HARRINGTON, JAMES (1611–1677)

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.

See also Constitutionalism; English Civil War and Interregnum; Political Philosophy.

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