John Pocock's Life, Legacy, and Languages of Historical and Political Thought

When I was invited in 2019 to tweet a book a day for a week I had no hesitation as to what my first book would be. John Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was probably the single biggest influence on me as a student, directly affecting the direction my research has taken. For this reason I was thrilled later that year when, just before the publication of my Intellectual Biography of James Harrington, I received one of John Pocock's beautiful handwritten letters expressing his interest in my forthcoming book, which initiated a brief correspondence between us. Following Pocock's death at the age of 99 in December 2023, I was honoured to be invited by John Marshall to contribute to 'John Pocock's Life, Legacy, and Languages of Historical and Political Thought', which was held simultaneously at Johns Hopkins University and online on Tuesday 5th March 2024.

Having initially reassured John Marshall that I relished the challenge of saying something meaningful about 'Pocock's Harrington and the history of republicanism' in less than five minutes, I did subsequently question my initial enthusiasm. The reality of drafting something worthwhile that did not breach the time constraint was tough. It was, though, very illuminating to hear the other speakers perform equally impossible tasks of summarising Pocock's thoughts on a range of topics including the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke in less than five minutes each. Papers were presented by scholars at all levels, from PhD students to Emeritus Professors; and the event closed with three excellent questions by graduate students currently studying at Johns Hopkins. The organisation of this event was largely down to John Marshall (though with a supportive team around him). His vision for the event and his dedication to making it a success were impressive. What follows, provides a taste of what I gained from this ambitious celebration. Anyone who missed the event, and would like access to the recording, can contact John Marshall directly.

What came across more than anything else was John Pocock's phenomenal intelligence and the breadth and depth of his scholarship. Eliga Gould, speaking on behalf of Pocock's students, put it well when he referred to the capaciousness of his work and vision. During the course of his lifetime, Pocock offered groundbreaking insights on a whole host of individual figures while also making significant contributions to broader fields of study. These included the Enlightenment - where he put a persuasive case for thinking in terms of a plurality of Enlightenments rather than a single Enlightenment. He also contributed to the transformation of British History by challenging the dominant Anglocentric emphasis, calling for the inclusion of the histories of Scotland and Ireland, but also Wales, Cornwall, the Channel Islands, America (pre-1776) and, of course, his native New Zealand. Equally important was his stress on the tensions and interplay between metropolitan zones of law and marcher zones of war. In addition, Pocock set the terms for the study of the history of republicanism: emphasising and unpicking the ancient legacy; highlighting the centrality of the conception of time to republican thinking; and prioritising the vocabulary or language of republicanism over institutions.

Despite the breadth, it is possible to identify consistent threads that run throughout Pocock's thought. One was his robust approach to historical research, which - as was noted by David Bromwich (in relation to Burke) and John Marshall - involved reading all the works available by a particular author in order to enter into the thinking of those who interested him. He also adopted a broad approach to sources, consulting manuscripts as well as printed material, treating style as important (David Womersley commented on this in relation to Gibbon), and recognising that political 'sources' could take a variety of forms including literature and - as Anna Roberts noted - even artefacts.

Central among the sources Pocock himself deployed were histories. His first work The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law was a major achievement in the field of historiography. As Colin Kidd explained, it documented ideological uses of the past, treating historical thinking as political thinking. For Kidd this exposed a space between politics and the history of political thought in the form of the history of political argument. Pocock returned to this territory in the magnum opus of his later years, the multi-volume account of the thought of Edward Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion. Both here, and in his works on other individual thinkers, Pocock sought to identify and understand the political and intellectual battles in which those thinkers were engaged.

While The Ancient Constitution and Barbarism and Religion are the works that most obviously treat historical writings as political thought, the preoccupation with history and time also lay at the heart of Pocock's other major work The Machiavellian Moment. In the first place, the conception of time is presented as crucial to republics in that they exist in time and are, therefore, subject to corruption and decay. This was what Pocock meant by the 'Machiavellian Moment'. He argued that Machiavelli was particularly concerned with 'the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time' and explored how this idea played out in the writings of others in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century Britain and America. In adopting this broad chronology, the book also examines the survival - and transformation - of ideas over time. While there is continuity in terms of the central problem being confronted and the vocabulary deployed to address it, the republican language at the heart of the book was adapted to fit different circumstances and Pocock was sensitive to the particular historical contexts that prompted the production of specific texts. The adaptations are especially evident in the case of James Harrington. He drew on Machiavellian ideas to construct an immortal commonwealth - which Machiavelli would have declared an impossibility - and his ideas were in turn deployed by those Pocock labelled 'neo-Harringtonians' in ways directly contrary to Harrington's intentions.

