The Commonwealth of Oceana
Encyclopedia
Lord Protector
Lord Protector is a title used in British constitutional law for certain heads of state at different periods of history. It is also a particular title for the British Heads of State in respect to the established church...
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....
(1599–1658). It was eventually published, with a dedication to Cromwell.
Harrington's magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
, Oceana is an exposition on an ideal constitution, designed to allow for the existence of a utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n republic
Republic
A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, have supreme control over the government and where offices of state are elected or chosen by elected people. In modern times, a common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of...
. Oceana was read contemporaneously as a metaphor for interregnum England, with its beneficent lawgiver Olphaus Megaletor representing Cromwell. The details of this ideal governing document are set out, from the rights of the state to the salaries of low officials. Its strategies were not implemented at the time.
The first constituent in Harrington's theoretical argument states that the determining element of power in a state is property, particularly property in land. The second is that the executive power ought not to be vested for any considerable time in the same man, men, or class of men. In accordance with the first of these, Harrington recommends an agrarian law, limiting holdings of land to the amount yielding a revenue of £3000, and consequently insisting on particular modes of distributing landed property. As a practical issue of the second he lays down the rule of rotation by ballot. A third part of the executive or senate
Senate
A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a legislature or parliament. There have been many such bodies in history, since senate means the assembly of the eldest and wiser members of the society and ruling class...
are voted out by ballot every year, and may not be elected again for three years. Harrington explains very carefully how the state and its governing parts are to be constituted by his scheme.
Publication
The Commonwealth of Oceana was published in two first editions, the "Pakeman" and the "Chapman" (first names Daniel and Livewell, respectively) by the London printer John StreaterJohn Streater
John Streater was an English soldier, political writer and printer. An opponent of Oliver Cromwell, Streater was a "key republican critic of the regime" He was a leading example of the “commonwealthmen”, one division among the English republicans of the period, along with James Harrington, Edmund...
, between September and November, 1656. Their contents are nearly identical. The Chapman edition was listed in the Stationers' Register of Sept. 19, and was first advertised during the week of Nov. 6 in the serial Mercurius Politicus, a "quasi-official" organ of the commonwealth. The first edition of the book was seized while at the printer and taken to Whitehall
Whitehall
Whitehall is a road in Westminster, in London, England. It is the main artery running north from Parliament Square, towards Charing Cross at the southern end of Trafalgar Square...
. Harrington appealed to Elizabeth Claypole
Elizabeth Claypole
Elizabeth Claypole ,also Cleypole and Claypoole second daughter of Oliver Cromwell and Elizabeth, she married John Claypole in 1646 and is said to have interceded for royalist prisoners. After Cromwell created a peerage for her husband, she was known as Lady Claypole...
, Cromwell's favourite daughter; she agreed to intervene with the Lord Protector. The book went on to be published, was widely read and attacked by Henry Ferne
Henry Ferne
-Life:Ferne was admitted to St Mary Hall, Oxford, in 1618, and to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1620. He graduated B.A. in 1623 and was elected fellow in 1624. He was awarded a D.D. at Cambridge in 1642...
, later Bishop of Chester
Bishop of Chester
The Bishop of Chester is the Ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Chester in the Province of York.The diocese expands across most of the historic county boundaries of Cheshire, including the Wirral Peninsula and has its see in the City of Chester where the seat is located at the Cathedral...
, and by Matthew Wren
Matthew Wren
"Matthew Wren" is also a British actor who appeared in BBC children's show Trapped!.Matthew Wren was an influential English clergyman and scholar.-Life:...
. In 1659 an abridged version in three volumes, entitled The Art of Lawgiving was published.
Harrington's first editor was John Toland
John Toland
John Toland was a rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment...
(1670-1722), who in 1700 published The Oceana and other Works of James Harrington, with an Account of his Life. It was first reprinted in Dublin in 1737 and 1758 in a super-edition (as it were), containing a version of Henry Neville
Henry Neville (writer)
Henry Neville was an English author and satirist, best remembered for his tale of shipwreck and dystopia, The Isle of Pines published in 1668.-Life:...
's Plato Redivivus and an appendix of miscellaneous Harrington works compiled by the Rev. Thomas Birch
Thomas Birch
Thomas Birch was an English historian.-Life:He was the son of Joseph Birch, a coffee-mill maker, and was born at Clerkenwell....
(1705-1766). This same appeared in London in 1747 and again in 1771.
Oceana was reprinted in [Henry] Morley's Universal Library in 1883; S.B. Liljegren reissued a fastidiously prepared Pakeman edition in 1924. Much of the remaining Harrington canon consists of papers, pamphlets, aphorisms, even treatises, in steadfast defence of the controversial tract.
If today's reader encounters difficulty ingesting Oceana, it is immediately understandable. Harrington's prose is marred by what his modern editor, J. G. A. Pocock, described as an undisciplined work habit and a conspicuous "lack of sophistication." He "wrote hastily, in a baroque and periodic style in which he more than once lost his way," thereby becoming "...productive of confusion." He certainly never attained the level of "a great literary stylist."
Further reading
- Pocock, J.G.A., ed. The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge: 1992). these two works only with a slimmed down introduction.
- Sharp, R.A. "The Manuscript Versions of Harrington's Oceana," Historical Journal 16,2(1973), 227-39.
- Worden, Blair. "James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656" and "Harrington's Oceana: origins and aftermath, 1651-1660," in David Wootton, ed. Republicanism, liberty, and commercial society, 1649-1776 (Stanford: 1994).
- James Harrington page: Further Reading.
- The Work of J.G.A. Pocock: Harrington section.