The Man Goes Away: John Pocock and the History of Political Thought

It is reported that on December 13, John Pocock, professor emeritus of history at Johns Hopkins University in the United States and a core member of the "Cambridge School" in the second half of the 20 th century, died at the age of 99. The original title of this article, From "History of Political Philosophy" to "History of Political Language": John Pocock and the History of Political Thought, was originally published in the 2009 Fudan Political Science Review.

John Pocock

In current Chinese academic circles, John Pocock is a name that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Speaking of familiarity, as early as 1990, Zhang Zhizhong published the article "From Philosophical Method to Historical Method", which gave us a first glimpse of his research methods in the history of political thought, and in recent years, with the "hot sales" of civic republicanism and Cambridge School intellectual history research in China, Pocock's name has been repeatedly mentioned, and some of his papers have been translated into Chinese. Speaking of strangeness, until now, we have not been able to translate several of his core papers on the methodology of the history of political thought, and the Chinese versions of several classic works he wrote under the guidance of this methodology have also been lost. In addition, Pocock's obscure academic style (which contrasts sharply with Skinner's relaxed and bright style) makes the Chinese academic circles particularly alienated from Pocock, and there is still a lack of necessary common sense and accurate understanding of the theory and practice of his intellectual history research, especially in the field of political intellectual history research. This, in turn, prevents us from borrowing from this knowledgeable thinker and applying it to our own research practice.

As a paradigm of intellectual history research, the Cambridge School's "contextualism" research orientation was first initiated by Peter Laslett and then pushed to its peak by Skinner, so much so that some people call this paradigm shift in intellectual history research "Skinnerian revolution". In this way, in the academic pedigree of the Cambridge School, Pocock seems to be in an embarrassing situation of not standing on the "earth" before and not on the "sky" after it. But, in fact, in the development of the Cambridge School, Pocock was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. In the history of the Cambridge School, Laslet is only a figure who hints at the direction of future development, in Hu Shih's words, a figure who "does not open up the atmosphere and is not a teacher". Later, due to his shift in interest to the study of population and social history, he was unable to expand this direction further. It was John Pocock who really clarified the research orientation of "Situationism" and systematically thought about it from a methodological perspective. Among the three essays that established the Cambridge school of intellectual history, Pocock's "History of Political Thought: A Methodological Inquiry" (1962) has been hailed as a classic work of "portents of the future", which was published six years before Dunn's "The Identity of the History of Ideas" and seven years before Skinner's "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas". It is in this essay that Pocock first proposed that the identity of political thought is historical, that the most definite method we can use in the study of political thought is the method of historiography, and that the "meaning" we interpret from the text of political thought must be a meaning that has been confirmed by the method of history. As an indispensable and pivotal figure in the development of the Cambridge School, Pocock won the praise of his predecessors and successors. In Modern British Political Discourse, a collection of essays "with admiration and sincere respect" to Pocock, the editor writes, "From the present point of view, the sixties of the twentieth century did witness the beginning of a revolutionary way of thinking about the history of political theory, and it is more certain that John Pocock himself was the most active and important revolutionary...... His vast knowledge of the spiritual world of Anglo-Saxon politics, his authoritative writings, and his insatiable curiosity continue to inspire a large number of historical works. One can still feel the heart-pounding sense of history emanating from the best historians. ”

Within the Cambridge School, Pocock was distinguished by the theory and practice of the study of "history of language". As Skinner observes: "The most characteristic and fruitful work of the historian John Pocock was to concentrate his attention on the 'language' of public debate, as he preferred it." His main interest lies in discovering a variety of unique Xi and discourse patterns in which political debates can be unfolded. And Pocock himself agrees, "For me, the notion of a political language means that what was previously called, and is still called the history of political thought as a Xi, can now be more accurately described as the history of political language." And, with this as the center, Pocock developed a systematic theory and method of intellectual history research. Below, the author will comment on this.

