John Pocock and the jealousy of trade

At the end of The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock was unclear about what happened to the classical republican/civic humanist tradition. Significantly, he did not make the anticipated point, following Hannah Arendt, who he drew upon at the end of the book, concerning the decline of civic virtue and the need for its reassertion. In subsequent work Pocock published little on the nineteenth century, but he continued to be obsessed by the fate of civic humanism, especially in his self-reflective final writings, published or written between 2014 and his death in 2023. Especially in his unpublished Academic Reminiscences, he tackled the question of how The Machiavellian Moment ought to have ended. Commenting upon his own work from The Ancient Constitution to the sixth and last volume of his Barbarism and Religion series, Barbarism: Triumph in the West (2015), Pocock emphasised the relationship between his own work and the jealousy of trade, the commitment of national governments to the pursuit of markets and the defeat of rivals economically. Jealousy of trade, as a historical force which had altered world politics, was associated most especially with the scholarship of István Hont, whose perspectives on political thought Pocock found to be dovetailing increasingly with his own.