Pocock's intelligence, and the breadth of his scholarship, could make him appear intimidating, yet he tempered this with a deep humanity - and this also came out strongly in the presentations. Again and again, contributors spoke of the personal impact he had had on them and commented on the fact that, while he was challenging, he was also generous, encouraging, and fun (the last being exemplified by the fact that his sons Hugh and Stephen chose to begin their contribution with a song). Eliga Gould spoke of him having a personal and unique relationship with each of his graduate students, but it is clear that his intellectual relationships extended well beyond those who had the special privilege of being taught by him. Indeed, it was striking that one of the older contributors, Orest Ranum, who had been on the committee that appointed Pocock to his position at Johns Hopkins in 1974, described him as a constant teacher - instructing not just students but all those with whom he came into contact. Another Johns Hopkins colleague, Christopher Celenza spoke for many when he described the privilege of being taken seriously by Pocock - even when this meant disagreement. The possibility that polite disagreement could co-exist alongside friendship and respect, was also highlighted by perhaps Pocock's closest intellectual companion, Quentin Skinner, who admitted in his talk that he never succeeded in convincing Pocock on the subject of liberty. He was, then, as Jamie Gianoutsos articulated, not only a careful student of republican vocabulary, but also a model citizen himself.

I hope I have conveyed the fact that this event was deeply moving, instructive, and inspiring. I was, though, left with a slight sense of regret. Skinner recalled that in 1973 Pocock announced that he had a plan for a huge new project. It would explore all of British historical and political thought from Bede to Bertrand Russell. The scale and ambition of such a project reflects the massive breadth of John Pocock's vision and the strength of his drive, but perhaps also explains why it never came to fruition. I don't suppose I was the only person at the event who took a moment to lament this fact. I would have loved to read it.

Entangled Histories of Revolution

We are very conscious today of living in a global world. Thanks to economic, cultural, and military ties our daily lives are deeply entangled with those of others in distant places, most of whom we will never meet, whether individuals like key politicians, groups such as workers in various industries, or international corporations. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the notion of Entangled History is currently popular. Entangled History adopts a trans-cultural perspective and explores the interconnectedness of societies. It starts from the assumption that nations, empires, and civilisations were not formed independently but rather through a process of interaction and global circulation. The revolutions of the late eighteenth century are particularly amenable to this approach. While the French Revolution took place within an existing nation state, its origins, the ideas on which it was grounded, the unfolding of events, and its legacy were all impacted by cross-cultural relationships and exchange. Other revolutions of the period - including the American Revolution - were even more deeply embedded in global networks.

One important mode of cross-cultural interaction during this period was translations - including of earlier radical texts or contemporary revolutionary documents as well as newspaper accounts of the unfolding events. The 'Entangled Histories of Revolution' workshop that took place at King's College London on 4-5 November 2022 sought to explore this mode of entanglement more deeply. The workshop forms part of the Radical Translations project led by Sanja Perovic, Erica Mannucci and Rosa Mucignat, which is exploring the transfer of revolutionary culture between Britain, France and Italy in the period between 1789 and 1815.

Sadly, a combination of threatened train strikes and family circumstances meant that in the end I could not travel down to London as planned, but had to be content with participating remotely on the Saturday alone. Given how stimulating the papers I heard were, I greatly regretted having missed the first day of the workshop. But, necessarily, my comments here focus only on the papers from 5th November.

These papers led me to think about three distinct, but related, themes. First, the idea raised explicitly by Sanja Perovic, of translation as a method of responding to cultural problems. Sanja noted that revolutions, by definition, involve taking new paths and therefore facing uncharted territory. In these circumstances, looking to other times and places could offer helpful models - or to continue the metaphor, maps - for revolutionaries to use; and translations were often the vehicle by which such maps were conveyed.

In my paper I quoted Pierre-François Henry, who translated James Harrington's works during the 1790s, voicing this idea explicitly:

The troubles of the French Revolution resemble so closely those of the English Revolution, that those who wish to determine causes from effects will not do much better than studying the latter to better understand the unfolding of the former. (Pierre-François Henry, ‘Preface’, to Oeuvres Politiques de James Harrington. Paris, L’an III).

Oeuvres Politiques de Jacques Harrington, ed. P.-F. Henry (Paris, L’an III). Image by Rachel Hammersley, reproduced with permission from the copy held at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Similarly, in his paper, Richard Whatmore spoke of a widespread concern in the early nineteenth century to find an alternative to the British mercantile model, and here too the experiences of other countries as reflected through translations were seen as providing a useful source of inspiration and direction.

Translators were also well placed to become mapmakers themselves. In her paper on the French reception of the American Revolution, Carine Lounissi noted that the linguistic skills of French translators gave them privileged access to primary sources, putting them in a strong position to assess and write about the unfolding events in the Americas. More dramatically, several of the speakers provided examples of translators deliberately radicalising particular texts and authors. Sonja Lavaert described how Lucilio (Guilio Cesare) Vanini deliberately reversed the message of anti-Machiavellian texts that he translated, and she also suggested that we might usefully understand the radical clandestine text L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa as offering a radical reading of Thomas Hobbes through the lens of Spinoza and Vanini. Similarly, I showed in my paper how two different readings of Harrington - one centrist and one more democratic - were offered in the translations of the 1790s, and that both countered the more conservative reading of him that was typical in eighteenth-century France.

A second point that emerged from the papers was that translations are collaborative projects. Even single-authored works in a particular language are the work of a team comprising printers, booksellers, and editors who work alongside the author, each contributing directly to the text in different ways. Where translation is involved, the team has to be even wider. Every translation is effectively a co-authored work, with the original author and the translator both fundamental to the message that is conveyed. This is even more true of translation campaigns, such as those led by the Baron d'Holbach in the 1760s and 1770s, or that of the Comte de Mirabeau in the 1780s, which involved an even broader workshop of contributors.

