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JGA Pocock's Barbarism and Religion erudition and the republic of letters 2 (2017) 431-458 brill.com/erl J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion B.W. Young Christ Church, Oxford [email protected] Abstract There are no parallels to the career of J.G.A. Pocock in Anglophone scholarship; the singularity of his intellectual trajectory is traced here through constant appeal to his enquiry into the intellectual environments in which Gibbon conceived and wrote his Decline and Fall; the present essay is an attempt at applying much the same interpretative principles at work in the six volumes of Barbarism and Religion both to Pocock and to this culminating study, interpreted as a summa of his practice as an intellectual histori- an. Pocock is an historian, not a philosopher, and this affects his conception of Enlight- enment, which he treats critically as an historian rather than reifying it in the manner of many philosophers. Pocock’s project is to undo the very idea of an ‘Enlightenment Project.’ Barbarism and Religion is not only a study of eighteenth-century conceptions of erudition and the Republic of Letters; it is a contemporary contribution to both. Keywords J.G.A. Pocock – Gibbon – Hobbes – Venturi – Oakeshott – historiography – historical theology – contextual scholarship … He was, we may suspect, a historian first and a philosopher second.1 ∵ 1 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2016), 6: 132: hereinafter cited in the body of the text as br followed by volume and page number. An earlier version of this © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/24055069-00204003Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:24:05PM via free access <UN> 432 Young Few if any historians at work today can begin to match J.G.A. Pocock for sheer intellectual fertility; his contributions to the field of intellectual history are especially rich, encompassing many of its many subdivisions in a manner that renders such division redundant. Fundamentally, Pocock’s unique mastery of the history of historiography and the history of political thought has con- tinually demonstrated that any imagined boundaries supposedly subsisting between the two fields are entirely artificial, much more the product of specif- ic institutional contexts than of any purely scholarly demarcation.2 If Pocock belongs to a ‘Cambridge School’, it is one that unites the insights regarding the history of historiography pioneered by Herbert Butterfield (1900–79), his erst- while graduate supervisor, with the firmly historicised conception of political thought promoted in his turn by Peter Laslett (1915–2001), a research fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge slightly ahead of Pocock’s time there: in short, Pocock was the beneficiary of an immediate pre-history of such a Cambridge school of interpretation, identified by him as the ‘Laslettian moment.’3 And Pocock has proceeded well beyond the scholarship of both of his mentors, emphasising the role of religion in the evolution of political thought in a way that parallels the approach previously integrated in the history of historiogra- phy by Butterfield, and similarly tracing its direct impact on political thought in a manner that deepens that originally discerned not only by Laslett (the secular son of a Baptist minister), but earlier in the twentieth century by J.N. Figgis (1866–1919), an Anglo-Catholic clergyman who was to exchange—in 1907—a fellowship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge for membership of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the corner of the county in which Butterfield was born and still being educated as a young boy when Figgis moved away from Cambridge.4 In common with Laslett, Pocock surveys this history of the early modern European intellect from the perspective of an unbeliever, the son of a veteran of the First World War whose military experience had effectively (and perhaps essay was given as a paper at a ‘Conceptions of Enlightenment’ colloquium sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities in September 2016, and subsequently to the J.R. Green Society at Jesus College, Oxford. I am grateful to my audiences on both occasions for asking stimulating questions of me. I am similarly in- debted to Noël Sugimura and Mishtooni Bose, who have commented critically on the essay. 2 Pocock, Political Thought and History: essays on theory and method (Cambridge, 2009). 3 Pocock, ‘A discourse on sovereignty: observations on the work in progress in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 377–428, at 381. 