I. From "Philosophical Interpretation" to "Historical Interpretation"

In 1971, Pocock wrote, "In the last decade, scholars interested in the study of political ideologies have experienced a fundamental change in their discipline that in effect amounts to a transformation." Pocock has been involved in this transformation since its inception and has "written a series of papers to elucidate the characteristics of this transformation." In Pocock's view, the essence of this transformation is to establish "a truly autonomous method" for the study of the history of political thought: since "history is about the occurrence of things", this approach "treats the phenomenon of political thought strictly as a historical phenomenon, or even as a historical event." Since things happen in a situation, then that situation will determine the nature of the event". Through this strict definition, Pocock justifiably defines the traditional history of political thought as "illegal pseudo-political intellectual history": it mainly refers to the academic research method represented by Lovejoy that takes the "idea meta" as the content of the study of intellectual history. The most basic feature of this approach is that it is purely textual, it does not reveal the "situation" in which these ideas were formed, nor does it explore the "intentions" of the speakers behind these ideas, but only constructs the history of ideas as a lasting dialogue of classical thinkers on "eternal questions". Worse still, this approach often analyzes the relationship between texts and ideas in terms of "influence" or "omen", and this analysis of "influence" and "omen" is not a historical interpretation in most cases, but a kind of chronological reversal. Pocock argues that the root cause of the shortcomings and confusion in the study of the history of traditional political thought lies in "the dysfunctional relationship between history and philosophy." In view of this, in order to successfully realize the transformation of the study of the history of political thought, we must "re-evaluate the way in which philosophy and history meet" in concrete research practice: that is, to correctly distinguish between "historical interpretation" and "philosophical interpretation". Historical interpretations are concerned with "what actually happened in the past?" and in the field of intellectual history specifically, they are concerned with "what did what actually happened in the past mean?" while non-historical interpretations represented by philosophical explanations are concerned with "what did what actually happened in the past mean to me in the present?" Pocock argued, and we should not equate or confuse the two. As historians of ideas, our primary goal is to "reconstruct" the "historical meaning" of a particular text or discourse, that is, as interpreters, the meaning that we attach to the text or discourse must be the meaning of the text or discourse in the context of a particular historical context. When a competent historian is engaged in the activity of historical interpretation, he must realize that he and his interpretive object are not in the same "conceptual or meaning world", so that in order to ensure the legitimacy of the interpretive activity, he must ask: to what extent is the use of his words by the interpretive object (i.e., the author) consistent with the use of his words by him (i.e., the modern interpreter)? For, from the particular standpoint of the interpreter, he must have observed that the exchange between the interpreter and the author must be the kind of exchange that Petrarch imagined: that is, the kind of communication between him and Cicero (or Livy): "You come from the world of your time, and I come from the world of my time". In this way, in order to avoid the misreading of the "strong man for himself" type, and in order to be able to use certain words on the same level of meaning as the author, we must look to the conceptual tools of tradition and engage in what Pocock calls a "humanist" activity – that is, to reconstruct the "world of meaning" on which the writing or discourse of the text is written, that is, " Restate the thoughts of the ancients or forefathers in the language of their time, in order to understand what he had to say or had to say, and what he was concerned about, when so expressed. But, in Pocock's view, in the history of political thought in the twentieth century, this historical, humanist principle was tarnished and betrayed by philosophical, operationalist principles. In Pocock's words, "Twentieth-century people hate to think of themselves as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, and they prefer not to look for conceptual tools from tradition, but rather to build their own." The result is a "flourishing of betrayal" in the historical interpretation. This is manifested in the fact that the interpreter who adheres to the principle of operationalism is not concerned with what an author means by making a statement in the distant past, but with what his own present state can make that statement mean. He engaged in interpretive activities not to serve the author's purpose, but to serve his own purpose, and in Chinese parlance, he was "the Six Classics Note Me", not "I Note the Six Classics". Taking Hobbes studies as an example, in the view of humanists, operationists often only use Hobbes's "wine glass" to pour their own "blocks", so as to artificially add to Hobbes what Hobbes did not have intentions or impossible things to say. So historians often complain to philosophers or political theorists, "Hobbes didn't mean that when he said this, at least not exactly." But it is likely that you mean this if you find it useful to you. But don't put words like 'Hobbes said' in front of your thoughts, and don't add the dishonest present tense – 'Hobbes said'. ”

