Harrington, James(1611–1677)
The English political philosopher and publicist James Harrington was the eldest son of Sir Sapcote Harrington, of Rand, Lincolnshire. As such, he belonged to a junior branch of a family that had been prominent from the days of Richard I. An erudite man, Harrington must have acquired his great knowledge of languages, literature, and history largely independently, since he spent only two or three years at Oxford and in the Middle Temple and took no degree. During the 1630s he traveled extensively on the Continent and served in an English volunteer regiment in the forces of one of the palatine electors. From these experiences, and especially from a visit to Venice, he gathered much of the data that later formed the raw material for his political theory.
When civil war broke out in England, Harrington took a neutral position, despite his republican sympathies, because of his personal regard for the king, and at one point attempted the role of mediator between royal and parliamentary interests. But after Charles I's execution in 1649 he devoted himself to the construction of a republican political theory, which culminated in 1656 in the publication of his major work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, a blueprint for a perfect republic.
He was imprisoned by Charles II in 1661 on a false charge of treason. His mind became deranged while he was in prison, and he never fully recovered his faculties after his release. He died at his Westminster home in 1677.
Although Oceana has the form of a utopia, Harrington stands squarely in the British empiricist tradition. Even Niccolò Machiavelli, whom he admired as "the only Polititian of later Ages," he criticized for violating the canons of empiricism by using such concepts as "virtue" and "corruption," which Harrington held to be meaningless as analytical tools.
Harrington's own concepts are sociological, rather than psychological or ethical. A stable governmental system always represents the dominant property-owning groups of a society. Where political and economic power are held by the same hands, and a single person controls three-fourths of all the property, the political system will be an absolute monarchy. If a few hold three-fourths of the property, it will be a mixed monarchy. If property is so dispersed that no monopoly vests in a single social interest, the system will be a republic, or "common-wealth."
Harrington made no moral ranking of the forms of government. Words such as tyranny, oligarchy, anarchy he used descriptively rather than evaluatively, to signify unstable governmental forms that do not match their foundations, those in which power is held incommensurately to the distribution of property. The theoretical question that preoccupied him was stability, and the chief cause of revolution and civil war he identified as an incongruence between social balance and form of government. Conflict he viewed as a mechanism for bringing the two into close proportion. He was not an economic determinist, however, for he thought it just as possible to "frame the foundation unto the Government" as the reverse.
Like Machiavelli, Harrington preferred the republican system to all others. He wrote of "that Reason which is the interest of mankind, or of the whole," as "a Law of Nature," and described "the publick interest of a commonwealth" as "nearest that of mankind." Since he espoused a radically hedonic view of human motivation, this must mean he preferred republics because in them the things men enjoy are more widely distributed than in systems with a narrower property base. Not absolute equality but a middle-class order is implied, however. For "leveling" impedes economic growth and the social accumulation of the riches humankind desire.
More sanguine than Machiavelli, Harrington thought it possible to create a perfectly stable and unchanging republic. It could be maintained by an "equal Agrarian" law, fixing forever a middle-class distribution of property, and by arranging a suitable balance of interests in the organization of the government through such devices as separation of powers, division of the legislature, and rotation in office.
Empiricism; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Social and Political Philosophy.
Bibliography
Primary Works
James Harrington's Oceana. Edited by S. B. Liljegren. Heidelberg: Winter, 1924.
The Political Works of James Harrington. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Secondary Works
Blitzer, Charles. An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960.
Downs, Michael. James Harrington. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Fink, Zera S. The Classical Republicans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1945.
Fukuda, Arihiro. Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Russell-Smith, H. F. Harrington and His Oceana. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1914.
Tolan, John. The Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works. 4th ed. London: 1771.
Wershofen, Christian. James Harrington und sein Wunschbild vom germanischen Staate. Bonn, 1935.
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