A token advertising Thomas Spence’s periodical Pig’s Meat taken from https://www.marxists.org

Several of the papers spoke about works that were collaborative in a second sense - in that they comprised extracts from a variety of original texts. This was the case with L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa in the early eighteenth century and with radical periodicals like Pig's Meat that appeared in the 1790s. In both cases the drawing together of extracts created a work greater than the sum of its parts. Sonja Lavaert used the term 'combat manifesto' in relation to L'Esprit, a term that is equally applicable to the radical periodicals of the 1790s.

The third theme that spoke to me from the papers was the idea of knowledge itself as a revolutionary force; not least in the sense that keeping people ignorant is a way of keeping them down; whereas informing or educating them about politics provides them with the tools to combat oppression. This point was emphasised by Sonja Lavaert in her discussion of the radical Enlightenment. She quoted Jonathan Israel on d'Holbach's belief that it was impossible to improve human life without 'teaching men the truth'. Moreover, the suggestion was that this should extend to all: 'What greater insult to the human race can there be than to claim reason is reserved for some' while all the rest are not made for knowledge? (Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment. Oxford, 2012, p. 27).

This commitment to educating all people, and encouraging them to think, meant directing works explicitly at ordinary people rather than just at educated elites. Lavaert suggested that there is already some evidence of this with Henri de Boulainvilliers's version of L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa, which presented Spinoza's ideas in a less dry and more accessible language. But it was more pronounced by the 1790s when the Italian translation of that work was produced. This translation, Lavaert explained, was part of a deliberate pedagogical project.

I have demonstrated in a previous blogpost that the audiences at which the republican writings of the mid-seventeenth century were directed expanded during the course of the eighteenth century. As participants at the workshop made clear, this was part of a broader process which was reflected in several shifts during the course of that century.

In the first place there was a linguistic shift. This was not just about a move from Latin to the vernacular, but also from major to minor languages. Mary-Ann Constantine's paper, for example, noted the translation of radical texts into Welsh in the 1790s. As one commentator pointed out, this shift was symbolic as well as practical, indicating the capacity of the target language to receive new concepts and, by implication, a belief that Welsh speakers were capable of engaging with and understanding complex new ideas.

William Linton’s The National: A Library for the People. Frontispiece and contents page reproduced from http://www.hathitrust.org.

Secondly, expanding the audience for key political texts meant making those works and the ideas contained within them available in accessible formats. In part this meant the production of cheap and affordable editions. Equally important, however, was the dissemination of extracts from key texts in cheap periodicals - and even the presentation of key ideas in broadsheets, poems, and ballads. This innovation could also be combined with the first, as was the case with the Welsh-language periodicals produced by dissenting ministers - to which Mary-Ann referred - which were modelled on Thomas Spence's Pig's Meat and offered their audience a mix of educational material, religious fare, and extracts from radical political texts.

As Ian Haywood showed in the final paper of the day, these formats were further developed in the early nineteenth century. Editors like William Strange and William Linton were crucial in this regard, producing cheap publications that anthologised and excerpted relevant texts. In doing so they effectively created a radical canon of political texts; indeed, the subtitle to Linton's periodical The National was 'A Library for the People'.

They also worked to boil down the ideas to their very essence. As Ian noted, Linton's The National included various short extracts including a single sentence from The Ruins of Empire by the French author the Comte de Volney (a key text within the radical canon). Linton was quick to defend his brevity, promising that even the shortest extracts were not mere fillers 'but often the one line may contain as much wisdom as all the rest of the number'.

Volney’s Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (Paris, 1791). Reproduced from http://gallica.bnf.fr. This was a key text in the radical canon, extracts from which regularly appeared in cheap periodicals.

Of course, it was not only the radicals who were keen to 'educate' the masses. As Mary-Ann Constantine suggested, works like Hannah More's Village Politics which, was also translated into Welsh, was intended to serve as a kind of prophylactic against dangerous radical and revolutionary texts.

Translations, translators and even knowledge itself, then, could be revolutionary forces. Perhaps this offers hope in our own deeply entangled world.

Political Engagement: Utopias and Political Texts

In the last few weeks I have engaged in two public-facing events in which I have shared my research with non-academic audiences. Participants at both raised interesting questions and comments prompting me to think more deeply about the topics I am currently researching. In this blog I reflect on what I have learned from this engagement.

The first event was 'The Quest for Utopia', organised by the Liverpool Salon and held at the wonderful Athenaeum in Liverpool's City Centre. The Salon has been hosting public conversations on philosophical, political, and cultural topics on Merseyside for more than seven years, providing valuable opportunities for 'critical discussion'. The event in which I participated (a recording of which can be accessed here) was the first of a series exploring the theme of utopia. In his opening talk Ronnie Hughes, who presents himself as 'an occasional and formerly enthusiastic utopian practitioner', raised the provocation that the term 'utopia' has been misunderstood ever since it was first coined by Thomas More in 1516. More's aim, Ronnie insisted, had not been to create a 'perfect' society, but merely a 'better' one. I developed this point in my own introduction on James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, emphasising that when thinking about improving society we need to follow Harrington in taking human beings as they are rather than proposing plans that require super-human virtue or self-sacrifice. Moreover, given the constant dynamism of human life, deliberately leaving some things for future generations to work on (as Ronnie and his team did with the Granby Four Streets project) provides hope and opportunity for the future.