In the process of reconstructing the historical meaning of a text or discourse and reconstructing the conceptual tools of the author, one of Pocock's important methodological contributions is to develop the core concept of the "abstract level" of thought. Pocock argues that for a researcher engaged in historical interpretation, he must select a level of abstraction in which the intend of a given work or utterance unfolds, that is, he must discern whether the work (or utterance) is intended as a reflective philosophical act or as a rhetorical exhortation. By adopting the Burkean-Oakeshottian definition, Pocock defines political theory as an act of "abstraction and refinement from tradition": it is in the "behavioral tradition" that people take abstract action, and the study of political thought is the study of what happens when people carry out this abstract action. In Pocock's view, it is essential for the researcher of intellectual history to be fully aware that the purpose of thinkers in the abstract activity of ideas is variable and multiple: "People carry out abstract activities for multiple purposes, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes scientific, and their purposes are constantly changing. And this diversity of purposes also determines the diversity of the levels of abstraction: "Abstraction can lead to further abstraction, and the hierarchy of ideas often moves up and down the practical and theoretical levels." A fragment of thought can be seen both as an act of political persuasion and as an event in the pursuit of understanding. An argument or concept, after a few seconds apart, can be either more theoretical or more practical than the purpose it has just served. When a philosophy reappears, it becomes an ideology, and a partisan slogan can be turned into an educational tool for the promotion of pure scientific values. This can be seen from the observation of everyday practice: "It can be shown that the political ideas that emerge in a given society in a given historical period can appear at different levels of abstraction, and change according to the nature of the problems it is intended to solve." The same is true of the political ideology of a particular individual. In this way, in the study and practice of the history of political thought, the diversity of abstract levels becomes a difficult problem, which presents us with a solemn challenge. For the diversity of abstract levels does not give us freedom of interpretation, but rather imposes limits on us. Since, theoretically, political thought can be developed at any level of abstraction, in practice, the "historical task in the strict sense of the word" before the historian of ideas is to determine, through research, what kind of abstract level the idea takes place. In other words, in the writing of intellectual history, we must prove that "the level of abstraction we use is the level of abstraction in which political thought takes place."

However, in Pocock's view, the crucial step of "identifying the level of abstraction within which political thought can unfold" has been overlooked in the traditional study of intellectual history. Pocock described the traditional mode of intellectual history research as follows: "Until the middle of the twentieth century, in all the major disciplines of historical research, the study of the history of political thought was treated as the study of the traditional classics, and in this case, the transformation of the traditional classics into the history of ideas was carried out by the method of philosophical criticism—that is, philosophical commentary on the intellectual tenets of the tradition." This model is actually a philosophical mode of interpretation, which Xi is accustomed to placing political thought at a very high level of abstraction, and a priori setting political thought to be highly coherent and rational. In this mode of interpretation, the interpretation of the text is equated with the discovery of the "coherence" of the text, so the effort to reconstruct the idea is focused on restoring the "coherence" of the text, and even on inventing a way whereby the text may be given a "coherence" that the author failed to and did not assign. In this way, the diversity of abstract levels that actually exist in history is obscured or artificially obliterated, with the result that "tradition is condensed into a single description that takes place at a high level of abstraction". But what Pocock is asking is: Is this a "valid interpretation of history"? In his view, the study of the history of ideas, which aims to discover or reveal the "coherence" of texts, is in fact ahistorical, even anti-historical: "because, in principle, a thinker can both succeed in achieving this coherence and failing in it...... It is obvious that attaching to the author a coherence that he does not actually acquire is not the task of the historian." Pocock argues that this ahistorical interpretation arises because people mistakenly confuse a political work with the "coherence" of a political theory with the "historical" nature of a political work. When a philosopher constructs a political work a priori as a political philosophy or political theory, he is interested in ideas that can be explained at the level of strict reason. By reducing a political work to a historical phenomenon or a historical event, the historian is concerned with the factual process, i.e., "what kind of world does the individual thought actor inhabit and why does he behave in this world as he has done it?" A historical commentary on what the author intended to say (not to mention why the author wanted to say it, or why he chose to say it in this way). In fact, the "coincidence" between these two interpretations exists only in the specific case that our philosophical explanatory activity aimed at revealing or inventing the "coherence" of the text is "accidental" legitimate only if the object of our interpretation is a philosopher, and it is deliberately developed on a highly abstract level in writing or speaking. Because the two interpretations follow different paths, they have different questions to answer. In the case of philosophers, they Xi study texts and then abstract various systems of thought from them and arrange them in a historical order, in which the similarities between the systems of thought are seen as constituting continuity, and the differences between them constitute the process of change. However, in the eyes of historians, this historical order is not based on the method of historiography, it is not a real historical process, but only a supra-historical, imaginary "philosophical construct". Pocock notes that in the practice of intellectual history, we can often see this classic example of replacing historical interpretation with philosophical interpretation. R. Aaron I. Aaron: Aron attempts to explain why Locke was clearly not interested in any historical interpretation of politics in this way: In the rationalist age in which Locke lived, people were not interested in anything other than rational explanation. However, the discussion of history shows that such philosophical judgments are untenable. For at the time, Locke was a unique exception in the absence of interest in "historical interpretations," which was not the case with Locke's contemporaries, including his closest friends.

