H arrington, J ames

Abstract

James Harrington (1611–77) is best known as the author of the most substantial work of republican political theory to emerge from the English Revolution of 1640–60: The commonwealth of Oceana (1656), in which the land of Oceana is a thinly veiled version of England. Oceana is a difficult work to categorize and interpret with certainty, as Harrington chose to convey his theoretical arguments through generic features familiar from utopian literature and romance – a poetic quality which reflects his interest in verse, and in particular Virgil, whom he translated – and his style is syntactically complex. He was also the author of a substantial number of shorter, more straightforward works on political issues, several of which were not published until the landmark edition of Harrington's works produced by the republican and deist John Toland in 1700. Much of our knowledge of Harrington's life comes from Toland, who seeks to emphasize Harrington's radicalism, as well as from the contemporary biographical accounts of Anthony a Wood and John Aubrey, who describes himself as an ‘old friend’ of Harrington. Since J. G. A. Pocock's 1977 edition of the political works and his categorization of Harrington as a Machiavellian classical republican, the meaning and intention of Oceana have been to the fore in debates about republicanism and liberty in the seventeenth century. There has been a tendency more recently to assert Harrington's debt rather to the anti‐classical political and natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Rahe 1994; Scott 2000; 2004).