The Machiavellian Moment

Pocock traces a line of republican political thought from fifteenth-century Florence through seventeenth-century England to the American founding. The “Machiavellian moment” of the title is the moment a republic confronts its own mortality in time — the recognition that a self-governing community is a fragile, contingent thing that must continually renew the civic virtue that sustains it or decay into corruption. The book argues that this civic-humanist vocabulary of virtue, corruption and the armed citizen, not Lockean rights-liberalism alone, supplied the language in which the English and American revolutions were argued.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in McCord’s The American Experiment section, among Tocqueville, the Federalist Papers and Storing — the block where the curriculum examines how a durable republic was actually assembled, and Pocock’s contribution is the intellectual genealogy the founders were working inside.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas part, section The American Experiment — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• The Prince — Machiavelli’s text, on McCord’s list in the Renaissance section, and the origin of the tradition Pocock traces.
• Founding Fathers — the Atlantic end of the republican tradition the book follows.
• Liberalism — the rival account of the founding that Pocock’s civic-humanist reading is set against.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.