Por que a história é sempre política

Em seu trabalho sobre o republicanismo como uma ideia viva, J G A Pocock mostrou que contestar a história faz parte de uma vida cívica robusta

Rosario López

https://aeon.co/essays/history-is-always-political-and-contest-over-it-is-a-good-thing

A Piazza della Signoria em Florença (1740) por Bernardo Bellotto, que foi aluno e sobrinho de Canaletto. Cortesia do Museu de Belas Artes de Budapeste

Atualmente, descrever historiadores como atores políticos evoca preconceito, manobras políticas e falta de pensamento crítico. Essa descrição evoca historiadores meramente como especialistas políticos, vasculhando a história em busca de evidências para apoiar seus próprios objetivos políticos e potencialmente caindo no presentismo. As últimas décadas testemunharam o surgimento desse perfil híbrido e, embora alguns tenham afirmado que os políticos precisam de historiadores para que possamos transformar os debates políticos atuais e usar sua expertise para nos ajudar a nos projetar no futuro, vozes críticas alertaram que histórias superficiais "rápidas" podem servir a objetivos políticos ao preço da precisão histórica.

Portanto, definir J G A Pocock (1924-2023) como historiador e ator político precisa de esclarecimento, pois, sem dúvida, ele não se encaixa em um debate de dois campos sobre a utilidade da história, mas, em vez disso, mostra como a história nos habita em um nível político muito mais profundo.

Originalmente publicado em 1975, o livro de Pocock The Machiavellian Moment é uma obra-prima aclamada e uma das obras mais influentes do século XX para historiadores intelectuais, filósofos políticos e teóricos políticos. Até 2025, ele terá inspirado acadêmicos e debates públicos por 50 anos. The Machiavellian Moment apresenta uma história fluida, não linear e geograficamente diversa do republicanismo como uma linguagem política transatlântica que pode viajar entre diferentes períodos e contextos, nomeadamente, da antiguidade clássica à Florença renascentista, à Inglaterra moderna e à América colonial.

O livro gerou controvérsias acadêmicas e públicas mais amplas, já que Pocock descentralizou a história da fundação da política americana quando colocou a Revolução Americana como apenas um episódio de uma tradição republicana atlântica. Em outras palavras, ele traçou as origens intelectuais da fundação dos Estados Unidos até o antigo ideal aristotélico de cidadania e o humanismo cívico florentino. Ao fazer isso, ele desafiou, primeiro, o entendimento de que a Declaração de Independência dos EUA era o auge da modernidade, a fundação deliberada e singular de uma política e, segundo, a visão de que os debates em torno da fundação da América foram cunhados em um vocabulário liberal. Na interpretação de Pocock, esses debates não eram nem totalmente liberais nem completamente sem precedentes na história.

Esta história revisionista foi, adicionalmente, escrita por um expatriado neozelandês nascido em Londres que vivia nos EUA. Ele era um cidadão da Comunidade Britânica cujo trabalho revisou as narrativas existentes sobre uma antiga colônia britânica reivindicando sua identidade política e independência cultural. De certa forma, essa era uma história familiar, pois ele vivenciava a contestação de identidades políticas como parte integrante da história dos povos britânicos e concebia a história britânica como a história de várias nações interagindo com um estado imperial.

Apesar de sua importância, o livro mais conhecido de Pocock não foi originalmente destinado ao leitor em geral, e é famoso por seu estilo evocativo e caráter erudito. Pelo contrário, ele próprio reconheceu que seus interlocutores eram acadêmicos altamente especializados. The Machiavellian Moment, ele admitiu mais tarde, "foi planejado para ser difícil", escrito em um "estilo complexo e discursivo", não para simplificar as contradições e complexidades que estavam presentes na história que ele estava tentando contar. Dada a amplitude e profundidade de seu trabalho, não é de se admirar que as conclusões substantivas defendidas por Pocock permaneçam relativamente opacas ou mal compreendidas.

The Machiavellian Moment é um estudo da formação e transmissão de ideais republicanos clássicos no mundo ocidental. Ao fazê-lo, oferece uma visão abrangente da sobrevivência do conceito aristotélico de uma vida boa com base na cidadania ativa e virtude cívica, e o esforço para evitar corrupção e instabilidade política. Três momentos históricos dão sequência a essa história: Renascença florentina, Inglaterra do século XVII e o contexto revolucionário americano. Niccolò Machiavelli e James Harrington são os principais impulsionadores dessa transformação e, em termos da constelação conceitual em torno da qual a linguagem republicana gira, conceitos como tempo, virtude, corrupção e liberdade são centrais. Pocock mostra como Maquiavel, em linha com o conceito de cidadania ativa e virtuosa de Aristóteles, estava particularmente preocupado em sustentar a virtude cívica em um momento de instabilidade e decadência em Florença, o que aponta precisamente para a expressão "momento maquiavélico" como a dificuldade que ele enfrentou em reconciliar um ideal de cidadania com o caráter incerto e temporal das repúblicas.