For Pocock, interpreters like Aron make mistakes partly due to paranoia about the philosophical method and partly due to "ignorance" of the historical method. In Pocock's quip, "Philosophers, political theorists, or critics resent, for their apparent obligation to study what they know to be historical, or to write about what they know to be historical." "Because when they find themselves involved in a humanist activity and expected to do a historical interpretation, they don't have the necessary skills or training in that area. As a result, "whether they hate or like the work, the result is often unfortunate." Of course, Pocock adds with his usual rigor that this is not to say that philosophers or political theorists without historical training are necessarily unable to write "good works of political thought," but that good works written within the constraints of this methodology are "in a sense only a kind of creation, a creation made up of 'virtu' and fortuna."

二、从"言语(speech)"转向"语言(language)"

While both Pocock and Skinner advocated a "historical" reading of speech (parole or utterance), they were generally referred to as "Situationists" under the name of the "Cambridge School". But to be precise, Skinner was more of an intentionalist or conventionalist, while Pocock was the real "situationist." Pocock once wrote, "When political thought is written as a series of events that occur in history, the historian must deal with it in such a way that the thought takes place in the context of an event constituted by the thinking of a theorist or philosopher, and that its explanation can only be obtained by reference to that particular context." Here, Pocock refers to two main types of specific situations to which the interpretation is referred, one is a social situation and the other is a linguistic situation. For Pocock, the latter is particularly important: "The first context in which a spoken action is carried out is an institutionalized mode of speech that makes it possible." For anything to be said, to be written, to be printed, there must be a language in which it is spoken, written, or printed." For contextualists like Pocock, as the overarching framework or paradigm of speech and action, language determines not only the steps and forms of speech, but also the content and meaning of speech: "Society gives language to individuals, and it is in language that people can carry out their speech activities, and it is through language that their speech activities acquire public importance." It is on the basis of this theoretical position that Pocock has embarked on the most subversive and original step in his study of the history of ideas, that is, the transformation of the study of the history of political thought into the study of the history of political language, as Pocock himself concluded in his "farewell speech" at Hopkins University, "Throughout my life, the history of political thought has become no longer a history of ideas, but a history of language, discourse, and literature."

Of course, Pocock's position is not without grounds. As Melvin Richter points out, since the 1970s, the "linguistic turn" has led to the reshaping of the basic paradigm of intellectual history research, which has had a fundamental consequence: that is, in the study of intellectual history, people have begun to value and commit to "the historical role of language". However, there are also "special aspects" in the "common phase". For example, Skinner's main theoretical source comes from Austin's theory of verbal action, in which he emphasizes more on the hierarchy of "speech" or "verbal action", emphasizing every intentional, concrete, and immediate application of the author's speech, and the "rhetorical" component presented in it. Compared to Skinner, Pocock's theoretical background is rather mixed. As a diligent and long-thinking historian of thought, Pocock's theoretical paradigm was formed by extensively borrowing theoretical resources from other disciplines on the basis of summarizing his own practice. Therefore, in its theoretical origins, we can see the shadows of Wittgenstein's "language-game" and Austin's "speech acts", as well as Braudel's "longue duree" (mentalite), Foucault's "discourse", and Kuhn's "paradigm". However, I think that in the midst of this mixed theoretical undertone, what Pocock ultimately adheres to is actually a kind of Saussure structuralism. In this position, Pocock emphasizes more on the hierarchy of "language" or "discourse", and emphasizes the structural paradigm in which "verbal action" unfolds. Unlike Skinner and others, who emphasize the "agency" of the "author" through "intention", structuralists highlight the "passivity" and "constraints" of the "author" through "paradigm" or "discursive structure". Mark Bevir has an accurate description of this position: for structuralists, "the meaning of a discursive act derives from 'knowledge', 'discursive form' or 'paradigm'; The way in which the writer writes or speaks, the author cannot get rid of the structure given by a society, so what he can say is transferred by a theoretical structure, and the society gives them access to this theoretical structure, and what the author can say depends on the concepts they use to speak, and these concepts do not reflect the external reality objectively without value orientation, but contain the identification of the world that has been passed down through society. This view is also vividly revealed in Foucault's early quasi-structuralist stance. Foucault argues that the concept of "author" is redundant in the process of interpreting "meaning". Because it is the "paradigm" of speech, not the "intention" of the author, "which governs the style of speech as a unique event". This suggests that it is the "language", not the "author", that becomes the "first law of what can be said". In keeping with this position, Pocock also strictly limits the role of the "author" in the interpretation of "meaning", arguing that the author is only "the mouthpiece of the script-writing paradigms": although the author is still the agent of history, the unit of intellectual history research must be theoretical and linguistic structures, because it is these structures that "dictate what he (the author) can say and how he says it". By giving the author the way in which he or she might have to carry out his intent, language gives the author what he or she might have. In this way, in the study of intellectual history, "language", as a paradigm in which the author can develop his words and actions, has a greater priority than "words and actions". Pocock writes: "In the depths of history, once language is seen as a paradigm by which the author develops his words and actions, it has a greater 'intention' than the author's words The power of intraverbal expressive action takes greater precedence, because it is only when we already understand what the author has the means or means to say anything that we can understand what he intends to say or what he wants to say, what he has successfully said, what he is considered to have said, or what effect his words have in modifying or transforming existing paradigm structures. ”

