need to accustom themselves permanently. The alternative, an eventual rebirth of the violence and bloodshed of the 19th century New Zealand Wars, cannot and must not be entertained.

In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Pocock was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the history of political thought.

Alongside his ongoing work on Gibbon, has come a renewed attention to his nation of citizenship, New Zealand. In a progression of essays published since 1991, Pocock explored the historical mandates and implications of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (between the British Crown and the indigenous Māori people) for Māori and the descendants of the original 19th-century European (but mainly British) settlers, known as Pākehā. Both parties have legitimate claims to portions of their national sovereignty.

From 1975, Pocock began advocating the development of a new subject which he called "British History" (also labelled "New British History", a title that Pocock has expressed his wish to shake off). Pocock coined the term Atlantic archipelago as a replacement for British Isles: "We should start with what I have called the Atlantic archipelago – since the term "British Isles" is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously". He also pressed his fellow historians to reconsider two issues linked to the future of British history. First, he urged historians of the British Isles to move away from histories of the Three Kingdoms (Scotland, Ireland, England) as separate entities, and he called for studies implementing a bringing-together or conflation of the national narratives into truly integrated enterprises. It has since become the commonplace preference of historians to treat British history in just that fashion. Second, he prodded policymakers to reconsider the Europeanisation of the UK still underway, via its entry into the European Union. In its abandonment of a major portion of national sovereignty purely from economic motives, that decision threw into question the entire matter of British sovereignty itself. What, Pocock asks, will (and must) nations look like if the capacity for and exercise of national self-determination is put up for sale to the highest bidder?

By the 1970s Pocock had changed his focus from how lawyers understood the evolution of law to how philosophers and theologians did. The Machiavellian Moment (1975), a widely acclaimed volume, showed how Florentines, Englishmen, and Americans had responded to and analysed the destruction of their states and political orders in a succession of crises sweeping through the early modern world. Again, not all historians accept Pocock's account, but leading scholars of early modern republicanism show its influence – especially in their characterisation of political theorist James Harrington (1611–1677) as a salient historical actor.

Born in England, Pocock spent most of his early life in New Zealand. He moved to the United States in 1966, where since 1975 he has been a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Pocock is celebrated not merely as an historian, but as a pioneer of a new type of historical methodology: contextualism, i.e., the study of "texts in context". In the 1960s and early '70s, he, (introducing "languages" of political thought) along with Quentin Skinner (focusing on authorial intention), and John Dunn (stressing biography), united informally to undertake this approach as the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought. Hereafter for the Cambridge School and its adherents, the then-reigning method of textual study, that of engaging a vaunted 'canon' of previously pronounced "major" political works in a typically anachronistic and disjointed fashion, simply would not do.

John Greville Agard Pocock ONZM (/ˈpoʊkɒk/; born 7 March 1924) is a historian of political thought from New Zealand. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse.

Pocock was born in London on 7 March 1924, but in 1927 moved with his family to New Zealand where his father, Greville Pocock, was appointed professor of Classics at Canterbury College. He later moved to Cambridge, earning his PhD in 1952 under the tutelage of Herbert Butterfield. He returned to New Zealand to teach at Canterbury University College from 1946 to 1948, and to lecture at the University of Otago from 1953 to 1955. In 1959, he established and chaired the Department of Political Science at the University of Canterbury. He moved to the US in 1966, where he became the William Eliot Smith professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1975 Pocock assumed his present position at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. As of 2011 he holds the position of the Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor of History.

Subsequent research by Pocock explores the literary world inhabited by the British historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), and how Gibbon understood the cataclysm of decline and fall within the Roman Empire as an inevitable conflict between ancient virtue and modern commerce. Gibbon, it turns out, evinces all the hallmarks of a bona fide civic humanist, even while composing his great "enlightened narrative". The first two volumes of Pocock's six-volume magnum opus on Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion, won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999.

His first book, entitled The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law examined the workings and origins of common law mind, showing how thinkers such as the English jurist Edward Coke (1552–1634) built up a historical analysis of British history into an epistemology of law and politics; and how that edifice later came to be subverted by scholars of the middle to late seventeenth century. Some of this work has since been revised.