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J G A Pocock's "Machiavellian Moment"
In his work on republicanism as a living idea, J G A Pocock showed that contesting history is part of a robust civic life
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. America, Pocock said, became a ‘very unclassical’ republic and that is why, he contends, a foundational myth served a political purpose and had the potential of speaking to contemporaries: it was a nation, he wrote, ‘founded in experiment’, in which a covenant created a bond among individuals. Pocock defended himself with his elegant and sharp rhetoric by showing that his Italian critics had misunderstood his conclusions, and that, quite on the contrary, the so-called republican thesis was not a strategy aimed at imposing an ideology of American liberalism onto the trajectory of European history.
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