Historian1661
John Pocock's Life, Legacy, and Languages of Historical and Political Thought — Rachel Hammersley
When I was invited in 2019 to tweet a book a day for a week I had no hesitation as to what my first book would be. John Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was probably the single biggest influence on me as a student, directly affecting the direction my research has taken. For this reason I was thri
Amherst BooksFinally, Nat continues:
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Also, he argued against historian C.B. Macpherson, that John Locke could not have been basing his writing on capitalism because it had not yet codified into an available language. (But would soon do so.) I studied with Pocock but disagreed with him about Macpherson.
Anyway, you can see how that fits into "Babel 17." BTW, In those days no one would bring up SF in a grad class.
#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock #CBMacpherson
Nat:
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His argument for a linguistic empiricism contradicted political theorist Leo Strauss's combination of ahistoricism & conspiracy theory that, sadly, most of the current Supreme Court justices pretend to base their decisions on.
#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock #CBMacpherson
Nat:
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In the 1970s & 1980s the historian J.G.A. Pocock introduced a concept he called "available languges," based on such ideas as Wittgenstein's "family resemblance," J.L. Austin's "speech acts, & Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms." The idea was that at any given moment folks could only make political arguments given the concepts/languages available to them.
#SamuelRDelany #JLAustin #wittgenstein #ThomasKuhn #JGAPocock