Senate every two years (under a system where Senators serve six-year terms). This reminds one of the election of 1/3 of the U.S. Harrington’s Oceana, it is interesting to note, when describing locally run assemblies and advocating for rotation in the aristocracy, he advocates for a rotation of 1/3 of the assembly on a routine basis.

The English found themselves engaging in republicanism essentially by accident, in the absence of a monarchy which they had overthrown, even as Lord Protector Cromwell himself became more of a monarch in practice if not in name. When James Harrington published Oceana in 1656, it was informed by the increasing discontent of some in the circles of military power with the way the Protectorate had developed since 1654. He nonetheless appears to see the grasping at republicanism by the English as a sort of saving construction rather than an organic evolution. This seems rather a cynical view regarding the birth of English republicanism and whether or not Pocock means it this way is somewhat unclear.

“Florentines opted for republicanism because it was in their nature, while the English took up the rhetoric of balance and republic only because their traditional constitution was threatened by disorder” (Pocock, 365). Soon enough, Pocock notes a difference between the origins and motivations of Florentine republicanism and the English variety. This was too little, too late, but the fact that Charles I, finding himself precariously losing his hold on authority, saw this as a possible way of ameliorating conditions is telling. An important historic detail is that Charles I issued a proclamation two months prior to the outbreak of the war in which he “took the step of declaring England a mixed government rather than a condescending monarchy… here… was a new formulation of a kind” (Pocock, 361). Pocock begins the final third of the book with an analysis of the outbreak of civil war in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. That said, some discussion of some the chapters in the final third of the book which precede the last two chapters is appropriate. Whereas one reads Melville’s dense and substantial tome in order to fully appreciate the last seven pages, Pocock’s white whale similarly doesn’t have its day-as it were-until arguably the last two chapters, indeed maybe not even until the last few pages.

It reminds me in no small way of Melville’s Moby Dick. The final third of Pocock’s The Machiavelli Moment is the most satisfying of the book.

Pocock the machiavellian moment