James Harrington

The English political theorist James Harrington (1611-1677) is best known for "The Commonwealth of Oceana, " a utopian treatise which advocates the establishment of an aristocratic republic.

The eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington, James Harrington was born into an old and extremely wellconnected family. After showing much academic promise as a child, he entered Trinity College, Oxford. Upon the death of his father, he left Oxford without taking a degree and began a tour of the Continent.

Harrington became a frequent visitor at The Hague and, after meeting the Prince of Orange, was introduced to the Elector and Electress Palatine. He accompanied the elector on at least one state visit to Denmark. His discretion so impressed the elector that Harrington was later commissioned to look after his affairs at the court of his brother-in-law, Charles I. Before returning to England, Harrington passed from Holland, through France, into Italy. Venice greatly interested him, and he proved a keen observer of the Venetian republican government, as his later works demonstrated.

Upon returning to England, Harrington sought to retire from court life and devote his time to study, but in 1638-1639 was co-opted by Charles as a member of his privy chamber. He then accompanied the King in the First Bishops' War against the Scots, but this appears to have been the extent of his active involvement in the events precipitated by that unsuccessful campaign. He does not seem to have taken part in the Short or Long Parliament, nor does he seem to have played a role in the Second Bishops' War or in the civil wars which ensued.

After Charles's defeat Harrington was named as one of the King's attendants. Although he was not in sympathy with the excesses of monarchy, he apparently got along very well with the King and is reported to have been with Charles at the time of his execution in 1649.

Harrington then turned his attention to the problem of choosing the best of all possible governments for England and began work on The Commonwealth of Oceana. He proposed a society in which all men of property would have a share; property was to be balanced by laws which limited the extent of individual wealth. A senate (drawn from historical examples) was to be elected by all men of property and was to propose laws. Once the laws had been ratified by the people, they were to be executed by an elected magistracy. All officials were to serve for limited terms to ensure the maximum participation on the part of the citizens of the Commonwealth. A community of interest served to hold the society together. Harrington's work reflected conditions in England, but in a sense the reflection was all too clear. "Olphaus Megaletor" was so obviously Oliver Cromwell that the government seized his manuscript. Only with the greatest difficulty did Harrington succeed in convincing Cromwell of his good intentions, but his work was restored to him and finally published in 1656.

Once in print, the work was violently attacked by monarchists and extreme republicans alike. These attacks led Harrington to pen a defense called The Prerogative of Popular Government, to abridge his work for a wider audience under the title The Art of Law Giving, and to further develop his views in a series of essays which were printed in 1659, the last year of the Commonwealth.

With the Restoration, Harrington retired from public life but at the end of 1661 was arrested as a traitor and thrown into the Tower. There appears to have been no basis for the accusations made against him, but Charles Il's ministers evidently felt that his writings made him a dangerous foe of monarchical government. Transferred to a jail in Plymouth, he suffered from disease and from mistreatment at the hands of a prison physician, and he ultimately became insane. His release soon followed, but Harrington never recovered the full use of his faculties, nor did his health improve significantly. A late (and unhappy) marriage was followed by the onset of the gout and palsy; he died of a stroke on Sept. 11, 1677.

Further Reading

The Commonwealth of Oceana is the only work of Harrington's readily available. Henry Morley includes it in his Ideal Commonwealths (1893; 6th ed. 1968) and appends a short sketch of Harrington's life. See also Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (1960).

(1611-77) Political theorist, active in the Interregnum (the interval between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration of Charles II). Harrington was convinced of the need to create a republican settlement, reflecting the distribution of property and thus establishing political stability in England. He set out his argument at length in Oceana (1656), drawing on classical sources and his knowledge of contemporary republican forms, and incorporating aspects of Machiavelli's thought. He advocated a complicated mixed constitution in which each ‘class’ of citizens was allocated a role appropriate to its capacity and property. He adopted the idea of a citizen army and made elaborate stipulations about its formation and training. The complexity of his proposals, and the level of detail he provided, invited both mockery and incomprehension, and he tried to present his central ideas in simpler form in response.

— Andrew Reeve

Harrington, James (1611-77). Political philosopher. His Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), though dedicated to Cromwell, implicitly censured the Protectorate. Its central doctrine was that the distribution of property in a state determined its form of government. Where one ruler disposes of all the land, absolute monarchy results; where an aristocracy holds most of it, mixed monarchy is the natural form; but where property is widely distributed, only a republic can provide stable government.

Harrington, James, 1611–77, English political writer. His Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) pictured a utopian society in which political authority rested entirely with the landed gentry. Harrington advocated definite agrarian reforms, however, in order to achieve a greater equality of power. He sought to abolish primogeniture and to limit the amount of land an individual could hold. He also advocated division of the powers of government, a written constitution, and the principle of rotation in office. Penn's government in Pennsylvania is said to owe much to the Oceana. Harrington's ideas can be seen in the doctrines of the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

Bibliography

See studies by C. Blitzer (1960, repr. 1970) and H. F. Russell-Smith (1971).

