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The Machiavellian Moment: A Grand Ideological Synthesis

It is not easy to talk in a coherent manner about this book-a book so dense, so complex, so rich in analyses of so many texts and in references to so many writers.' As the author makes clear from the very beginning, it seeks to reconstruct the successive moments of a single intellectual phenomenon or "attitude," an attitude that develops through time from the political models of medieval Christian civilization to the themes typical of "civic humanism," from the major questions posed in the age of Machiavelli and Guicciardini to the great debates of the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of the theoreticians of the American Revolution. It is thus a study of a "long period" conducted with the traditional methods of the "history of ideas" and with a predominant use of interpretations of an analogical character. A correct evaluation of the book is rendered still more difficult by the decision of the author to abandon the traditional terrain of the history of political thought. He draws prospectives that are as hazardous as they are hypothetical. And while he brings together a number of historiographical ideas and concepts that are already well known, he pushes them to their most extreme ideological consequences and conclusions. These conclusions are often brilliant and suggestive. But they are also at times misleading and difficult to accept, even by those readers accustomed to the most adventurous experiments. To be sure, this book is not intended to be a work of history. It is intended, rather, to be a work of ideology, one which seeks to furnish answers to what the author holds to be the current crisis, ideological and political, of American culture. On the other hand, Pocock attaches great importance to the meaning of his title, and he tenaciously pursues the connection between the dominant ideas of Anglo-American political literature and its humanistic and Florentine precedents. Thus his work can, indeed it must, be judged also from the point of view of history. And it can be viewed as a document symptomatic of the extreme deformation of one rather important tendency in the current historiographical controversies regarding the nature of humanism and the Renaissance. It is based on a wide reading of "literary " sources rather than works of original historical research-and rather than on the results of the author's own philologicalhistorical investigations. Its principal interest consists not so much in the analysis and explanation of particular texts as in its proposal of a global synthesis of all the elements of a basic "moment" in the history of the