James Harrington

Little compares to the seventeenth-century English achievement in political thought, as in other genres of writing. Even within this context the stature of James Harrington is exalted. Like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, he aspired successfully to elevate polemic to the status of philosophy, extracting from the cure for a malady specific to one time and place universal principles of nature. Notwithstanding its baroque complexities of content, form and style, his The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) attracted immediate attention, resulting in a flurry of debate, in print, in parliament and in coffee houses. It had an enduring subsequent influence in early modern England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and North America. Thereafter it has enjoyed an intermittent starring role in twentieth-century historiographies concerning economic, especially Marxist, materialism; utopianism; the so-called ‘gentry controversy’; and republicanism. Over the last seventy years the latter has been a particularly rich, diverse and contentious

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