Harrington, James (1611–1677), English political theorist. James Harrington was born at Upton, Northamptonshire, the eldest son of Sir Sapcote Harrington and his first wife Jane (née Samuel). Most of our knowledge about Harrington's life comes from three seventeenth-century sources: John Aubrey's Brief Lives, Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses, and John Toland's "Life of James Harrington," which served as an introduction to his edition of Harrington's works. Since Wood drew on Aubrey, and Toland drew on Wood, there is some overlap between these three sources.

Harrington entered Trinity College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner in 1629 but did not take his degree. Instead he traveled extensively on the Continent. There is little evidence about Harrington's involvement during the first Civil War (1642–1646), though Wood claims that he sided with the Presbyterians and tried, unsuccessfully, to win a seat in Parliament. In May 1647, however, he was appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I, who was being held at Holdenby House. The ambiguity of Harrington's position—employed by Parliament to serve the king—perhaps explains the ambiguity of his political views, particularly his attitude toward the king. Despite the republican tone of Harrington's works, it was said that he got on well with Charles and that the latter's execution, on 30 January 1649, affected him profoundly.

Harrington's major work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), was written and published under the Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell. The work was dedicated to Cromwell, but the sincerity of that dedication is questionable. The work can be divided into two main parts: "The Preliminaries," in which Harrington set out his political theory, and "The Model of the Commonwealth," in which that theory was applied in the context of Oceana (England). The first part of the preliminaries deals with what Harrington called "Ancient Prudence"—the politics of the ancient world or "the [government] of laws, and not of men." The second part concerns "Modern Prudence"—the politics of the period since the fall of the Roman Empire, or "the [government] of men, and not of laws." The aim of the work as a whole was to show how to bring about a return to "Ancient Prudence" in the modern world. On the basis of his theory of the economic underpinnings of political power, Harrington argued that the time was ripe for such a revival in England.

"The Model of the Commonwealth" consists of a series of "orders" by which the new regime was to be established. At the national level Harrington advocated a variation on the conventional mixed system of government, with the magistrate (the one) executing the laws, the senate (the few) debating the laws, and the popular assembly (the many) voting on the laws. The system also involved rotation of office, a complex balloting process based on the Venetian model, and a network of assemblies running from the parish to the national level to ensure that the whole country would be governed effectively.

Harrington's subsequent works are less well-known than Oceana. They were aimed either at responding to critics of that work or at restating the theory presented there. But Harrington's ideas were of practical as well as theoretical interest. In July 1659 a petition was submitted to Parliament which proposed that certain of Harrington's ideas be adopted there. And in the autumn and winter of 1659–1660 Harrington and his friends formed the Rota Club, which met at Miles's Coffee House in New Palace Yard, Westminster. There Harrington's ideas were discussed and his system of balloting practiced. At the Restoration, the ambiguity of Harrington's position again brought him under scrutiny. He was arrested, interrogated, and finally sent to the Tower, later being transferred elsewhere. Though eventually released, his mind had been affected by his imprisonment, and he did not fully recover before his death in 1677.

Harrington's ideas continued to be influential after his death. During the eighteenth century they had an impact on such diverse figures as Thomas Gordon, David Hume, and Thomas Spence. Moreover, through the influence of men like Thomas Hollis, Harrington's works also found their way to America, where they influenced the revolutionary generation, and to France, where a model constitution based on Oceana appeared in 1792 and translations of Harrington's works in 1795. Harrington seems to have faded from view during the nineteenth century, but he became popular again in the twentieth century through the uses made of his works by R. H. Tawney in the debate over the rise of the gentry and by Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock in their accounts of eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen and neo-Harringtonians.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Aubrey, John. Brief Lives: A Modern English Version. Edited by Richard Barber. Woodbridge, U.K., 1982.

Harrington, James. The Political Works of James Harrington. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1977. Pocock's introduction provides further details concerning the sources on Harrington's life and works, as well as providing the most detailed recent account.

Toland, John. "The Life of James Harrington." In The Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works. Edited by John Toland. London, 1700. Reprinted in James Harrington and the Notion of a Commonwealth. Edited by Luc Borot. Collection "Astraea," 6. Montpellier, France, 1998.

Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford. Edited by P. Bliss. 4 vols. London, 1967.

Secondary Sources

Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, 1975.

Robbins, Caroline. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies. Cambridge, Mass., 1959.

Russell Smith, H. F. Harrington and His Oceana: A Study of a Seventeenth-Century Utopia and Its Influence on America. Cambridge, U.K., 1914. Good on Harrington's posthumous influence in America and France.

Worden, Blair. "James Harrington and 'The Commonwealth of Oceana,' 1650" and "Harrington's 'Oceana': Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660." In Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776. Edited by David Wootton. Stanford, 1994.

—RACHEL HAMMERSLEY