Abstract

ABSTRACT2024 witnessed not only J.G.A. Pocock’s centenary but also that of the publication of Friedrich Meinecke’s classic study of Machiavellianism; a critical assessment of the relationship between the two historians and students of historiography is, therefore, timely. As early as 1957, Pocock referred to the ‘disasters’ associated with the rise of historicism; implicit in this assertion is the history of antisemitism within German intellectual life, and Pocock was serially indebted to a host of émigré Jewish intellectuals. Meinecke did not speak out regarding the antisemitic writings of Carl Schmitt; the conservative Lutheran historian Gerhard Ritter did. Schmitt’s incendiary notion of ‘political theology’ was a long way from what Pocock understood by the concept. The refugee scholars Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt turned against historicism; Pocock was resolutely critical of Strauss but critically indebted to Arendt. Pocock, a conservative liberal, developed a method that led to a pluralistic appreciation of intellectual history; Meinecke, a liberal conservative, followed in his ‘genetic method’ of Ideengeschichte a more traditionally heroic, ‘great man’ conception of the subject.