It should be noted that in his writings, Pocock sometimes names "vocabulary", "language", "paradigm", and sometimes "discourse" and "rhetoric" for "the paradigm by which the author develops his speech and action". From this definition, we can see that the "language" that Pocock refers to here is neither a natural language nor a national language in the species sense (such as English or French), but refers to a sub-language under the same national language, that is, the various political languages that exist in a particular political community, that is, what Pocock calls "the mode of political debate" or "the way of discussing politics". Since the discourse paradigm determines the content of the discourse to a certain extent, in order to establish the meaning of a political text, in order to discover what its author actually said, meant, or transmitted, the first task of the historian is to find and reconstruct these "languages" as modes of political argumentation, as well as the changes that these languages have made over time. In this way, Pocock completely subverted the traditional perspective of the study of the history of political thought, focusing on the "language of political debate". As Pocock puts it, "I want to study the language in which speech unfolds, not the speech that unfolds within language." In Pocock's view, every stable political society develops a variety of political languages. In terms of its internal composition, similar to natural language, political language is composed of "concepts" assembled in an internal order through a system of grammatical and connected instructions. So, how did political language develop as an "organized concept"? Pocock argues that political language originally originated from a "technical vocabulary" extracted from specific social and cultural traditions, and later, in the process of constructing political thought, this "technical vocabulary" was borrowed and politicized "as a way of discussing politics". In response, Pocock wrote: "Any stable and eloquent society has concepts in its possession and uses them to discuss political affairs." At the same time, these concepts are connected to form a conceptual group or language...... These languages differ in the sectors of social behaviour from which they are derived, in the methods in which they are used, and in the corrections they undergo. Some languages are technical vocabulary derived from the institutionalized mode of regulating public affairs in society, while Western political thought is mainly developed in the vocabulary of law, while Confucian Chinese political thought is mainly developed in the vocabulary of etiquette. Others derive from the vocabulary of social processes that have become politically relevant: the theological vocabulary in theocratic societies, the vocabulary of land tenure in feudal societies, and the vocabulary of technology in industrial societies. ”

Unlike technical vocabulary, political language has a specific function of defending or denying the legitimacy of political actions. In Pocock's view, as a paradigm of argumentation, each "language" imposes limits on how politics can be conceptualized, and how political institutions and political practices can be legitimized. Pocock's theoretical vision in this regard derives to a large extent from Kuhn's "paradigm" theory. Pocock was always full of praise for Kuhn: "It is impossible for a historian of political thought to praise Kuhn's appeal because ...... He provided a methodology that gave the history of political thought methodological autonomy. In Pocock's view, by proposing the concept of "paradigm", Kuhn succeeded in transforming the traditional sense of "history of science" into a kind of "history of discourse" or "history of language". In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn describes the "paradigm" as follows: that is, by defining what is the problem to be solved by presupposition, the "paradigm" authoritatively indicates the direction, mode and organizational form of the scientific researcher's efforts, as well as the attribution and definition of authority among the individuals and groups that make up the "scientific community". For Pocock, this foreshadows the paradigm in which Kuhn treats the "history of science"—what Pocock calls "a branch of intellectual history"—as "a process that is both linguistic and political," and that scientific research, a "highly formal act of thought," is "an act of communication and distribution of authority through linguistic means." Pocock argues that this is of great inspiration and reference for researchers of the history of political thought: as a paradigm, although political language is not ultimately problem-solving, like scientific language, it performs the same function as the latter in distributing ideas and political authority among the actors of the social system: " People think by communicating linguistic systems, which help to construct their conceptual and authority-structures, and the associated social worlds, which can be seen as mutually contextual, and from which we can get a precise and clear picture: the individual's mind may now be seen as a social event, a paradigmatic communication or feedback action, a historical event, a historical moment. That is, the historical moment in the transformation of the language system, and the historical moment in the interactive world in which the language system and linguistic actions are interconstructed with the authority structure and the social world. In this way, we get what we were lacking before: the complexity of the situation that historians need. ”

