This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published, and several appear here for the first time in print.

Pocock explores the relationship between the study of law and the historical outlook of seventeenth-century Englishmen.

James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a longterm process of social change that led to the decay of the old political order. Professor Pocock's lucid introduction emphasizes Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of principal events...

There is at present no overall history of English and British political thought and literature in the early modern period. This volume attempts to review the period from the English Reformation to the French Revolution, to suggest new ways of studying the articulation of political consciousness and the conduct of political argument, and to point out the extraordinary intellectual and linguistic richness of the ongoing English and British political debate.

Written by one of the world's leading historians of political thought and published over the past three decades, the purpose of these essays is to present British history as the history of several nations interacting with--and sometimes seceding from--association with an imperial state. The commentary presents this history as that of an archipelago, situated in oceans and expanding across them to the Antipodes. Both New Zealand history and ways of seeing history formed in New Zealand enter into the vision.

In this first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, John Pocock follows Gibbon through his youthful exile in Switzerland and his criticisms of the Encyclopedie and traces the growth of his historical interests down to the conception of the Decline and Fall itself.

This major intervention from one of the world's leading historians, challenges the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and posits instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. The first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion were warmly and widely reviewed, and won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. In the third volume in the sequence, John Pocock presents a historical introduction to the first fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work, recounting the end of the classical civilization Gibbon and his readers knew so much...

In this first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, John Pocock follows Gibbon through his youthful exile in Switzerland and his criticisms of the Encyclopedie and traces the growth of his historical interests down to the conception of the Decline and Fall itself.

The second volume of Barbarism and Religion explores the historiography of Enlightenment, and looks at Gibbon's intellectual relationship with writers sucah as Giannone, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, Ferguson and Adam Smith. Edward Gibbon's intellectual trajectory is both similar but at points crucially distinct from the dominant Latin "Enlightened narrative" these thinkers developed. The interaction of philosophy, erudition and narrative is central to enlightened historiography, and John Pocock again shows how the Decline and Fall is both akin to but distinct from the historiographical context...

This major intervention from one of the world's leading historians, challenges the notion of any one 'Enlightenment' and posits instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. The first two volumes of Barbarism and Religion were warmly and widely reviewed, and won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society. In the third volume in the sequence, John Pocock presents a historical introduction to the first fourteen chapters of Gibbon's great work, recounting the end of the classical civilization Gibbon and his readers knew so much...