James Harrington (1611-1677) was a pioneer in applying the methods of Machiavelli and other civic humanists to English political society and its landed structure. In the century after his death, his ideas were adapted to become an important ingredient in the vocabulary of both English and American political opposition to the methods of Hanoverian parliamentary monarchy. This work includes all of his prose works on political subjects as well as Oceana, his best-known work. The critical introduction attempts to revalue the evidence concerning Harrington's life and writings, to locate them in the context of Civil War, Commonwealth and Puritan thinking and to trace the development of Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian ideology during subsequent generations.

This work of James Harrington includes all of his prose works on political subjects as well as Oceana.

James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a long-term process of social change which led to the decay of the old political order. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalised presentation of English history up to the victory of the New Model Army, explaining the fall of the monarchy and proposing a republic to replace it. A System of Politics, written after the Restoration, is a scheme of history and political philosophy erected on the foundations of his previous works. Professor Pocock's introduction emphasises Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of events in Harrington's life and a guide to further reading.

James Harrington (1611-1677) was a pioneer in applying the methods of Machiavelli and other civic humanists to English political society and its landed structure. In the century after his death, his ideas were adapted to become an important ingredient in the vocabulary of both English and American political opposition to the methods of Hanoverian parliamentary monarchy. This work includes all of his prose works on political subjects as well as Oceana, his best-known work. The critical introduction attempts to revalue the evidence concerning Harrington's life and writings, to locate them in the context of Civil War, Commonwealth and Puritan thinking and to trace the development of Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian ideology during subsequent generations.

Excerpt from The Political Writings of James Harrington: Representative Selections The choice of the pieces included in this volume was a relatively simple matter. Given the aim of the volume-to present in a limited space the most complete and accurate picture of James Harrington's political thought-the choice was almost automatic. Harrington's Introduction to his Commonwealth of Oceana, which contains the fullest exposition of the fundamentals of his system, was indispensable. Since Harrington's reputation and influence have rested chiefly upon his theory of the political importance of property and of the property-owning classes, it seemed highly desirable to include those portions of the Oceana that are most relevant to this subject, passages which have the added advantage of giving something of the flavor of that unusual work. A slight problem was raised by the necessity of dealing briefly with the complex institutional proposals that form the heart of the Oceana, covering scores of detailed and rather tedious pages. Fortunately, this was a problem that Harrington himself had faced three centuries ago; in order to make his proposals more presentable to his contemporaries, he wrote a brief abstract of the institutions of his "equal commonwealth," entitled The Rota, which exactly meets our needs. Finally, the conciseness and clarity of Harrington's last, posthumously published work, A System of Politics Delineated in Short and Easy Aphorisms, made it ideal for a collection such as this. Once these selections had been made, the problem of arrangement also proved to be quite simple. Since all of Harrington's political writings were produced in the five years from 1656 to 1660, and since his ideas developed not at all during this period, it was unnecessary to be bound by any strictly chronological order. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Despite not being an active participant in the English Civil War, seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington exercised an important influence on the ideas and politics of that crucial period of history. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he sought to explain why civil war had broken out in 1642, to put the case for commonwealth government, and to offer a detailed constitutional blueprint for a new and successful English government. In this intellectual biography of Harrington, Rachel Hammersley sets a fresh analysis of this and Harrington's other writings against the background of his life and the turbulent period in which he lived. In doing so, this study seeks to move beyond the conventional view of Harrington as primarily a republican thinker, offering a broader and more comprehensive account of him which addresses the complexity of his republicanism as well as exploring his contributions to economic, historical, religious, philosophical, and scientific debates; his experimentation with vocabulary and literary form; and the relationship between his life and thought. Harrington is presented as an innovative political thinker, committed to democracy, social mobility, and meritocracy. Ultimately, this broader examination of Harrington's life and work opens a window on political, economic, religious, and scientific issues which serve to complicate understandings of the English Revolution, and sheds fresh light on the relevance of seventeenth-century ideas to the modern world.