4 See also to essays by Mark Goldie: ‘J.N. Figgis and the history of political thought in Cam- bridge’, in Richard Mason ed., Cambridge Minds (Cambridge, 1994), 177–92, and ‘The cont ext of The Foundations’ in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations of Political Thought, 3–19. erudition and the republic ofDownloaded letters from 2 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 431-458 10:24:05PM via free access <UN> J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion 433 understandably) rendered him an atheist in the H G Wells mode; not for Pocock the exercises in more or less explicit Christian apologetic that marked the contributions of Figgis and of Butterfield, both legatees of eighteenth- century sectarianism, the former as a refugee from the Countess of Huntingdon’s Con- nexion, in which his father was a minister, the latter as a devout Methodist lay preacher. His own honestly avowed, but subtle, scepticism serves to make Pocock’s rehabilitation of theology as a vital and literally fundamental compo- nent of early modern intellectual history all the more powerful; his profound expository gift is a scholarly heuristic, not a historically-attentive mode of religiously-inflected exegesis. As he put it, responding to contributors to his own festschrift: The great discovery which we constantly make and remake as histori- ans is that English political debate is recurrently subordinate to English political theology; and few of us know one-tenth of the theology available to competently trained divines and laymen among our predecessors.5 In making that statement, Pocock also displayed an intellectual modesty that determined him on securing a deeper knowledge of the theology known to such far from orthodox figures as Thomas Hobbes and Edward Gibbon, both of whom disparaged the orthodoxy of an Oxford in which they had been imperfectly educated, and an environment—between the periods of their own studies—in which, by contrast, John Locke had initially flourished before acquiring his own taste for heterodoxy. These are religiously musical elements that Pocock has learned to modulate in his turn in recreating the various climates in which that work makes the most sense, if paradoxically sometimes more to their successors than to their own contemporaries. Pocock is always duly attentive to paradox; not for him the interpretative urge to refine away difficulties when making coherent systems of thought that had rightly resisted the imposition of such coherence in order to flourish when orthodoxy would otherwise have rooted them out. Not for nothing has he proved the sharpest student of William Warburton, who sought to define and maintain orthodoxy by constant appeals to paradox. Ever attentive to argumentative style, Pocock noted that the greatest scholar of the early eighteenth century, Richard Bentley (as much as Warburton the most eccentric of the mid-eighteenth century), revelled seriously in paradox. (br, 1: 149–50). 5 Pocock, ‘Foundations and moments’ in Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton- Bleakley eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 37–49. See further, ‘Quentin Skinner: the history of politics and the politics of history’, in Political Thought and History, 123–42. erudition and the republic of letters 2 (2017) 431-458Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:24:05PM via free access <UN> 434 Young But it is not a paradox that the sharpest eye for religious meaning in texts produced in both the early and the high Enlightenment belongs to a modern secular reader. Religious readers are often too interested in such texts to be entirely trusted as interpreters. The ‘religious turn’ is not without its more than merely intellectual dangers. Similarly, it has been a great achievement on Pocock’s part to remind modern, programmatically secular interpreters of intellectual history how peculiar are their own biases, considered histori- cally; no less securely, however, he has pointed to the many peculiarities of Christian theology, both in its ancient and in its modern varieties. Pocock is a historian, not a theologian manqué; as he cautioned in the ‘Advice to Read- ers’ in the fifth volume of Barbarism and Religion, which is directly concerned with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century appraisals of the history of the early Church: Readers, Christian or non-believing, who may find themselves in analyses of thought they considered obsolete or false, are asked to remember that they are studying the history of a time when such thinking was offered and read seriously. In our time, when theism and atheism are again in direct collision, this warning seems necessary. (br, 5: xviii) This was indeed necessary in a book published in 2010 in a way that few would have suspected when the first volume of the project had appeared as recently as in 1999. As he sadly observed later in volume five when writing of Gibbon’s revisionist account of early Christian martyrdom in chapter sixteen of the Decline and Fall, at the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘martyrdom itself has become a choice, and therefore a problem.’ (br, 5: 85) Pocock does not, however, believe that secular readers need ‘trigger- warnings’ as such; rather he is concerned as an intellectual historian to take seriously all the beliefs that have informed the minds of human beings, and in this he reminds us that the Enlightened thinker is not necessarily as enlightened as he has the potential to be, even in an era of recrudescent bigot- ry, both religious and irreligious.
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