The Reading Room at the Liverpool Athenaeum. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The emphasis on perfectionism may be one reason why, as participants lamented, utopianism is in short supply today. In our discussion we spent some time thinking about how to rekindle utopianism in the present and future. One obstacle is undoubtedly a pessimistic tendency - 'doom and gloom' as one person put it. It is easy to get so caught up in complaining about how bad things are, that we talk ourselves out of being able to do anything about it. Here too Ronnie had some wise words for us, identifying as a 'utopian moment' the point in his discussions with the Granby Four Streets residents when he told them they could have five more minutes of moaning, but then had to start talking positively about what they wanted. That shift is crucial if we are to have any hope of making things better. I was not the only participant reminded of Gerrard Winstanley and his comment that 'action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing' (Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London and the Armie, London, 1649). The first key to moving forward, then, is to turn from the negative to the positive; and to take action to move from how things have been, to how they could be.

Another important point that arose from our discussions was that scale is crucial. Grand visions can be impressive and inspiring, but they are also difficult to implement, and it can be hard to know where to start. Perhaps, then, instead of thinking big we need to take smaller steps initially to bring about concrete change. This might mean working locally rather than nationally or internationally. The Granby Four Streets project was local, as were the town projects arising out of the Garden City movement of the twentieth century. Such projects might not change the world fundamentally or bring about perfection, but they can and do make a difference to people's lives. Growing up in Milton Keynes, I was conscious that despite it often being the butt of jokes, there were many positive features of my home town (such as an extensive and well-lit cycle network) which I have missed in other places I have lived. Moreover, even small projects can have a big impact. After all, the Granby Four Streets project won the Turner Prize in 2015.

The Liverpool Athenaeum’s copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. Image by Rachel Hammersley and courtesy of the Library of the Liverpool Athenaeum - with particular thanks to Robert Huxley.

This leads to my third point: the importance of utopian thinking being grounded in place. The etymology of utopia means 'no place' and, as Robert Huxley demonstrated in his talk, a lot of utopian thinking of the Renaissance and early modern period was inspired by voyages of exploration that brought Europeans into contact with previously unknown places. But Vanessa Pupavac emphasised in her introduction that utopias work best when they are 'some place' connected to an actual location and its history. Believing, as some early explorers did, that we can impose our utopia or 'civilisation' on others - or, conversely, that we can import the Tahitian dream back to Europe - is a misconception that has repeatedly resulted in misery and disaster. We cannot remake the world divorced from the realities of climate, geography, culture, or human nature. Our utopias, then, must not only be positive and realistic, but also grounded in a particular time and place.

These ideas about how to build a better future remained in my mind as I approached the first meeting of our Experiencing Political Texts reading group, which took place at another wonderful city institution, Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. The aim of this group is to explore the dissemination of political information both today and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinking in particular about how the medium through which political ideas are conveyed can frame, influence - and even distort - the message.

Infographic advertising the Experiencing Political Texts reading group. With thanks to Nifty Fox Creative for the design.

At our initial meeting we talked about where each of us gets our knowledge about politics and current affairs from. There were various responses ranging from traditional media such as print newspapers and journals through to social media such as Twitter. It was also clear that while some of us favour text-based material, others prefer aural forms such as radio and podcasts. Fewer of us seemed to prioritise visual media, but that is also a format that is increasing in popularity - especially among the young.

Participants also commented on the limitations of some of these formats. In social media, headlines are accentuated, yet these do not always provide an accurate indication of the content of the article. Even longer articles may not provide as much depth - particularly on the history behind events - as might be necessary to properly understand them. Social media have been criticised for creating echo chambers, but participants also questioned the extent to which individuals reading conventional media seek out views and opinions different from their own.

This image and the one below are infographics produced by Nifty Fox Creative during the live scribing of our first reading group meeting.

More broadly, participants identified two pressing issues. First, the increasingly blurred line between truth and fiction - which becomes especially worrying when it is applied to the outcome of elections, as has been the case in several countries recently. Secondly, the fact that in many quarters the presentation of the news seems to be aimed primarily at entertaining the audience rather than informing or educating them. I share these concerns, but it also struck me that some of the early modern figures I have been studying actively deployed such tactics in order to engage readers. For example, Henry Neville deliberately presented his political views in entertaining genres such as a travel narrative and dialogue, and he used satire to draw in his audience. He also deliberately blurred the line between truth and fiction in order to prompt his readers into thinking more deeply about the truth of the information being presented to them. There is clearly a complexity here that requires careful unpicking.

Finally, we looked at some examples of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political texts and compared them with the sources of political information available to us today. The group discussed what sort of people would have been able to read these works, thinking about access, class, and literacy. We acknowledged that the sharing of texts - for example by reading them aloud, passing them on to friends, and using the circulating and subscription libraries that emerged in the eighteenth century - will have increased the number of people who could engage with them. The presentation of works will also have been affected by the authors' sense of their target audiences - including the fact that some works will have been designed to be read aloud in coffee houses. The group also raised the thought-provoking question of whether authors thought only about contemporary audiences or whether they also had future readers in mind. If not, what does that mean for reading groups like ours addressing these texts today? I look forward to exploring these issues further in later sessions.

