The Cambridge School and All That: An Antipodean Writes, November 2015

On the occasion of his introduction to the new edition of Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment for the Princeton Classics series, Richard Whatmore began collecting letters and other materials that could provide insights into Pocock's work, particularly regarding how he came to write The Machiavellian Moment.Whatmore soon realised that few of Pocock's letters had been retained, either by Pocock himself or by their intended recipients.Quentin Skinner was an exception and came to the rescue, allowing Whatmore to copy letters exchanged between the two men from the 1960s until the publication of The Machiavellian Moment in 1975.The letters raise questions about Pocock's membership in a so-called Cambridge School, a categorisation that risks presenting a misleading picture of Pocock's independent approach to a set of issues whose geographical range and chronological extent overflow a simplistic understanding of Cambridge political thought.