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J.G.A. (John) Pocock is a renowned historian of political ideas and is most associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” of political thought whose founding members in the 1960’s also include Quentin Skinner and John Dunn. This volume is a collection of essays arranged more-or-less in chronological order of publication that are “concerned with relations between history and political theory” (ix) and encompasses the full length of Pocock’s half-century-long writing career. As such, it is very instructive for getting a grasp of a major author in a significant current of contemporary political thought. The “Cambridge approach” to the interpretation and understanding of texts in the history of political thought is distinguished by its method, which emphasizes to a great extent the historical context in which a given political text (book, essay, or other) was composed. While the three original representatives of this school have differing areas of focus, they share the view that the meaning of the text for the reader cannot be separated from its context. Pocock himself emphasizes the language used by political actors in discourse with their contemporaries, a feature of his writing that finds ample mention in this volume. This approach “is one in which I identify languages of political conceptualization, select patterns of implication which they may bear, and try to trace the working out of these implications in the history of thought” (p. 26). Indeed, language presents itself in the book as the vehicle by which is mediated the relationship between its two main themes: politics and history. This theme is manifest in the structure of the book: the first part is entitled “Political Thought as History” and the second, “History as Political Thought”, with an “Intermezzo” on Skinner. Language emerges thus in the political context in manifold forms as itCEU Political Science Journal. Vol. 8, No. 2 265 manifests itself in history: as discourse, as dialogue, as narrative, as historiography, as “illocutionary” means to political action. In pursuing his development of this program, Pocock presents a biographical perspective on his work in that the two parts reflect the changing emphasis of his primary occupation in the course of his career. The first part is chiefly concerned with methods for analyzing political theories in their historical context, or, as the title of one essay runs, “Working on Ideas in Time” (pp. 20-32). He describes in this piece, for instance, how “the history of political ideas, the history of political thought, considered as an activity, could very conveniently be treated as the history of political language or languages” (p. 26). But what exactly does Pocock mean when he uses the word “language,” particularly in the first part? Not the culturally and historically rooted distinct languages, e.g. English or French, nor any system of signs and signifiers, notwithstanding Pocock’s proclivity for using French (and occasionally German) words and expressions. Rather, it is the emphasis on language as a determining force for action in the political sphere that comes out most strongly in the first part, and one sees affinities between Pocock and Skinner in particular. For Pocock, the historian of politics, the concept of “language” as thus understood is indeed important: “The historian of political discourse who is emerging from this account of his practice spends his time learning the ‘languages’, idioms, rhetorics or paradigms in which discourse has been conducted, and at the same time studying the acts of utterance which have been performed in these ‘languages’, or in language formed as a composite of them” (p. 89). Pocock’s attention to utterances makes manifest his “membership” in the “Cambridge School” of political thought, for like Skinner’s “speech-act theory,” Pocock’s concept of “political language” bears particularly on the way in which texts are approached and read. At the center of the thought of both authors lies the relation between history and philosophy, a theme that comes out most clearly in the aforementioned “intermezzo” on Skinner (p. 133): The methodological problem before us both is the following: ‘Is it possible to assert a continuity of debate, extending across generations and centuries, without imposing a false pattern and engaging in a false prolepsis? To claim that it is possible, one must be able to demonstrate (1) the continuity of the languages in which the debate was conducted and (2) the connexions between the speech acts by whose performance it was conducted. Skinner’s approach, centered around speech-acts, attempts to discern what the author is “doing”, but Pocock’s notion of language in politics is somewhat different and brings him in his later work to quite a different perspective on political thought.Book Reviews 266 The second part of the book, entitled “History as political thought,” is largely concerned with the theme of historiography, or the writing of history (-ies), here in the political context, which in this collection is represented by Pocock’s later work. Clearly, the (written) history of a political community can be very controversial (what is to be included, what excluded, hushed up?) - hence why the theme is politically charged. The essays in this part of the book “inquire in what sense the historian of a society may be its citizen, participant in it through recounting and renarrating its history, which she or he shares with those who do not recount and need not think of it” (p. x). The five essays (pp. 9-13) that comprise this part of the book broach themes that are connected with the main subject of historiography, including: the modes by which a chronicle of contemporary events may be transmitted to posterity; the understanding and meaning of traditions; and the role of myth (itself a form of story-telling) in the historiography of a political community, particularly in upholding authority. The author does indeed take account of the balancing-act that is often necessary to perform between history and philosophy in the history of political thought. The question does throughout the book come to the fore regarding this interaction between the two disciplines, and is encapsulated in one passage quite well: “The questions with which political philosophers come to deal may perhaps be perennial – I do not intend to deny this, though I do think we need critical means of determining when to say it and when not – but precisely when they are, they cannot be historical” (52). Yet do texts in the history of political thought not bear within themselves an applicability to present-day political problems? Is the text not only related to its composer and to his or her own historical context, but also to the individual reader, regardless of the historical period in which the text is read? It seems that if this last possibility were excluded, the study of texts in the history of political thought, a standard component of the discipline of political science, may well become a purely historical endeavor, a documentation of what has happened in the past without normative appraisal and without relevance to the present. It is a balancing-act indeed that is nonetheless handled well by Pocock in this highly recommendable volume of essays.