Dois outros momentos maquiavélicos são posteriormente enquadrados dentro de uma mentalidade republicana, o que, de acordo com Pocock, mostra a persistência e a coerência dessa tradição ao longo do tempo e do espaço. Por um lado, o objetivo de Harrington em The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) era o projeto de uma comunidade inglesa "imortal" — novamente tentando escapar da corrupção e da finitude — que autores inspirados por Harrington adotaram mais tarde no século XVIII. Por outro lado, ao fundar a república americana, os federalistas estavam preocupados com instituições representativas, argumentando que arranjos constitucionais fortes poderiam salvar a república da corrupção. Durante esse tempo, foi o comércio e a ascensão da sociedade comercial que representaram a ameaça mais significativa, pois a riqueza incentivou a corrupção. No relato de Pocock, sua preocupação era preservar a virtude e a estabilidade política, o que exigia impedir que membros da sociedade, incluindo representantes políticos, se entregassem ao luxo, às paixões egoístas e aumentassem seu poder econômico às custas do público.

Como o que Pocock mais tarde chamou de "história do túnel", The Machiavellian Moment revitalizou a presença do republicanismo na história do pensamento político ao mapear ao longo dos séculos os esforços para manter repúblicas em dificuldades. Mas foi o capítulo final do livro – "A Americanização da Virtude" – que envolveu Pocock na maioria das controvérsias. Pocock vinculou a Revolução Americana ao republicanismo clássico desde Maquiavel, por meio da influência de Harrington na Grã-Bretanha. Ele queria mostrar como a linguagem do republicanismo clássico estava presente nos esforços de construção da nação para garantir a virtude popular contra a corrupção e a decadência representadas pelo comércio. Crucialmente, isso significava que uma sociedade moderna dos EUA retinha os valores modernos iniciais, e a Revolução Americana, em vez de marcar uma ruptura com o antigo regime, era um capítulo da história europeia. A Declaração e a Constituição não eram, portanto, completamente sem precedentes, o que de certa forma minimizou sua importância ao dissolvê-las parcialmente em linguagens políticas de longa data com raízes no velho mundo.

Em contraste com as visões de Pocock, Leo Strauss e seus seguidores, por exemplo, sustentavam que havia apenas conexões superficiais entre o republicanismo e a fundação dos EUA, e que a continuidade exagerada do republicanismo perdeu a influência e o caráter inaugural do liberalismo. Eles argumentaram que Pocock, ao destacar a presença de passados ​​republicanos, havia deixado pouco espaço para ideias liberais e pensadores liberais como John Locke. The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), de Louis Hartz, sob a influência de C. B. Macpherson, também havia retratado Locke como um Pai Fundador honorário, e o liberalismo, com sua defesa do individualismo, comércio e governo limitado, como fornecendo a base filosófica para uma república emergente. O cenário estava pronto para um debate sobre posições antitéticas: o republicanismo, enraizado no paradigma do humanismo cívico, razão e virtude, foi contrastado com o liberalismo, definido pelo individualismo possessivo, capitalismo emergente e paixões privadas. O cidadão/patriota virtuoso se opôs ao homem econômico, e foi Maquiavel ou Locke que forneceu a base filosófica para uma nova sociedade.

A ideia de que o republicanismo e o liberalismo eram tradições e línguas políticas mutuamente exclusivas era um lugar-comum historiográfico e político e continua sendo uma estrutura amplamente aceita para a compreensão do discurso político até hoje. O historiador David Craig observou que o livro de Pocock ajudou a popularizar, bem como a problematizar, uma divisão clara entre liberalismo e republicanismo. Comentando sobre The Machiavellian Moment alguns anos após sua publicação, Pocock reconheceu que o livro "consistentemente exibe o republicanismo como estando em desacordo com o liberalismo", embora o que ele quisesse transmitir fosse a existência de uma tensão complexa entre republicanismo e liberalismo nas mentes dos Pais Fundadores da América.

