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James Harrington’s prescription for healing and settling
Over the last half century, interpretations of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of
Oceana (1656) have diverged wildly. In 1945, in a pioneering work by Zera Fink,
Tawney’s analyst of contemporary economic change became a `classical republican’.
Building upon this interpretation, John Pocock made Harrington `England’s premier civic
humanist’, and the author of a `Machiavellian meditation upon feudalism.’. Subsequently
Harrington’s classical republicanism has been depicted as Platonic, Aristotelian, neo-
Roman, `Virgilianized’, Machiavellian, and Polybian. For others he was a Utopian, a
Stoic, a natural philosopher, a disciple of Hobbes, and the author of a civic religion.Yet
what most of these interpretations underestimate is Harrington’s own spectacular
intellectual and political independence. It is impossible to generalize about English
republicanism from Oceana because that text is untypical of the genre in almost every
way.
We may start with personal biography. It was Marchamont Nedham who notoriously
preceded his career as a republican polemicist with editorship of a royalist newspaper. On
this basis Nedham has been vilified as a mercenary turncoat, a judgement which, while
containing an element of truth, is much less than the whole truth. Either way, no one
looks at James Harrington in a similar light. Yet according to John Toland it was
Harrington, not Nedham, who during the later 1640s served Charles I personally with
`untainted fidelity’. It was Harrington who `vindicated…his Majesty’s Arguments against
the Parliament at Newport and…accompany’d him on the Scaffold’. According to
Aubrey, too, Harrington `was on the scaffold with the King when he was beheaded; and I
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Convention