H. R. S. Pocock was a descendant of William Wilmer Pocock, Master of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, who was responsible for the design of Carpenters' Hall.
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Immune to fashionable trends in the history of philosophy and of ideas, he was critical of the concept of paradigms of thought associated with the work of J. G. A. Pocock.
Aristotle, according to J. G. A. Pocock, suggested that ancient Greeks thought that being a citizen was a natural state.
His first book, entitled The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law elucidated the common law mind, showing how thinkers such as the English jurist Edward Coke (1552–1634) built up a historical analysis of British history into an epistemology of law and politics; and then how that edifice later came to be subverted by scholars of the middle to late seventeenth century.
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The Machiavellian Moment (1975), his widely acclaimed magnum opus, showed how Florentines, Englishmen, and Americans had responded to and analysed the destruction of their states and political orders in a succession of crises sweeping through the early modern world.
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In the 1960s and early '70s, he, (introducing "languages" of political thought) along with Quentin Skinner (focusing on authorial intention), and John Dunn (stressing biography), united informally to undertake this approach as the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought.
Together with John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock Skinner has been said to have founded the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought.
The Cambridge School of political thought, led principally by Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Richard Ashcraft, and others, developed in opposition to interpretations such as Strauss's and, to a lesser extent, Macpherson's.