John Greville Agard Pocock (; born 7 March 1924) is a New Zealand historian of political thought. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period (mostly in Europe, Britain, and America), his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse. Born in England, Pocock spent most of his early life in New Zealand. He moved to the United States in 1966, where since 1975 he has been a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Early life and career Pocock was born in London on 7 March 1924, but in 1927 moved with his family to New Zealand where his father, Greville Pocock, was appointed professor of Classics at Canterbury College. He later moved to Cambridge, earning his PhD in 1952 under the tutelage of Herbert Butterfield. He returned to New Zealand to teach at Canterbury University College from 1946 to 1948, and to lecture at the University of Otago from 1953 to 1955. In 1959, he established and chaired the Department of Political Science at the University of Canterbury. He moved to the US in 1966, where he became the William Eliot Smith professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1975 Pocock assumed his present position at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. he holds the position of the Harry C. Black Emeritus Professor of History. His first book, entitled The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law examined the workings and origins of 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 how that edifice later came to be subverted by scholars of the middle to late seventeenth century. Some of this work has since been revised. Later work By the 1970s Pocock had changed his focus from how lawyers understood the evolution of law to how philosophers and theologians did. 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.