Why history is always political
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 inhabitsus at a much deeper political level.
Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book TheMachiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, itwill 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.