For Pocock, the first task of a historian is to learn to "identify" the language and to read and understand the text through it, so as to "place the mind correctly in the discursive tradition to which it truly belongs." It is from this particular standpoint, from the mid-twentieth century, that Pocock has been working to "discover" and "identify" the various "languages" used by political theorists in early modern Britain, and has achieved great success, as critics have noted, "Pocock's achievement is to discover more fully than anyone of his predecessors the pluralistic, competing political discourse of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-speaking world". In the process, Pocock is always asking: What are the modes of criticizing and defending the legitimacy of political actions in political debate, and what symbols or principles do these models refer to? In what language and through what forms of argument do speakers try to achieve their goals? In this regard, Pocock argues that the work done by historians is similar to that of anthropologist Raymond Firth in his famous book The Traditions and History of the Tikpians (Tikopia Tradition and History, Wellington, 1961), that is, to uncover the traditions used by the Tikpia people belonging to several different lineages, and the role these different traditions played in maintaining social cohesion or inducing social conflict. It was in this way that Pocock "identified" the three "languages" that existed in English political debate in the late seventeenth century—the language of ancient constitutions, the language of religious revelation, and the language of Latin humanism. In his classic work, Ancient Constitutions and Feudal Law, which established his original scholarly status, Pocock examines the language of "ancient constitutions" (also known as "precedents"). As a paradigm of political debate, ancient constitutional language attributes English politics, and in particular the right to liberty associated with the legal system, to a continuous, uninterrupted Xi of ancient customs. Pocock argues that it was this "precedent" language that provided Burke with many of his arguments against the French Revolution. In this regard, of course, Pocock's most impactful and exemplary work is provided by Machiavellian Moments. In the book, Pocock unearths a language of "civic humanism" that is completely different from the language of "jurisprudence (or natural law)." In the traditional classics, whether it is the work of Carlyle and Sabine, or the work of Waring, the history of political thought is written in the language of "jurisprudence". But in Pocock's view, this is just a mutilated picture of intellectual history that has been "manufactured" by misreading. For in early modern Europe, in addition to the language of "jurisprudence," there was another competing political language – the language of "civic humanism" in which thinkers such as Guiacciardini and Machiavelli thought and wrote. Although the two have different value premises, different problems and different argumentative strategies, previous intellectual historians have often ignored or confused this difference, and have brutally forced the language of "civic humanism" into the language of "jurisprudence", thus causing misinterpretation. For in Pocock's view, to read Machiavelli in a language of "jurisprudence" is in fact to translate Machiavelli into a language that he simply cannot identify.

For Pocock, in a sense, compared with the traditional "history of ideas", this practice of intellectual history with the goal of exploring "political language" is more of an adventure full of countless surprises and unexpected discoveries, a kind of "serendipity test". Because we can often find a familiar language in places that people have not expected or overlooked, and thus feel the striking, excitement, and astonished that ordinary historians of thought cannot experience.

III. From "Monistic History" to "Pluralistic History"

In Pocock's view, the concept of "language" not only means a transformation of the perspective of the history of political thought, but also means the expansion of the "spatiality" of its interpretation mode, that is, from the traditional unitary and flat interpretation mode to a pluralistic and three-dimensional interpretation mode. As a highly "institutionalized" mode of discourse, "language" has a similar function to the scientific paradigm: that is, to define and distribute political and intellectual authority within the political community. However, Pocock also points out that, unlike the scientific paradigm, language is not exclusive, and that in the same political society, and even in a particular political discourse and political text, several "languages" often coexist. Since a particular discourse activity (or text) acquires a definite meaning in a specific "paradigmatic scenario", that is, a specific "language", a particular speech action (or text) can actually acquire multiple meanings in the context of multiple co-existing "language contexts". As Pocock put it, "The more complex and even contradictory the linguistic situation in which an author lives, the richer and more ambivalent the linguistic actions he can perform." Therefore, in this pluralistic context, Pocock has always emphasized the "muddle-ridden character" of "everyday language", especially "political discourse". In Pocock's view, political discourse is actually a "rhetoric" that "is used to reconcile those who pursue different values, goals, and behaviors, so that a single political discourse is likely to perform several different linguistic functions at the same time." For some, it is a factual statement, while for others, it symbolically evokes a particular value. In one group of listeners it evokes a factual claim and the value judgments associated with it, and in another group of listeners it evokes another factual claim and a determination to recommend another action...... As a result, the inherent ambiguity and secrecy of political discourse is quite high."