Political Legacies

For personal reasons the commemoration of the dead, and the legacies they leave to those who remain, have been on my mind recently. Though inheritance is usually assumed to refer to money, I am much more interested in the ideas, practices, and values that the dead bequeath to the living. Thomas Hollis is a particularly interesting case when it comes to legacies of both kinds.

Thomas Hollis by Giovanni Battista Ciprani, etching 1767. National Portrait Gallery NPG D46108. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In my last blogpost I referred to the donation of approximately 3,000 books that Hollis sent to Harvard College in Massachusetts. Partly in recognition of this, the catalogue of the current Harvard University Library is called HOLLIS - a reference to the donations provided by the family and a convenient acronym for Harvard Online Library Information System. Hollis was not the first of his family (nor even the first with his name) to make donations to Harvard. His great grandfather - also called Thomas Hollis - founded several posts at Harvard which still bear his name, and was commemorated in a hall on campus and a street in the area.

Like his great grandfather Hollis had no children. Yet instead of passing on his inheritance via different family lines, as previous generations had done, Hollis chose to leave his own substantial fortune to his friend Thomas Brand, who subsequently styled himself Thomas Brand Hollis in recognition of the legacy.

Thomas Brand was born in Essex around 1719 (Colin Bonwick, 'Hollis, Thomas Brand, c.1719-1804, radical.' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Being from a dissenting family he could not attend an English University and so studied at Glasgow where he was taught by the great Francis Hutcheson and became friends with Hollis's future collaborator Richard Baron. Brand and Hollis are said to have met at the inns of court in London in the 1740s. They travelled around Europe together in 1748-9.

Hollis had always been keen to support Scottish institutions. In addition to the bequest in his will of books for Scottish University libraries, he also made donations to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, including this copy of Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland ([AD]7/1.8). It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Licence with permission from the Library.

When Thomas Hollis died in 1774 Thomas Brand, whom Hollis described as 'my dear friend and fellow traveller', was named sole executor of his will and inherited his lands and the residue of his personal estate (The National Archives: PROB 11/994/68 'The Will of Thomas Hollis of Lincoln's Inn'). Hollis insisted on a private and modest funeral and, as was conventional, left small donations to the poor in the parishes near to his Dorset estate and money to various servants, family members, and friends, as well as to book binders, engravers, and printers with whom he had worked during his life. Hollis also continued his family's philanthropic traditions as well as those he had established during his lifetime. He pledged £300 to rebuild the almshouses that had been constructed by his great grandfather in Sheffield and £100 to the Society for Promoting Arts and Commerce in London. He also left money to be spent on books 'relating to Government or to civil or natural history or to ... Mathematics' for the university libraries at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Dublin, as well as for the public library at Berne and the university library at Geneva, in addition to a larger donation for Harvard.

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), A View of Walton Bridge, 1754, oil on canvas, 48.7 x 76.4 cm, DPG600. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. With thanks to curator Lucy West for her assistance. This painting was commissioned by Thomas Hollis. It depicts Hollis himself (in the yellow coat) and his friend Thomas Brand.

As well as enacting these bequests, Thomas Brand also advanced Hollis's legacy in other ways. The two men shared a dissenting background and a commitment to political radicalism and reform. Brand Hollis was a member of several reform societies including the Revolution Society established in 1788 and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). He was a founder member of the SCI attending its first meeting in April 1780, often chairing sessions, and being elected President in December of that year (The National Archives: TS 11/1133).

In its purpose and activities the SCI echoed and extended Hollis's campaign to disseminate political texts and share political information. Hollis had sent copies of a wide range of works to university and public libraries in many countries. As I noted in my last blogpost, he paid particular attention to North America where his donations were explicitly designed to influence how the colonists interpreted the actions of the British government against them. In short, Hollis appears to have been seeking to rouse the Harvard students to revolutionary action by providing them with specific reading material on the nature of their rights as Englishmen and the threats posed to those rights - and therefore to their liberty - by the actions of the British government towards them. The SCI also disseminated political texts for free, this time in England. Its aim in doing so was to promote and eventually bring about political reform. The terms in which this aim was expressed were very similar to those used by Hollis in relation to the American colonists:

As every Englishman has an equal inheritance in this Liberty; and in those Laws

and that Constitution which have been provided for its defence; it is therefore

necessary that every Englishman should know what the Constitution IS; when it is

SAFE; and when ENDANGERED (An address to the public, from the Society for

Constitutional Information. London, 1780, p. 1).

There was also a similarity in the particular texts thought worthy of dissemination. At a meeting on 12th May 1780, at which Brand Hollis was present, the Society resolved to task one of its members, Capel Lofft, to:

compile a Tract or Tracts, consisting of Extracts from the

Mirror of Justices, Fleta, Bracton, Fortesquieu, Selden, Bacon,

Sir Thomas Smith, Coke, Sidney, Milton, Harrington, Nevile,

Molesworth, Bolingbroke, Price, Priestly, Blackstone, Somers,

Davenant, the Essay on the English Constitution, and other Authors

as may clearly define, or describe in few Words the English

Constitution (The National Archives: TS 11/1133).

