I’m re-reading J.G.A. Pocock for the first time in many years, and it’s surprising to me how obsessed he is with what used to be called, back in the heyday of the Cold War, “psychological man.” Pocock was a historian of early modern political and historical thought. His great subject was civic humanism, and his touchtones were Machiavelli, Savonarola, Harrington, Hume, Gibbon, and so on. His frames were virtue and rights, commerce and property. But the not-so-latent thread of his writing is anxiety, personality, hysteria, lethargy, melancholia, disintegration, and so on. On the page, he presents himself as the Anglo man of remove. But the writing betrays a midcentury, vaguely closeted Freudian who perhaps had done a stint or two, […]