Why history is always political

In his work on republicanism as a living idea, J G A Pocock showed that contesting history is part of a robust civic life

https://aeon.co/essays/history-is-always-political-and-contest-over-it-is-a-good-thing


The Piazza della Signoria in Florence (1740) by Bernardo Bellotto, who was was both a student, and the nephew, of Canaletto. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest



At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism. The past few decades have seen the rise of this hybrid profile, and while some have claimed that politicians need historians so that we can transform current political debates and use their expertise to help us project ourselves into the future, critical voices have warned that ‘rapid-fire’ superficial histories might serve political aims at the price of historical accuracy.

Therefore, defining J G A Pocock (1924-2023) both as a historian and a political actor stands in need of clarification since, arguably, he does not fit into a two-camp debate on the usefulness of history, but instead he shows how history inhabits us at a much deeper political level. Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book The Machiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, it will have inspired scholars and public debates for 50 years. The Machiavellian Moment presents a fluid, non-linear and geographically diverse history of republicanism as a transatlantic political language that can travel among different periods and contexts, namely, from classical antiquity to Renaissance Florence, early modern England and colonial America.


Niccolò Machiavelli (detail, 1843) by Lorenzo Bartolini, Uffizi Galleries, Florence. Courtesy Wikipedia

The book generated academic and wider public controversies, since Pocock decentred the history of the foundation of American politics when he placed the American Revolution as only an episode of an Atlantic republican tradition. In other words, he traced the intellectual origins of the foundation of the United States as far back as the ancient Aristotelian ideal of citizenship and Florentine civic humanism. In doing so, he challenged, first, the understanding that the US Declaration of Independence was a pinnacle of modernity, the deliberate and singular foundation of a polity, and, second, the view that the debates surrounding America’s foundation were coined in a liberal vocabulary. In Pocock’s interpretation, these debates were neither fully liberal nor completely unprecedented in history.

This revisionist history was, additionally, written by a London-born New Zealand expatriate living in the US. He was a citizen of the British Commonwealth whose work revised the existing narratives about a former British colony reclaiming its political identity and cultural independence. In a way, this was a familiar story, since he experienced the contestation of political identities as an integral part of the history of the British peoples and conceived of British history as the history of several nations interacting with an imperial state.

snip