HEGEL AND POCOCK ON HISTORICAL TIME: A MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT COMES LATE TO GERMANY?

Abstract

J.G.A. Pocock diagnosed in the Machiavellian Moment a difficulty in understanding the temporality of their civic engagement. That engagement concerned particulars rather than general rules, and it concerned mutable facts that varied over time and across space. Of course, Hegel is not writing in Machiavelli’s Italy, and so there can be no question of simply locating Hegel’s writing within this problematic. And yet it is also the case that Sattelzeit Germany was another place and time in which the development of a distinctively historical consciousness was forced upon thinkers by specific political events. Hegel thought that one of his essential contributions to philosophy generally was his development of conceptual resources for dealing with particulars – and with individuals as well. In fact, Hegel’s location of both particularity and individuality within the concept is a distinctive and even idiosyncratic position with substantial consequences for his understanding of historical experience. And it is also the case that Hegel’s own intellectual development is far more closely tied to related themes in Christian temporal schemes than is often acknowledged.