With just two exceptions (Sir Thomas Smith and Charles Davenant), works by all of these authors had been sent by Hollis to Harvard.

As well as disseminating the texts free of charge, both Hollis and the SCI used newspapers and periodicals to advertise them and their relevance to contemporary affairs. In April 1766 Hollis inserted the following advert into the London Chronicle to alert the Corsican rebels who were drawing up a new constitution for the island - and more especially their British supporters - of the potential a particular English republican text offered them in their endeavour.

TO THE PEOPLE OF CORSICA

      FELICITY

"The Oceana of James Harrington, for practicable-

ness, equality and completeness, is the most perfect

model of a Commonwealth, that ever was delineated

by antient or modern pen (The London Chronicle, 10 April 1766).

John Somers, Baron Somers by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt. c.1705. National Portrait Gallery NPG 490. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In the same vein, from Spring 1782, members of the SCI began inserting extracts from key texts into the General Advertiser. These included extracts selected by Brand Hollis from a work by John Somers, first Baron Somers (1651-1716), a notable Whig and one time Lord Chancellor. The extracts, which appeared in the General Advertiser on Monday 18 March 1782, concerned the limits of the ruler's powers and the rights of the people. Somers argued that a sovereign who invades or subverts the fundamental laws of society gives up his legal right to govern and absolves his subjects of obedience. Citing the popular phrase asserting the rights of the people salus populi, he claimed that all law and government is aimed at the public good and therefore: 'A just Governor, for the benefit of the people, is more careful of the public good and welfare, than of his own private advantage.' 'He who makes himself above all law, is no Member of a Commonwealth, but a mere tyrant whenever he pleases' and under such a magistrate the people would be justified in exercising a right of resistance. Though probably originally written in the context of the Glorious Revolution, these sentiments were meaningful to those engaged in the reform campaign and perhaps designed as a warning to George III.

There is one final more frivolous way in which Brand Hollis continued his friend's legacy. Hollis had had a curious habit of naming fields and farms on his Dorset estate at Corscombe and Halstock after thinkers, works, and places he respected. In July 1773 Hollis noted in a letter that he had named a small farm on his estate after George Buchanan 'this oldest son of liberty' (Caroline Robbins, 'Thomas Hollis in His Dorsetshire Retirement' in Absolute Liberty, ed. Barbara Taft. 1982, p. 240). Another farm of 247 acres was named after James Harrington and on that farm was a field he called Oceana after Harrington's most famous work. To the west of Harrington Farm was another called Milton Farm after John Milton, which included a field named after John Toland - who had edited both Milton's and Harrington's works. Also in the vicinity were farms named for other leading English republicans: Algernon Sidney, Edmund Ludlow, and Henry Neville.

Dorset History Centre, D1_MO_3 Plan of Harrington Farm from the Corscombe Estate Map. With thanks to the Dorset History Centre for assistance and permission.

We know that Brand Hollis was aware of Hollis's actions in this regard since a survey of the estate that Brand Hollis conducted in 1799, now held at Dorset History Centre, details the names of the various farms and fields.

Brand Hollis not only maintained and memorialised Hollis's nomenclature on his Dorset estate, he also engaged in the same practice himself - naming trees on his property at Hyde in Essex after George Washington and other heroes of the American Revolution (Bonwick, ODNB). To my mind, legacies of place names, book collections, and the values of kindness and generosity, are far more meaningful and enduring than any financial bequest - even from someone with as extensive a fortune as Thomas Hollis.

Algernon Sidney (1623-1683)

Algernon Sidney is far from being a household name and is probably less well known even among scholars than his uncle Sir Philip Sidney, author of Arcadia. Among those who are familiar with the younger Sidney, he is generally famed less for his published works than for two facts about what he wrote. First, his own words were used to convict him of treason in 1683, resulting in his execution. The manuscript of the work that became the Discourses Concerning Government was said to have been on Sidney's desk at the time of his arrest in May 1683 for his alleged involvement in the Rye House Plot. Those manuscript pages were subsequently used as a 'witness' against him at his trial, held later that year. Secondly, when working as a diplomat in Denmark, Sidney wrote the following inscription in the signature book of the University of Copenhagen:

MANUS HAEC INIMICA TYRANNIS

EINSE PETIT PLACIDAM CUM LIBERTATE QUIETEM

('This hand, always an enemy to tyrants, seeks a little peace under liberty.'). (Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677. Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 133).

Next year marks the four hundredth anniversary of Sidney's birth. Though originally planned for April 2020, only to be disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference held in the French town of Rouen in April 2022 might now be seen as an early celebration of that anniversary. The conference was organised by Christopher Hamel and Gilles Olivo. Christopher has recently produced a modern edition of the 1702 French translation of Sidney's Discourses by Pierre August Samson, to which he has added a rich scholarly introduction that surveys the reception of Sidney's thought in eighteenth-century France. This was the first conference I have attended in-person - and my first trip abroad - since January 2020. As such it was a particular pleasure to be able to attend.