Particularmente com seu último capítulo, Pocock foi bem-sucedido em ser provocativo e alimentou um debate que ressoou em níveis historiográficos, culturais e políticos. Tempo, política e contexto eram categorias intrinsecamente interligadas. Como as pessoas entendem seus passados ​​e a história de como escrevem sobre seus passados ​​têm implicações políticas e determinam (não inteiramente, mas crucialmente) a experiência política em qualquer momento. São os historiadores que assumem as tarefas fundamentais de escrever e reescrever narrativas históricas e, ao fazê-lo, moldam as identidades políticas presentes. Seguindo a abordagem de Pocock, a história é o elemento mais poderoso na construção e destruição do autoconhecimento das sociedades políticas e um dos motores de um senso compartilhado de comunidade. As palavras de Pocock a esse respeito se destacam: "o que explica o passado legitima o presente e modera o impacto do passado sobre ele". Em outras palavras, a crítica de Pocock a um passado liberal também implicou um desafio a uma identidade liberal. É nesse sentido que a história importa fundamentalmente e os historiadores são atores políticos.

For an author who has devoted a great deal of attention to the political implications of societies’ historical imaginations, it makes sense to turn the spotlight on him and ask how The Machiavellian Moment was read politically in different contexts. This is an opportunity to contextualise Pocock’s text within a wider framework of reception and draw on some details of his professional biography – fittingly, as contextualism was a cornerstone of his own method.

The debates over the reception of The Machiavellian Moment have come to form a historiographical debate of their own. In the years following its publication, Pocock wrote several pieces addressing his numerous critics, both in the US and elsewhere. For sure, he wrote as a specialised historian, although the political implications could hardly be missed. One of them was the essay ‘The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology’ (1981), in which the reader gets to dive into the ideologisation of his book. Pocock provides a justification of his own approach to republicanism among different historiographical (and ideological) schools. For him, the last part of the book presented two conceptions of liberty, the ‘active-participatory’ and the ‘negative-liberal’, which were both used in the political scenario of the 18th century and at the time in which he wrote the essay. It was the coexistence of republican and liberal ideas and the possibility of using the language of republicanism that some American historians later perceived as a threat to the liberal foundational constitutionalism, that is, as a problematic rewriting of the historical narratives underpinning political discourses. Scholars on the Left like Joyce Appleby, Isaac Kramnick or John P Diggins saw Pocock’s doubt that Locke, Montesquieu and David Hume provided the basis for the Federalist papers as doubt about America’s political character and cultural identity as derived from liberal values, that is, as an alleged departure from individualism, constitutional pluralism and commercial values.

America, Pocock said, became a ‘very unclassical’ republic and that is why, he contends, a foundational myth served a political purpose and had the potential of speaking to contemporaries: it was a nation, he wrote, ‘founded in experiment’, in which a covenant created a bond among individuals. According to this so-called foundationalist myth, US history and society originated thanks to a conscious and deliberate act, or rather as an act that could be separated into two moments: the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. The language of liberal rights, most notably articulated by Locke, served as the blueprint in this process. In this ‘foundational culture’, citizens judge the performance of the republic according to the observance of these principles. And therefore the existence of political corruption would not only mark a decadence, but also shake the very foundation of the (liberal) republic. In other words, liberalism became integral to the nation’s identity, and doubts about this correspondence amounted to attacks upon a cultural identity. What was at stake in situating either Locke or Machiavelli at the roots of US political history was Americans’ own understanding of who they were and are. In Pocock’s words in 2017, ‘in debating the fundamentals of their government, Americans debate who they essentially are.’

This debate was by no means confined to US academia. In this sense, Pocock was accused by Italian historians including Renzo Pecchioli of being an exponent of the ‘ideologia americana’. For instance, Cesare Vasoli reproached The Machiavellian Moment for being less a work of history than a work of ideology targeting the political roots of US culture. Pecchioli argued that Pocock’s interpretation pictured the US as the culmination of a republican tradition originating in Europe, and in doing so it positioned Florentine republicans as one link in the chain of a global republicanism. Reclaiming the singularity of European Renaissance republicanism, Pecchioli labelled Pocock’s history of republicanism as ‘neoliberal’, by which he meant that the global continuities described by Pocock masked instead a form of appropriating and undermining the significance of European traditions. Pocock was thus reduced to representing an ‘American liberal imperialism’ and, being unaware of his own ideological bias, he had established a liberal history of republicanism. Interestingly, the tentacles of this allegedly liberal expansionism even seized its political counterpart, republicanism. Pocock defended himself with his elegant and sharp rhetoric by showing that his Italian critics had misunderstood his conclusions, and that, quite on the contrary, the so-called republican thesis was not a strategy aimed at imposing an ideology of American liberalism onto the trajectory of European history. His aim was not to uphold American traditional liberal values, but precisely to problematise the intellectual origins of the foundational myth as exclusively liberal.

