John Pocock's monograph "The Machiavelli Moment" is one of the most authoritative and cited studies in the social sciences of the last fifty years. A prominent representative of the Cambridge school of political thought, Pocock proposed a new concept of the history of Western political philosophy of modern times: the place of the liberal canon from Locke to Smith was taken by the republican tradition. The book describes the history of the republican language of political thought, which includes the writings of Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington, Madison, and Jefferson. The author traces the evolution of this type of political language from the debates of the civic humanists of Renaissance Florence to the polemics of British thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries and discussions about the nature of the new republic in the United States at the end of the 18th century. The key topic of the study is the role of active citizenship and its virtues in the evolution of Western European political thought. Pocock's ideas remain relevant today, especially in Russia, which is experiencing its own “Machiavelli moment”—a time when a young republic is confronted with a crisis of its proclaimed values and institutions.