请将“THIS BOOK is in two main parts, and the complexity of its theme must be the justification of its length. In the first half—subdivided into Parts One and Two—I attempt a treatment of Florentine thought in the era of Machiavelli, which groups him with his contemporaries and peers—Savonarola, Guicciardini, Giannotti, and others—in a manner not previously attempted in English; and I do this by seeking to situate Florentine republicanism in a context analyzed in the three chapters composing Part One. I here presume that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment. Further, I presume that the European intellect of this period was possessed of a limited number of ways of rendering secular time intelligible, which I discuss in the first three chapters and group under the headings of custom, grace, and fortune. The problem of the republic’s existence in time had to be dealt with by these means and no others; and it is the way in which the Florentines of the first quarter of the sixteenth century—Machiavelli in particular—stated and explored the problem thus posed which gives their thought its remarkable character.

“The Machiavellian moment” is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. In the first place, it denotes the moment, and the manner, in which Machiavellian thought made its appearance; and here the reader is asked to remember that this is not a “history of political thought,” whatever that might be, in the last years of the Florentine republic, or a history of the political experience of Florentines in that era, designed to “explain” their articulation of the ideas studied. The “moment” in question is selectively and thematically defined. It is asserted that certain enduring patterns in the temporal consciousness of medieval and early modern Europeans led to the presentation of the republic, and the citizen’s participation in it, as constituting a problem in historical self-understanding, with which Machiavelli and his contemporaries can be seen both explicitly and implicitly contending. It became crucial in their times and remained so, largely as a result of what they did with it, for two or three centuries afterwards. Their struggle with this problem is presented as historically real, though as one selected aspect of the complex historical reality of their thought; and their “moment” is defined as that in which they confronted the problem grown crucial.

In the second place, “the Machiavellian moment” denotes the problem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, this was spoken of as the confrontation of “virtue” with “fortune” and “corruption”; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how Machiavelli and his contemporaries pursued the intimations of these words, in the context of those ways of thinking about time explored in the earlier chapters. In seeking to show that Machiavelli was one of a number of greater and lesser men engrossed in the common pursuit of this problem, I hope also to show that this is an appropriate context in which to study his thought, and that to study it in this way may diminish the amount of magniloquent and unspecific interpretation to which it has been subjected.

It is further affirmed that “the Machiavellian moment” had a continuing history, in the sense that secular political self-consciousness continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of Western thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode. To these continuing problems Machiavelli and his contemporaries, Florentine theory and its image of Venetian practice, left an important paradigmatic legacy: concepts of balanced government, dynamic virtù, and the role of arms and property in shaping the civic personality. In the second half of the book—Part Three—I pursue the history of “the Machiavellian moment” into English and American thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and seek to show that the English-speaking political tradition has been a bearer of republican and Machiavellian, as well as constitutionalist, Lockean and Burkean, concepts and values. The crucial figure here, it is asserted, is James Harrington, who brought about a synthesis of civic humanist thought with English political and social awareness, and of Machiavelli’s theory of arms with a common-law understanding of the importance of freehold property. The first three chapters of Part Three are devoted to a consideration of how a classical republican presentation of politics came to appear appropriate in the otherwise unlikely setting of Civil War England, where the conflict of Tudor monarchism with Puritan religious nationalism and sectarianism ensured the presence of many more competing styles and languages of thought than seems to have been the case in Florence. The steady growth of a neoclassical conception of politics, as in some sort an heir to Puritan millennialism, and its ascendancy in eighteenth-century England and America, is a phenomenon that requires exploration, and this the remainder of the book seeks to provide.

“The Machiavellian moment” in its eighteenth-century form provides the subject of the concluding chapters, whose emphasis is increasingly American. The confrontation of “virtue” with “corruption” is seen to have been a vital problem in social and historical philosophy during that era, and its humanist and Machiavellian vocabulary is shown to have been the vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism, grounded in awareness of the elaborate conventions of public credit rather than of the more direct interchanges of the market. The role of “fortune” was increasingly assumed by the concepts of “credit” and “commerce”; but while this led thinkers to perceive secular time more as dynamic and less as merely disorderly, the antithesis of “virtue” with “corruption”—or “virtue” with “commerce”—continued to operate as the means of expressing the quarrel between value and personality on the one hand, history and society on the other, in its first modern and secular form. This quarrel culminates, so far as the eighteenth century is concerned, with the beginnings of a dialectical perception of history in Europe, and of a utopian perception of global space in America, where an essentially Renaissance awareness of time is seen to have endured into the nineteenth century. What started with Florentine humanists as far back as Leonardo Bruni is affirmed to have played an important role in the shaping of the modern sense of history, and of alienation from history.

The book originated when Norman F. Cantor asked me to write a study of European constitutional thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a series he was then editing. It has developed far from his or my original intention during nearly ten years; but I must not neglect to acknowledge his initial encouragement, or the generosity of his then publishers (John Wiley and Sons) in releasing me from obligations which I had formed.

When I seek to name those scholars whose work has meant most to me in writing this study, the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously if controversially (and entirely without his prior knowledge) over the whole scene. Among those whose works and conversations I have more immediately consulted, the names of Felix Gilbert, Donald Weinstein, William J. Bouwsma, John M. Wallace and Gordon S. Wood stand out in a host of others; and closer still to the historian’s workshop, J. H. Hexter (Yale), Peter Riesenberg and John M. Murrin (Washington University), Richard E. Flathman (University of Washington), and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge) have read and criticized various sections of the manuscript at various stages. They of course bear no responsibility for its contents. Mr. Skinner even suggested the title, though he is not to be blamed for what I have made of it. I should also like to thank Peter Fuss, Max Okenfuss, and Henry Shapiro, my colleagues in the St. Louis chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, who endured a great deal at my hands; and my dear wife, who organized the index at a time when we had many other things to do. And the Graduate School and History Department of Washington University have been an unfailing source of material, moral and intellectual support for eight years.

J.G.A. POCOCK

Washington University, St. Louis

November 1973”翻译为中文