In the historical changes of multiple contexts and linguistic paradigms, since the meaning of a particular discourse is "open", the historical development mode of "political philosophy" composed of discourse must also be "pluralistic". Thus, as a critique of Strauss, Bloom, and others (who called Bloom's history of political philosophy "a freak of ignorance and esoteric ideas"), Pocock argues that political philosophy does not have "a monolithic descriptive history", but a plurality of histories in a pluralistic context: "Political philosophy is the product of people's reflection on their political language, and political language is the raw material that social actors aggregate in order to elucidate and reconcile various behaviors." As the basic material of history itself, these raw materials are extremely heterogeneous and chaotic, so that political philosophy cannot have a single evolving pattern of history. In Pocock's view, political philosophy can be seen as a kind of "dialogue" that transcends time and space as a reflective discursive activity. The philosopher is not isolated in the construction of political philosophy, "he is aware of the statements of other philosophers and various other political actors, whose words constitute an input to his consciousness and cognition." By saying what he says, the philosopher responds to what he thinks others have said, and the interpretation of what others say and do constitutes a considerable part of the philosopher's professional activity. Since political philosophy is also a kind of "dialogue" in a sense, it cannot escape the nature of "dialogue" within the constraints of everyday language: that is, the participants in the dialogue "often converse in inconsistent purposes or cross-purposes". Pocock gave an example: There are two philosophers, one named Alter and the other called Ego. At a given moment in history, Ego performs a discursive activity that, in a certain sense, is a response to a discursive activity that Alter has performed. Since it is a response, it inevitably involves a question of interpretation, that is, Ego's response is based on an interpretation of Alter's words and actions. However, in response to Ego's response, Alter often says, "I didn't say that," and "That's not what I said." This means that in a conversation, the parties who are the speakers do not have "complete knowledge and absolute control" over what is being said, that is, it is difficult for him to define the "scope of meaning" of the other party's words (or even his own words), so there will be additions, derogations or variations of meaning. In fact, the story between Alter and Ego will never end up repeating itself over the course of history, and each Ego will "reinvent" Alter's words and actions according to the situation in which he finds himself. This foreshadows that, in the chain of intellectual transmission, the words and actions of any philosopher can be given meaning by others, whether his students and disciples, or his opponents and critics, that philosopher did not anticipate or intended.

Pocock argues that as long as we regard speech and action in political philosophy as a "historical phenomenon", then its meaning must be "multi-dimensional", and only in the artificially set "laboratory" can the meaning of any given speech and action be "exclusive". Let's take Alter and Ego as an example: Ego can respond to Alter's "I didn't say that" or "I didn't mean it that way", "I don't care if you say it or not, or if you mean it this or that, I want to say that if that's what you're saying, then that's what I'm commenting will look like." Pocock argues that from this moment on, Ego pulls himself out of the "conversation" and into an "imaginary world" of "self-legitimation": in which, by "freely reshaping the information he receives into a form of information that he is willing to accept and respond to", Ego judges the meaning of Alter's words and actions in an arbitrary, "mono-drama" form. However, in Pocock's view, Ego's substitution of "experimentation" for "history" has only achieved temporary and limited success. Outside of the laboratory, Alter's speech and action are still "multi-valence" in the "everyday world of language", still operating in multiple situations and layers historically. Moreover, Ego can never rule out the effort to "reconstruct a message as it was when it first spreads, or as it once was at any intermediate moment in its transmission." Historians have contributed enormously in this regard, often "bugging" the flow of time with "decoders" in their hands, in Pocock's words.

