J.G.A. Pocock, former Johns Hopkins historian who placed the past in context, dies

J.G.A. Pocock, a historian who delivered revelatory insights on topics from republicanism to the Enlightenment, from English common law to the American Revolution, and from Aristotle to Machiavelli by rigorously placing his subjects in the context of their times, died Dec. 12 at an assisted living center in Baltimore. He was 99.

His death was announced by the Johns Hopkins University, where Mr. Pocock taught for two decades before retiring in 1994. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son Hugh Pocock.

Mr. Pocock was born in London, grew up in New Zealand and spent most of his academic career in the United States. His international background, combined with what was by all accounts his extraordinary erudition, contributed to his innovative approach to history — and especially to his novel views on historiography, the study of how history is and has been written.

Along with historians including Peter Laslett and Quentin Skinner, Mr. Pocock was a leading figure in the Cambridge School, a loose collective of scholars who challenged the way their field was conducted by seeking to consider historical figures, events and ideas as they would have been seen in their times.

When he embarked on his scholarship, it was “very standard” for historians of political philosophy to study a defined canon of writers in search of “timeless insights,” said John Marshall, a colleague in the Johns Hopkins history department.

But the notion of liberty, for example, has changed markedly from the time of Aristotle to the American and French revolutions to the modern day. The understanding of that or any other concept, a member of the Cambridge School would have said, requires a firm grasp of what the idea meant at the various points of its evolution.

Mr. Pocock called on scholars and students to “try, so far as you could, not to impose your current assumptions on thinkers of the past,” said Christopher S. Celenza, a historian and the dean of the school of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins. Instead, Mr. Celenza added, Mr. Pocock argued that a historian should “try to take them on their own merits and try to figure out what it was that they meant in their own time.”

Mr. Pocock’s scholarship encompassed not only history but also political science and philosophy. One of his most celebrated works was “The Machiavellian Moment” (1975), which traced the writings of the Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli from the Florentine Republic through early modern British history to the founding of the United States.

He was also acclaimed for “Barbarism and Religion,” a six-volume opus about Edward Gibbon, the 18th century English historian known for writing another major six-volume work, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Mr. Pocock produced the entire series after taking emeritus status at Johns Hopkins — a feat that led his colleague Mr. Marshall to observe that he “published more in his retirement than most of us in our actual careers.”

Until late in his life, well after retiring, he could be found in the rare books room at the university library, Mr. Celenza said, still searching into the past.

John Greville Agard Pocock was born in London. He was 3 when he moved to New Zealand, where his father, who was British, became a classics professor at the University of Canterbury. His mother, a high school history teacher, was from the Channel Islands, just off the coast of France.

After beginning his university studies in New Zealand, Mr. Pocock returned to England, receiving a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1952.

His first book was “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century,” published in 1957.

Mr. Pocock taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the University of Canterbury and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1974.

He and Felicity Willis-Fleming were married in 1958. She died in 2014. Besides his son Hugh, of Baltimore, survivors include another son, Stephen Pocock of Oakland, California, and four grandchildren.

Mr. Pocock edited books on political theorists and philosophers, including James Harrington and Edmund Burke. His own later works included “The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History” (2005).

His writings and lectures were not for the academically uninitiated.
“Whether on the page, at the lectern or — astounding when one hears him — in ad-libbed seminar discussion, [he] communicates in lapidary paragraphs dense with aphorism and wit, literary and philosophical allusion, and copious historical learning drawn from all periods and continents,” historian Colin Kidd wrote in a 2008 essay for the London Review of Books.

But “if he makes enormous demands of his audience, the effort is worthwhile,” Kidd added, “for he brings talents and perspectives to the discipline which nobody else possesses.”