As always, what I offer here are my own reflections on the papers delivered rather than a full account of every paper. Three themes in particular struck me as I listened to the contributions: the relationship between theory and practice in republican thought; the value of adopting a European perspective to English republicanism; and the views of Sidney (and others) on prerogative power and its relationship to popular sovereignty.

Theory and Practice in Republican Thought

Algernon Sidney, after Justus van Egmont, based on a work of 1663. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 568. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Scholarly accounts of Sidney's thought have tended to place emphasis on his writings, and in particular the Discourses Concerning Government and Court Maxims. While not dismissing the importance of these writings and the ideas contained within them, Tom Ashby's excellent opening paper focused on Sidney's actions and writings as a diplomat working on behalf of the English Commonwealth and Free State. He expertly demonstrated how the letters that Sidney wrote to King Charles Gustavus of Sweden, and King Frederick of Denmark, in August 1659 effectively embody his republican principles in the way in which he presented himself  to, and engaged with, his royal correspondents. Sidney's role as a martyr has long been central to the understanding of him and his ideas, but his role as an agent of the English republic has received far less attention, and the glimpse into this that Tom offered suggests it has the potential to greatly enrich our understanding of Sidney's thought. I eagerly await the opportunity to read his finished thesis - and the publication of the article he is preparing on these letters. 

As I noted in my own paper, political action (negotium) was crucial for republican authors. I argued that figures like Sidney and James Harrington (as well as their later editors, printers, and translators) used the literary and material dimensions of their texts not merely to convey ideas in a passive form but to encourage readers to engage more deeply with those ideas and even to venture into action.

Encouraging political action was, of course, also central to the Leveller movement, which has been richly studied by Rachel Foxley, John Rees, and others. Rachel's paper, which compared the ideas of the Levellers on the nature and role of parliament with those of Sidney, also touched on questions of the interaction of thought and practice. Specifically, Rachel explored the ways in which Levellers - such as Richard Overton - in the 1640s and Sidney in the 1680s grappled with the pressing problem of the relationship between a sovereign people and its representatives; and how (if at all) those representatives might be made accountable to those they represented.

One of the problems of engaging with ideas in action that was discussed in response to these papers is whether this makes it harder to identify a coherent - and consistent - political theory. The question of whether a consistent political theory can be constructed from the various petitions and pamphlet writings of the Levellers has already been addressed by Rachel and others, but the question is equally applicable to Sidney. Christopher noted this in his introduction to the conference, asking whether it is possible to talk of coherence when Sidney himself did not complete or publish either of his major works. Building on this, Tom's paper raised the question of whether it is appropriate to treat Sidney's diplomatic letters as texts in the history of political thought. It certainly seems as though there would be value in doing so, not least because - as Tom pointed out - they provide a useful counterpart to the Court Maxims. In that dialogue Sidney attempts to persuade the people of his ideas on government, whereas in his diplomatic correspondence his aim is to persuade kings. Moreover, as both Rachel's paper and that by François Quastana made clear, the problem of consistency also arises in the Discourses. Because Sidney's aim in that text is to refute the arguments of Robert Filmer, he sometimes ends up contradicting himself. Rachel showed this very clearly in relation to his arguments about representation. In some places he presents representatives as servants, and so insists that those who elect them must be able to instruct them. Elsewhere his views reflect a more aristocratic understanding of representatives, arguing that they must be given the freedom to make their own decisions, and that they cannot be held to account by their constituents. Similarly, François showed that while Sidney castigates Filmer for drawing a parallel between kings and fathers, he himself draws a similar (and equally problematic) parallel between brothers and citizens.

The Value of a European Perspective

Since the motivation behind this conference was the publication of Christopher's excellent edition of the French translation of Sidney's Discourses, it should come as no surprise that the importance of adopting a European perspective to English republicanism was another theme that was raised by various participants. Again Tom's paper was pioneering in this regard showing (as Gaby Mahlberg's recent book on the English Republican exiles has also done) just how much material is available in foreign archives on the English republic and English republicans. 

A typical Rouen building. Image by Rachel Hammersley

As other papers made clear, the European approach is important not just with regard to individuals but also texts. François reminded us how much both Filmer and Sidney owed to French political models; including both, on the one hand, the writings of Jean Bodin and, on the other, those of the monarchiens. In her paper, which offered a stimulating comparison of the reception of the ideas of Sidney and Harrington in eighteenth-century France, Myriam-Isabelle Durcrocq made the important point that studying the French reception of the works of these thinkers not only reveals much about French Huguenot and Enlightenment thought, but also illuminates English republicanism itself. It draws our attention to the different preoccupations of Sidney and Harrington (which led to their works being celebrated in France at different points in time and by individuals facing very different concerns). This highlights the fact that there was not just one single strain of English republican thought, but rather several distinct varieties.