In Pocock's view, for an idea or utterance to be "history," it must be seen as an "action," and its authors must be seen as "historical actors": that is, we get its history by tracing what a statement "actually did" in history, and what that utterance "actually did" is always reflected in the use and reaction of others to that speech. But as Pocock suggests, once the historian of ideas traces the history of political discourse in terms of "how people react to the use of political discourse and the way in which it is used, he must recognize the theoretical possibility that political discourse has a plurality of histories." Because political discourse is used, recognized, and provoked at different levels. Given the semantic diversity at these levels, the histories of political discourse are very different from each other." For Pocock, these "histories" of words and actions are real, and each history affects (or changes) history by influencing (or changing) people's perceptions, and is therefore the object of study for intellectual historians. It is from this stance that Pocock begins to extend the tentacles of his research to the linguistic and spatial forms of "political discourse", and then considers the occurrence of political discourse "in a variety of communicative spaces and situations": what happens when Grotius is read and reacted to in London? What happens to Locke when he is read and reacted to in Naples? What happens to Montesquieu when he is read and reacted to in Philadelphia? Through these questions, Pocock tries to show that in the historical process of the transmission (dissemination) of ideas, since anyone (including the author) can control the meaning of words and actions, since words and actions always belong to the pluralistic discursive world, and since words and actions always occupy multiple logical positions and contexts of references), since speech and action always carry out multiple political actions and political functions, it cannot have only one (a) history. Take Leviathan, for example: in the middle of the 17th century, in London, the Leviathan was read, recognized, and reacted to in a world of George Thomason, a world of rapid expansion of the print medium and a growing revolutionary consciousness, and a different story in the Netherlands, where the Leviathan was read and discussed in Latin in university lecture halls in a capitalist world of Yongyongmumu. It is in these different communication spaces, sites, and structures that the Leviathan's many histories are born and disseminated. In this historicist reconstruction of "thought" centered on "action", the historian of thought outlines for the "philosopher" the "richness of the meaning carried by the statement" and the pluralistic historical development model that comes from it. As Pocock points out, this historicist critique is less aimed at the negative effect – the exclusion of the meaning that Ego imposes on words – and more on the positive role, that is, the training of philosophers like Ego to "understand what another person says in a historical context, that is, to take into account the diversity of what is said, felt, and what is conceived." diversity), and the diversity of the ways in which these contents can be spoken, felt, and thought." For a philosopher like Ego, Pocock argued, this training was of great value: on the one hand, it greatly expanded Ego's ability to receive and process a variety of different information, and on the other hand, it greatly expanded Ego's understanding of the diversity of the "language games" he could play.

Since political discourse has more than one meaning at any point in the inheritance, and does not participate in only one kind of history, the primary task of an intellectual historian is to "locate" the political discourse it wants to explain, and to place it in a specific meaning layer and historical context with "a highly sophisticated detection and discovery technique", so as to avoid being tempted by "diversity" to fall into "undisciplined and arbitrary interpretation"; In addition, the historian must learn to choose, to choose the history or piece of history that he is best able to tell. In Pocock's view, the "meaning layer" of a political discourse can be divided into "latent" and "explicit". Since the meaning of political discourse is conditioned by linguistic paradigms, this means that with the change of linguistic paradigms, at certain historical moments, some layers of meaning that were once "obvious" in political discourse will become "potential", and some layers of meaning that were once "potential" will become "explicit". It's like an underground river, which climbs to the surface and jubilantly appears in front of people's eyes under certain favorable terrain conditions, and hides into the ground and disappears silently from people's view under certain unfavorable terrain conditions. As a historian, he must take advantage of the "vantage-points" provided to him by the current historical moment, and unearth the "potential" and "layers of meaning" that have been ignored in some political discourse, so as to make them "explicit". In this sense, the Pocockian intellectual historian has become to a large extent an "archaeologist", dedicated to unearthing the "layers of meaning" that have been annihilated by history. It is worth mentioning that this archaeological work of the idea of changing from "potential" to "manifest" was a great success with both Pocock and Skinner. In The Machiavellian Moment, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and Freedom Before Liberalism, they work together to succeed in turning classical republicanism, once as "latent" as an underground river, into "manifest." However, we may be able to further ask, what kind of "vantage point" has given Pocock and his team this usable horizon to make the "latent" become "explicit" in contemporary times?

As a thinker, Pocock's most striking feature is that he fuses theoretical thinking and research practice into one furnace, and his writings are both theoretical and subtle, as well as practical meticulousness, which can be described as "one foot in the clouds and the other in the mud". However, at the general end, the most valuable and original thing in Pocock's thought is the introduction of the concept of "language" and the "pluralistic" values contained in it. Pocock has reason to argue that since any interpretation of thought is conditioned by a particular paradigm of "language", any attempt to monopolize the hegemony of thought and discourse is somewhat vain! Finally, to borrow a phrase from Bernard Beldi, "Since there is no such thing as childish reading, it is not wrong for us to know the glasses we wear." It is also true for researchers of the history of ideas that since any thought is based on "language", it is not harmful to understand the "language" that people use to "organize" and "construct" their ideas before studying them. Perhaps, this is what Pocock is trying to convey to us!