Reviews for Pride and solace

The average rating for Pride and solace based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-11 00:00:00 Rob Stein I read only the first essay in this volume, in which Pocock lays out his approach toward developing a proper "historical" understanding of "political" language. Pocock also discusses Quentin Skinner's more technical take on the matter (as influenced by the philosophy of Austin, Wittgenstein, et al.), yet seems at a further remove from it. While Pocock is not necessarily uninterested in or ignorant of the "hard" questions posed by the philosophers of language, he emphasizes that such an understanding of texts in their proper contexts emerges primarily from one's own close readings thereof (which of course Skinner does as well, albeit in a far more rigorous manner, in his short article "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts"). Part of the essay consists of a spirited defense of this "texts and context" method, which represented a major advance over the "Great Books" approach (of Leo Strauss et al.) to doing intellectual history.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-29 00:00:00 Doug Lott There's simply no doubt that this book is incredibly important. In graduate school, I was assigned it by three separate professors, in two different institutions. So why the low rating? It's an excruciating read: pretentious, tedious, turgid. Pocock certainly has a knack for marketing a banality as a profundity. After all, this is the guy who managed to convince much of the modern academy that Harrington was worth listening to, and that Jefferson's interest in him wasn't just another eccentricity. I urge you no to fall for that. Though I do admit that I have kept a copy of this book on my night stand for more than fifteen years. I pick it up when I can't sleep. Works almost everytime.