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James Harrington An Intellectual
Biography
Rachel
Hammersley
Oxford:
University Press, 2019 Hardcover.
xvii+315 p. ISBN 978-0198809852. £70
Reviewed by Warren Chernaik King’s College London
James Harrington, the
author of The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), is a very odd, puzzling
figure, a subject of controversy in his lifetime and posthumously, and a book
investigating his writings in their historical context and in the history of
political theory should be highly interesting and useful. Though generally
recognised as a key figure among the classical republicans of the Early Modern
period, Harrington differed from all his fellow republicans in many ways. Rather
than providing a model or template for the development of the ideology of
republicanism in his time and afterwards, as such influential scholars as John
Pocock have argued, Harrington is at best a ‘minority voice’, arguing an
independent, idiosyncratic position.(1) Harrington’s political works were all
written during a very short period, in two concentrated bursts: The
Commonwealth of Oceana was published in 1656, two years after Oliver
Cromwell had been become Lord Protector, and followed by a sudden outpouring of
pamphlets in 1659 (Hammersley lists nineteen in her index), in the period of
uncertainty after Cromwell’s death. The Commonwealth of Oceana, his
major work, is not a political tract, but a utopian romance, an allegorical roman
à clef, in which, transparently, Oceana is England, Marpesia is Scotland,
Panopea is Ireland, and Olpheus Megaletor, Lord Archon, is Oliver Cromwell.
Clothed within this fiction is a detailed constitutional settlement, applicable
to England in the 1650s, which is intended to serve as a permanent model for an
‘immortal commonwealth’, fortified against vicissitude. Along with Hobbes’s Leviathan,
written five years earlier—and the relationship between Hobbes and Harrington
is complex—The Commonwealth of Oceana is one of the most important works
of political theory of the 17th century, providing ‘a system of politics’ or ‘Political
Principles’ applicable beyond the immediate circumstances that prompted the
work. Though Hammersley at
times suggests that Harrington cannot be called a classical republican, or a
republican of any sort, it is clear that he considered ‘ancient prudence’, as
‘unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans’, until ‘the liberty of Rome’
was ‘extinguished’ by Julius Caesar, far superior to ‘those ill features of
government’ prevalent in his own day: ‘An art whereby some man, or some few
men, subject a city or a nation, and rule it according to his or their private
interest …the empire of men and not of laws’ [Commonwealth of Oceana :
8-9]. Like Machiavelli, whom he praises as ‘the only politician of later ages’, the greatest of political theorists, ‘having excelled all others’ [10, 221], Harrington sets forth a series of historical examples, largely drawn from ancient Greece and Rome, as lessons for the present. In opposition to Hobbes and other proponents of one-man rule, he argued that monarchy, as likely to be corrupted into tyranny, was the worst of governments. Harrington differed from other classical republicans of his day in his lack of emphasis on the right of resistance: though the idea of consent is central to his arguments, he never tried to justify the right of the people to overthrow a bad monarch. Like his friend Andrew Marvell, writing at a time when ‘the kingdom old’ had been cast ‘into another mould’, he sought to anatomise the process of revolutionary change and to suggest what, in a time of uncertainty, might follow. Harrington was unusual in his time in his economic determinism: for him, the motivating force in historical change was that ‘Empire follows the Balance of Property’, with the inevitability of a scientific principle. According to his disciple Walter Moyle: ‘The Balance of Dominion changes with the Balance of Property, as the Needle in the Compass shifts its Points just as the great Magnet in the Earth changes its Place’.(2) Harrington’s
principal innovation (other than the idea of a secret ballot) was what he
called an ‘agrarian law’, limiting the accumulation of property, in land or
money, by any individual, abolishing primogeniture and establishing a figure
beyond which accumulation was prohibited. Though ownership of property
(propriety: what belongs to any individual within the society) is central to
Harrington’s thought, he neither advocates the abolition of private property
nor, like Locke, the sacred trinity of ‘life, liberty, and property’, seen as
inalienable rights. Hammersley’s book,
the product of twenty years of research, includes a chapter which clearly sets
forth Harrington’s innovatory doctrine of the balance of property, the material
basis of political power, according to which ‘all government is interest, and
the predominant interest gives the matter or foundation of the government’.(3)
Starting from Aristotle’s conventional distinction between ‘the government of
one man, or of the better sort, or of the whole people, which by their more
learned names are called monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy’ [Oceana :
10], Harrington, as Hammersley shows, goes on to argue that in any government
power must necessarily rest in which of these groups predominates in the
possession of land and material goods. Here and in a chapter on ‘Harrington the
Republican’, Hammersley gives a lucid account of the specific constitutional
proposals set forth in The Commonwealth of Oceana by which ‘an equal
balance’ can be achieved and maintained. Excellent chapters, carefully argued,
explore ‘the limits of Harrington’s republicanism’ [81-96] and—a topic rarely
considered in accounts of Harrington—the philosophical underpinnings of
Harrington’s political writings. Harrington’s writings include many references
to Harvey’s discoveries about the circulation of the blood, which, as
Hammersley shows, provide an insight into his relationship to the New Science
of his day [219-226]. An introductory chapter gives a brief account of the
development of Harrington’s reputation, the ‘complex and contested legacy of
his political thought’ [23], while chapters on ‘Harrington the man’ emphasise
his complex, possibly conflicted position as a republican thinker who deeply
mourned the death of Charles I. Harrington served the King in a number of capacities,
including Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1647-8, and, according to his
biographer and disciple John Toland, ‘He had the good luck to prove very
acceptable to the King, who much convers’d with him about Books and Foren
Countreys’ [57]. In keeping with her desire to give ‘a fresh account of
Harrington’s life and work’ which goes ‘beyond the republican paradigm’ and
does not concentrate excessively either on a single work, The Commonwealth
of Oceana, or on his place in the republican tradition [22], Hammersley
devotes a great deal of attention to Harrington’s less familiar writings, with
particular attention to the pamphlet wars of 1659. I found these chapters,
arranged topically, on the exchanges between Harrington and his
opponents—controversies on politics, religion, history, and philosophy—especially
informative. Though Hammersley has
succeeded admirably in presenting a fresh view of Harrington, bringing out ‘the
complex relationship between his life, his political activities, and his
writings’ [26], there are certain problems implicit in this book’s approach.
