"The Machiavellian Moment" is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment." After examining this problem in the thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican thought in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance. He relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in the thought of the eighteenth century.
Introduction
Pt. 1 Particularity and Time: The Conceptual Background
I The Problem and Its Modes: Experience, Usage and Prudence
II The Problem and Its Modes: Providence, Fortune and Virtue
III The Problem and Its Modes: The Vita Activa and the Vivere Civile
Pt. 2 The Republic and its Fortune: Florentine Political Thought from 1494 to 1530
IV From Bruni to Savonarola: Fortune, Venice and Apocalypse
V The Medicean Restoration: Guicciardini and the Lesser Ottimati, 1512-1516
VI The Medicean Restoration: Machiavelli's Il Principe
VII Rome and Venice: Machiavelli's Discorsi and Arte della Guerra
VIII Rome and Venice: Guicciardini'a Dialogo and the Problem of Optimate Prudence
IX Giannotti and Contarini: Venice as Concept and as Myth
Pt. 3 Value and History in the Prerevolutionary Atlantic
X The Problem of English Machiavellism: Modes of Civic Consciousness before the Civil War
XI The Anglicization of the Republic: Mixed Constitution, Saint and Citizen
XII The Anglicization of the Republic: Court, Country and Standing Army
XIII Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy: The Augustan Debate over Land, Trade and Credit
XIV The Eighteenth-Century Debate: Virtue, Passion and Commerce
XV The Americanization of Virtue: Corruption, Constitution, and Frontier
Afterword