James Harrington was the most significant figure within the civic-republican tradition between Machiavelli in the sixteenth century and Rousseau in the eighteenth century. It was not by accident, after all, that Montesquieu singled out Harrington as a philosophical “legislator” uniquely driven by his passion for “the republic of England” (The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 29, chap. 19). Has he gotten his rightful due within the canon of Western political thought? Political theorists and intellectual historians should have a much better idea of how to answer this question on the basis of Rachel Hammersley's thoughtful and ambitious survey of Harrington's ideas and legacy.
Hammersley begins her book with a helpful sketch of all the very different Harringtons that have emerged between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. As the author lays out with terrific clarity and care, these divergent characterizations of Harrington have generated a series of important interpretive debates. Was Harrington the first historical materialist, as some commentators have claimed? Did he, along with John Milton, Henry Neville and Algernon Sydney, compose a tradition of English “classical republicanism”? Or owing to his debt to Machiavelli and Hobbes, was his republicanism (as Paul Rahe, for instance, has maintained) more modern in inspiration than ancient? Indeed, did he place sufficient emphasis on the idea of civic virtue to count as republican at all? The nineteenth century may have neglected Harrington, but there's been no neglect among theorists and historians of political thought over the course of the last 75 years. The image of Harrington that has assumed the most authority during this period has been the one instilled by J. G. A. Pocock; but Pocock's interpretation has drawn capable critics and challengers. By giving as much attention to Harrington's life as to his texts, Hammersley aspires to arrive at a fuller picture of the scope and originality of Harrington's contribution than would be available if one confined oneself solely to “the republican paradigm.”
One of the strange aspects of the Harrington story is that while he established himself in the history of political thought as one of the seventeenth century's leading theoretical champions of republican institutions, Harrington was personally friendly with Charles I, the monarch whose defeat and execution turned England into a republic during the decade (the 1650s) when Harrington wrote all his political works. Parliament appointed Harrington as gentleman of the bedchamber in service to Charles I when Parliament assumed responsibility for the captive king in 1647. The two of them hit it off. Hammersley captures the nature of the relationship by quoting biographical accounts by John Toland (“[Harrington] had the good luck to grow very acceptable to the King, who much convers'd with him about Books and Foren Countreys”), Anthony Wood (“His Majesty lov'd his company, and, finding him to be an ingenious Man, chose rather to converse with him than with others of his Chamber: They had often discourses concerning Government”) and John Aubrey (“Mr. Harington passionately loved his majesty”) (57). However, both Wood and Aubrey report that the king balked “when they happen'd to talk of a Commonwealth,” refusing “to indure it.” The regicide in 1649 hit Harrington hard; yet his affection for Charles didn't deter him from publishing, seven years later, a statement of republican principles of lasting significance. Indeed, Hammersley quotes a royalist's angry accusation that Harrington had betrayed his friendship with “the blessed martyr Charles” by composing a book like Oceana (61–62, 152–53).
No less intriguing is the issue of Harrington's veiled and rather tense relation with Oliver Cromwell. A legend disseminated by Toland has it that Harrington had to get Cromwell's daughter to intercede with her father in order to secure permission for Oceana to be published (68, 122). The extent to which the book was part of a movement of republican resistance to Cromwell's Protectorate is still debated by scholars. The restored monarchy arrested Harrington in 1661 on suspicion of being an anti-royalist subversive, and in his responses to interrogators, he claimed that he had written Oceana in order to educate Cromwell about the nature of a commonwealth (identified by Harrington with popular sovereignty), referred to Cromwell as “a Usurper” and asserted that the book proved the Cromwellian regime not to be the commonwealth it took itself to be (68, 82).
Hammersley's own position in regard to debates concerning Harrington's republicanism is that while he was unquestionably committed to the theoretical superiority of popular government, his republicanism was capacious enough to encompass varieties of commonwealth that incorporate aspects of monarchy. Moreover, Hammersley suggests that this was in no small measure owing to Harrington's biographical connections with the Stuarts (both Charles I and Charles's nephew, Charles Louis). She calls him “a pluralist rather than an exclusivist republican” (66, 92, 175n38, 266), and she advocates in a persuasive and balanced way for this view. Another crucial aspect of the argument is that it was redundant for Harrington to decide the role of monarchy on a normative basis, since Harrington's proto-Marxism (his theory that the character of the political “superstructure” follows ineluctably from its economic foundation) dictated that this question has to be decided ultimately by the historical rise of new constellations of dominant property relations (12–15, 84–85, 97–99).
Rachel Hammersley has given us a well-crafted, meticulously researched and beautifully readable study of an important thinker. Her intellectual biography will be an essential resource for all students of republican political thought.
