The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock is a major work by a serious, scholarly, and innovative student of political thought. As such, it deserves the close attention of scholars who define themselves as historians of political ideas, political philosophers, political theorists, or political scientists. The book is a (though, one hopes, not the) culmination of Pocock's substantive concerns (e.g., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law) and his more methodological efforts (e.g., the essays in Politics, Language and Time). One reason for judging Pocock's book to be of such general interest is that the substantive and the methodological angles are not left dangling, mutually irrelevant, but rather interact and inform each other. The Machiavellian Moment offers a rich substantive analysis of "Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition," which is informed by a coherent and distinctive view of how properly to study political thought. The general unsettledness, at least with respect to politics, of history, philosophy, science, and theory and their mutual relations may well be the central feature of our intellectual landscape; "separate and distinct" disciplines capable of doing their work autonomously have not been achieved, nor has an integrating structure of knowledge. But while much of the discussion of what should follow the breakdown of positivism has been abstract or specialized, we are extremely fortunate to have some scholars whose efforts at creating an intellectual enterprise in which history, philosophy, science, and theory find their proper place have been carried forward to substantive works that offer an understanding of political life.
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