Visdom versus historia (kritik av Cambridge-skolan)

No tradition, in Pocock’s view, was in greater need of debunking than that of old-fashioned political theory, the grand narrative from Plato’s philosopher-kings to Marx’s proletarian-dictators articulated by George Sabine and others a generation before Pocock. Reading Sabine as a young man, Pocock was enthralled, soon realizing that ”this was the tradition which it was to be my business to criticize”.

Yet if gaining wisdom from great books is fundamentally unhistorical, perhaps the proper response is to conclude, ”Well, so much the worse for history”.

En Notre Dame-recension (Michael L. Frazer, Harvard University) av J. G. A. Pococks bok Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method.