In sum, Pocock was paradoxically under attack for being too liberal, but also for not being liberal enough. Said differently, Pocock was criticised for being too American and for not being American enough – all the more intriguing for a New Zealander. In a way, these examples vividly illustrate the existence of a powerful but too simplistic correspondence between American identity and liberalism that Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment precisely challenged.

Pocock was never comfortable engaging in these debates, as he himself acknowledged. In the foreword to the French edition of The Machiavellian Moment, he wrote that the book had been ‘too successful for his own comfort’, creating a ‘vehement’ debate in a ‘confused and complicated scene’. Still, he was acutely aware that historical narratives are read differently in different contexts, since – as a historian of historiography himself – he devoted his career to situating ideas in the contexts to which they belong.

Pocock died in December 2023, a few months short of his 100th birthday. His death sparked well-deserved tributes across the world and heartfelt reflections on his legacy, with a number of academic events subsequently organised in his memory. Participating in some of them, I found that, when approaching his extensive body of work, a two-fold commonsense division emerged. On the one hand, one could look at his historical practice, that is, his studies on the history of legal and political thought and the history of historiography, where a number of monographs stand out: The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975) and the six-volumes of Barbarism and Religion (1999-2015), his study of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) by Edward Gibbon.

On the other hand, Pocock was also celebrated for his theoretical and methodological contributions on how to study the history of political thought, mostly spread across journal articles and essays, and many of them collected in Politics, Language, and Time (1971), Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985) and The Discovery of Islands (2005). Among those who have praised Pocock’s methodological contributions, many have emphasised the significance of the notion of ‘political language’ as an idiom, rhetoric or specialised vocabulary (such as the language of ‘common law’, ‘civil jurisprudence’ or ‘classical republicanism’). Political debates can be conducted in a variety of languages (notice the plural form), since languages could coexist with each other, be adopted by different authors and travel between discursive contexts variously located in time and place. A somewhat less discussed theoretical point in Pocock’s work is his view of the intimate link between historiography and politics, which led him to believe that histories are political narratives that should be perpetually open to discussion.

In the two-fold division described above, his substantive monographs and his methodological writings are typically mapped separately within Pocock’s impressive production and often presented as independent from one another. This would suggest that, depending on the reader’s interest and focus, one could engage with Pocock as a historian of political thought while possibly remaining unaware of Pocock the theorist and political actor, and vice versa. However, an interesting path (among many) into Pocock’s oeuvre involves looking at how his insights on historiography illuminate his work as a historian of early modern republicanism and the political debates surrounding the reception of The Machiavellian Moment.

I take Pocock’s extensive reflections on the role of historians in the abstract as an invitation to consider his own writings in this light: he personified, according to his own formula, a historian who is also a political actor. In this picture, expert historians are prominent public figures who are far from comfortable seclusion in so-called ivory towers. Historians occupy a central, privileged position for crafting and re-crafting shared meanings and political identities. They narrate what was and is to be admired or despised, imitated or avoided.

Pocock’s views are related but not identical to those of his close associate Quentin Skinner. In defending the importance of contextualising intellectual history, Skinner had to counter accusations of antiquarianism and address critiques about the public irrelevance of historical knowledge. Building on this defence, Skinner has shown, for example, that political freedom has been historically linked to the absence of coercion, thus highlighting that these insights could be potentially helpful when navigating present-day politics. His strategy has been to underline that the past could be put to use in the present. In doing so, he nicely articulates a defence of the role of the historian as a public intellectual who brings together past, present and future, but his point remains susceptible to the pitfalls of political punditry.

While for Skinner history can be a political tool, Pocock’s claim is that history writing is, to some extent, political in itself. Pocock’s intricate relations between history and politics crucially merges the polity and the academia, that is, political debates and academic discourses are not simply in a constant dialogue, but rather they are forms of each other. In this sense, according to Pocock, historians are not potential partisans in disguise who use and abuse historical records for political purposes. History is not to be used for political intervention, but instead we get to inhabit the history that we believe. The downside is that the historian’s role carries an almost too heavy weight, as is apparent when examining the reception of The Machiavellian Moment.

