his death announced Dr. Pocock was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught for 20 years until his retirement in 1994. His son Hugh Pocock said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Dr. Pocock was born in London, grew up in New Zealand, and spent most of his academic career in the United States. His international background, coupled with his unparalleled erudition, combined with his innovative approach to history, especially historiography, that is, how history has been written and how it can be written. He contributed his novel views on what has happened.
Dr. Pocock, along with historians such as Peter Laslett and Quentin Skinner, were part of a loose group of scholars who challenged the ways of their field by seeking to examine historical figures, events, and ideas as they really were. He was a leading figure of the Cambridge School. seen in their own time.
When he began his studies, he said, it was “quite standard” for historians of political philosophy to study a defined canon of writers in search of “timeless insights.” John Marshallcolleagues in the history department at Johns Hopkins University.
But the concept of freedom, for example, has changed significantly from the time of Aristotle to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and on to the present day. Members of the Cambridge School would say that to understand that concept, or any other concept, we need to have a firm grasp of what that concept meant at different points in its evolution.
Dr Pocock called on academics and students to “as far as possible refrain from imposing current assumptions on past thinkers”. Christopher S. Celenza, historian and dean of the Johns Hopkins University College of Arts and Sciences. Instead, Dr. Pocock argued that historians should “take them on their own merits and try to understand what they meant at the time,” Celenza added.
Dr. Pocock’s scholarship extended not only to history but also to political science and philosophy. One of his most famous works is Machiavelli’s Moment (1975), which traces the writings of Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli from the Republic of Florence through early modern British history to the founding of the United States.
He also received high praise for his six-volume work, Barbarism and Religion, about Edward Gibbon, an 18th-century British historian known for writing another six-volume magnum opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was evaluated. Dr. Pocock produced the entire series after receiving an honorary position at Johns Hopkins University. This feat led his colleague Marshall to observe that he “published more in retirement than most of us in our actual careers.”
Until his later years, long after his retirement, he was still searching for his past in the university library’s rare book room, Celenza said.
John Greville Agard Pocock was born on March 7, 1924 in London. He immigrated to New Zealand when he was three years old, and his British father became professor of classics at Canterbury University. His mother, a high school history teacher, was from the Channel Islands, just off the coast of France.
After commencing his university studies in New Zealand, Dr Pocock returned to England and completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1952.
His first book was Ancient Constitutions and Feudal Law: A Study of Seventeenth-Century British Historical Thought, published in 1957.
Dr. Pocock taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the University of Canterbury, and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1974.
He and Felicity Willis-Fleming married in 1958. She passed away in 2014. Survivors include a son, Hugh of Baltimore, another son, Stephen Pocock of Oakland, Calif., and four grandchildren.
Dr. Pocock has edited books on political theorists and philosophers such as James Harrington and Edmund Burke. His own subsequent works include The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (2005).
His writings and lectures were not aimed at academic novices.
“Whether it was on paper, on a podium, or—surprisingly to hear him speak—during an improvised seminar discussion. [he] “It is delivered in jewel-like paragraphs filled with aphorisms and wit, literary and philosophical allusions, and a wealth of historical knowledge drawn from all eras and continents,” said historian Colin Kidd. In a 2008 London Review of Books essay,.
But, Kidd added, “if he demands so much from his viewers, the effort is worth it.” “Because he brings a talent and a perspective to this field that no one else has.”