There is little attempt to relate either Oceana or the pamphlets of 1659
to the immediate political context which impelled Harrington to write these
works. Two brief pages on ‘Oceana’s Historical and Intellectual Context’
fleetingly mention the Instrument of Government, the proposed constitution of
the Protectorate, but take no stand on Harrington’s attitude towards Cromwell
and the Protectorate. Instead we have a summary of what several 20th-century
critics have said about the work, and a paragraph on whether Harrington can be
associated ‘with the republican movement of the 1650s’ [70]. The excellent
chapter on Harrington and political debate in 1659-60, full of illuminating
detail, would be even better if it tried to explore the implications of a
passage quoted from parliamentary debates: ‘What doth an interregnum signify
but that we are without a government at present’ [231]. Another methodological
problem is implicit in Hammersley’s title. An ‘intellectual biography’
presumably will deal with the intellectual influences on an author,
analytically investigating the formation of his ideas, what he takes from his
predecessors and how he differs from them. Though there are many references to
Machiavelli and even more to Hobbes in Hammersley’s book, most of them are
embedded in references to what other scholars have said, or mention ways in
which, in specific details, Harrington’s position differed from these authors. What
a distinguished intellectual historian like Hammersley could have provided in
this book is a clear account of the trajectory of Harrington’s ideas, with
careful attention paid to such figures as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francis Bacon,
John Selden, Aristotle, Cicero, and Livy. In one chapter,
Hammersley’s attempt to decouple Harrington from the republican tradition,
seeing him in a different light, seems to me seriously misleading. She makes
the valid point that the term ‘democracy’ in the 17th century generally has
negative connotations (as in Dryden’s contemptuous ‘drawn to the dregs of a
Democracy’), and that this is not so in Harrington. But this does not mean that
Harrington should be considered a democratic rather than a republican theorist,
or that he endorses a form of democratic government in his imaginary republic. Hammersley’s
account is useful in calling attention to the sheer number of references to the
term ‘democracy’ in such Harrington treatises as The Art of Law-giving and
The Prerogative of Popular Government as well as Oceana. Harrington
and his disciple Henry Neville frequently use the term to apply to a form of
government in which ‘the chief part of the Soveraign Power, and the exercise of
it, resides in the People’, a
government in which ‘the people have the election of the Senate’, or ‘a meer
popular Council, giving Law unto a King’.
At times Harrington uses ‘Democraticall’ as a synonym for ‘Popular’,
contrasting ‘the Few , or the Natural Aristocracy’ with ‘the Many,
or the Natural Democracy’.(4)
Each of these passages, though differing in detail, derives from the threefold
division into government by a single person, government by the few, and
government by the many. Consistently, Harrington
warns that any state in which ‘the Many’ have predominant or exclusive power is bound to
collapse into self-destructive anarchy: ‘a single Council consisting of the Many, is ever tumultuous, and doth
ill even while it means well’ [Hammersley : 113]. For this reason, his
constitutional proposals, based on the principle of balance or separation of
powers, gives the body of ‘the people’ a very limited voice—basically, a right
to elect members of a popular assembly which itself could only vote yes or no
on proposals submitted to it, without debate. Like Milton, who engaged in
friendly debate with Harrington in The Readie and Easie Way, Harrington combined an
unwavering commitment to the principle of popular sovereignty, the consent of
the governed, with a deep scepticism about the ability of ‘the people’ to act
rationally. Where Milton, like a number of other republican theorists, emphasised
the role of virtuous citizens in a commonwealth, Harrington took a different
approach. Convinced, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, that self-interest governed
most human behaviour—‘a man doth not look upon reason as it is right or wrong
in itself, but as it makes for him or against him’—Harrington looked for ways
to limit the human propensity to pursue one’s own advantage at the expense of
others. Harrington’s constitutional
proposals assume that no one is to be trusted, the one, the few, or the many: ‘Good
orders make bad men good, and bad orders make good men bad’. ‘Give us good men and
they will make us good laws’ is the maxim of a demagogue, and … exceeding
fallible. But ‘give us good orders, and they will make us good men’ is the
maxim of a legislator.(5) (1) Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles :
Republican Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: University Press, 2007 :
61. See J.G.A. Pocock, The
Machiavellian Moment. Princeton: University Press, 1975; and James
Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics,
ed. J.G.A. Pocock. Cambridge: University Press, 1992. (2) Walter Moyle, An Essay Upon the
Constitution of the Roman Government (1726), in Hammersley : 97-98. On
Harrington’s economic determinism, his conception of ‘economic change as a
blind impersonal force’ bringing about historical change, see Christopher Hill,
‘James Harrington and the People’, in Puritanism and Revolution. London:
Panther Books, 1968 : 301. (4) Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus (1681);
Oceana; Harrington, Aphorisms Political (1659); and The
Prerogative of Popular Government (1657-58), in Hammersley : 112-114. (5) Oceana, ed. Pocock : 22, 64; A System of Politics, 4.
22 : 274. On Harrington and Milton, see the excellent discussion in Scott,
Commonwealth Principles : 181-184.
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