Ideas about the inseparability of history and politics run through many of Pocock’s theoretical essays. For instance, in ‘The Historian as Political Actor in Polity, Society and Academy’ (1996), republished in Political Thought and History (2008), Pocock radically asks: ‘what kind of political phenomenon is a history?’ and ‘what kinds of political reflection, or theory, may the various forms of historiography constitute?’ His replies emphasise the circularity of history writing as a political act and inevitably lead us to picture a degree of both contestation and consensus in public debates.

Contestation logically implies the existence of different narratives or positions on historical events. History has therefore shed its singular nature and embraced pluralism, which manifests in the existence of several possible ‘histories’ and ‘pasts’ – within the constraints of evidence. Pocock is far from falling into the relativist trap, by which, if anything goes, everything goes. In terms of what can be said about the past, he emphasises that histories are invented but also verified, which means they are both ‘discovered’ and ‘constructed’. In turn, the existence of multiple histories also leaves us with the possibility of upholding multiple political identities coexisting within a polity. In this regard, Pocock ends up giving competing stories about a polity a prominent place in his theory, as these stories constitute political identities, foster a sense of belonging and otherness.

He further elaborates on these ideas in the article ‘The Politics of Historiography’ (2005). The processes by which political societies ‘acquire pasts’ and ‘re-tell contested narratives’ in ‘endless’ and ‘multiple’ ways enhance citizens’ experiences. In fact, narratives form historical ‘myths’ that function to ‘uphold the continued existence’ of societies, that is, to bind them together and establish their autonomy and sovereignty. This is not to say that historians should be mere instruments of governmental propaganda (although they might have been), but rather that a degree of disagreement and pluralism is integral to both the historian’s craft and the citizen’s experience.

Pocock’s career and biography might provide some clues to further contextualise his approach. Although he moved to the US in 1966 and remained there until his death, Pocock grew up and spent most of his early life in New Zealand. He travelled between Britain and New Zealand while doing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, yet he retained his New Zealand citizenship and considered his home country to be instrumental in shaping what he called an ‘antipodean perception’ of history. The Machiavellian Moment, which he conceived during the years spanning his own transit between ‘the South Pacific Ocean’ and ‘the Mississippi Valley’, is fittingly also a history determined by the ‘voyaging’ of people and ideas. As he said in his Valedictory Lecture (1994), he had traced the ‘journeying’ of the Atlantic republican tradition. A bold statement follows, struck through by his own pen in the manuscript of this lecture, admitting that ‘only a mid-Pacific being … can truly develop a mid-Atlantic perspective’.

Being part of a family of settler descent, histories were naturally in motion, determined by ‘voyagings’ and generated by settlements and contacts. British history, which for him included the American Revolution, was a global phenomenon with locations in two hemispheres. And, as far as we accept that histories and political identities are inseparable, a sense of political contestation easily arises from a contested history. When thinking of history as the creation of autonomy, sovereignty and political identity, history writing sets the scene for a ‘contest for power’ in a postcolonial world. Both hegemonic and ‘subaltern’ (ie, subordinated) positions generated non-final histories that were never quite settled and were required to find ways to enter into a respectful dialogue. It is with these theoretical points in mind that I suggest framing the controversies generated by The Machiavellian Moment. The insistence among many American academics in reading Pocock’s work as a challenge to US history and identity was artificial from the perspective of a historian like Pocock who was ‘never quite at home’ and who had personally witnessed the struggles that configurate the political identities of the ‘British peoples’. For Pocock, there was no history without politics, and no politics without a contested political identity.

While attempting to read Pocock’s own career and contributions to the history of political thought as part of contemporary political debates, I am purposely avoiding simplistic definitions about his political sign in present-day terms. Many critics understood that The Machiavellian Moment was an attack of contemporary liberalism per se, but in fact his belief in the inherent contestability of histories accordingly required a robust pluralism and organic liberalism. Allowing different and sometimes opposite points of view was, he argued, a necessary condition for the historical profession to take place. To put it differently, the historical profession, as Pocock envisaged it, required a liberal political setting: ‘History is a field of study in which many explanations can, and must, exist together.’ (My emphasis.) In a sense, all history writing enables the creation of multiple worlds and facilitates a constant redefinition of the continuities and discontinuities that link past, present and future.

Rosario López é professora associada de filosofia moral e política no Departamento de Filosofia da Universidade de Málaga, na Espanha. Ela é autora de Contexts of John Stuart Mill’s Liberalism: Politics and the Science of Society in Victorian Britain (2016).