[4] He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Canterbury College before returning to England to study at the University of Cambridge, earning his PhD in 1952 under the tutelage of Herbert Butterfield.
The Machiavellian Moment (1975), a widely acclaimed volume, 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.
Again, not all historians accept Pocock's account, but leading scholars of early modern republicanism show its influence – especially in their characterisation of political theorist James Harrington (1611–1677) as a salient historical actor.
[9] The first two volumes of Pocock's six-volume magnum opus on Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion, won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999.
[10] Hereafter for the Cambridge School and its adherents, the then-reigning method of textual study, that of engaging a vaunted 'canon' of previously pronounced "major" political works in a typically anachronistic and disjointed fashion, simply would not do.
Defined as "idioms, rhetorics, specialised vocabularies and grammars" considered as "a single though multiplex community of discourse",[11] languages are uncovered (or discovered) in texts by historians who subsequently "learn" them in due course.
In a new article in January 2019, Pocock answered parts of the criticism against the contextualism of the "Cambridge School": "The beginnings of the ‘global’ critique are well known and may as well be accepted as common ground.
First, he urged historians of the British Isles to move away from histories of the Three Kingdoms (Scotland, Ireland, England) as separate entities,[16] and he called for studies implementing a bringing-together or conflation of the national narratives into truly integrated enterprises.
[19] According to Pocock, in the history of Irish Protestant parishes, specters of a previously "hard-core" Reformed Christianity had either contributed to rebellions or spurred support for the state.
Pocock pointed out that "to see this as key to the journey of Northern Protestants from rebellion towards loyalism is to say that they have a history of their own, unshared with others; but it has become the aim of republican nationalism to deny them such autonomy."
Pocock concludes that the issue of New Zealand's sovereignty must be an ongoing shared experience, a perpetual debate leading to several ad hoc agreements if necessary, to which the Māori and Pākehā need to accustom themselves permanently.
In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Pocock was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the history of political thought.