Prerogative Power and Popular Sovereignty

Of course, as Myriam-Isabelle rightly noted, while Harrington and Sidney diverged on various points, two principles on which they firmly agreed were, first, the evils of arbitrary power (or the power of one) and, secondly, the sovereignty of the people. One reflection of this in Harrington's work (as she reminded us) is that Harrington called his popular assembly the Prerogative tribe, alluding to the fact that the prerogative power lies not with any king or prince but with (as Harrington puts it in Oceana) the 'king people'. Sidney embodies a similar idea in his engagement with the Kings of Sweden and Denmark in the letters discussed by Tom. Not only does he clearly believe that, as a representative of the English commonwealth, he can speak directly and on equal terms with royalty, but he also warns Gustavus to adjust his behaviour and to act in the interests of the common good rather than arbitrarily for his own personal gains - or risk republican violence being launched against him.

Algernon Sidney by James Basire after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, 1763. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D28941. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The attitude to prerogative power was also, as Alberto de Barros pointed out in his paper, a fundamental dividing line between Sidney and John Locke in their respective responses to Filmer's Patriarcha. While both were critical of the prerogative power of kings, Locke was willing to accept that it might legitimately be exercised under two distinct circumstances. First, at moments of crisis or emergency; and, secondly, when the law is silent on a particular point and interpretation is therefore required. Locke was clear, however, that in these cases the prerogative (in order to be legitimate) must only be used to advance the common good. Sidney, by contrast, was adamant that any power that operates above the law is illegitimate; that the very existence of a royal prerogative would undermine liberty and constitute a violation of the common good.

As I hope this blogpost demonstrates, I learned a huge amount from all the papers at this excellent event; as well as from our stimulating and fruitful discussions, which continued over drinks and meals. As I sat on the train leaving Rouen (somewhat reluctantly), I was struck by a parallel between the ideas I had been having about the conference discussions and my experience of attending a conference for the first time in two years. Sidney not only thought and wrote about republican principles, but also embodied them in his engagement with rulers such as the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, developing and extending his thought in the process. Similarly, in attending this conference I moved from contemplation of his thought to engagement with others, was led to interact with individuals coming from different countries and intellectual traditions, and ultimately had my perspectives challenged - resulting in a richer and deeper understanding of Sidney and his ideas.

British Republicans 1: Charles Bradlaugh

When writing Republicanism: An Introduction I had to address what happened to republican ideas during the nineteenth century (beyond my usual area of expertise). I chose to focus on France, Britain and the United States. In the process I discovered several interesting nineteenth-century British republicans. I am continuing to investigate some of these characters for other projects. In this blogpost, and some that follow, I will offer brief sketches showcasing these figures and their ideas.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) was a self-confessed republican who established the National Republican League in 1873. Yet despite not being afraid of controversy and firmly owning his republican views, Bradlaugh's The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick addresses the question of republican politics in an oblique fashion.

Charles Bradlaugh by Sydney Prior Hall. National Portrait Gallery: NPG 2313. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In his preface to the second edition, Bradlaugh stated explicitly: 'This is not ... a Republican pamphlet' (Charles Bradlaugh, The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick. 4th edition. London, 1874, Preface). What he meant by this is that rather than calling for the abolition of the monarchy, he was simply pointing out that the British monarchy is elective and that the British people have the right to choose different rulers should they wish to do so. He based this argument on legislation from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the Parliament of the English Commonwealth, meeting on 25 April 1660, that gave the Crown to Charles II. Similarly, it was the Convention, meeting with all the authority of Parliament, which on 22 January 1688 took the Crown away from James II and passed over his son the Prince of Wales, bestowing the throne instead on James's Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Furthermore, in various statutes passed under the later Stuarts, the right to accede to the throne was limited, first, to members of the Church of England, and then to the heirs of Princess Sophia of Hanover. Given this history, Bradlaugh insisted, Parliament in his own time had the right, both to deprive a living monarch of the Crown and to treat the heir to the throne as having no claim to the succession.

While Bradlaugh insists that he is not advocating a republican regime, but the replacement of one monarch (or dynasty) by another, his hostility to the Brunswicks is vitriolic. He condemns them for their extravagant expenditure (which he charts in detail), for their hostility to the welfare of the ordinary people, and - more uncomfortably for a twenty-first-century reader - for being foreign. Indeed, what he appears to be advocating is the replacement of the current dynasty - after the death of Queen Victoria - with an English alternative.

Given the history of republican arguments, this position is an interesting one. Bradlaugh is harsh in his condemnation of the Brunswick rulers, but despite admitting his own preference for republican rule, in this work at least he is willing to accept the continuation of the British monarchy under another line.

Alongside his republican writing and campaigning, Bradlaugh was also strongly committed to the issue of land reform. He was involved with the Land Tenure Reform Association, the Land and Labour League and the Commons Protection League and in 1874 he wrote The Land, The People, and The Coming Struggle. Indeed, in the 1870s he presented the Land Question as the key political issue of the day.

James Harrington after Sir Peter Lely, published by William Richardson 1799. National Portrait Gallery: NPG D29116. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Bradlaugh was by no means the first republican to take an interest in land. James Harrington's argument as to why England was ripe for republican government in the mid-seventeenth century was grounded in his theory that land provides the foundation of political power, and that in order to secure allegiance and stability the form of government should fit the distribution of land within the nation. Harrington believed that changes introduced by the Tudor monarchs had brought a shift in land ownership away from the aristocracy and towards commoners. The civil war, on Harrington's account, adjusted politics to the economic reality, making England ripe for republican or commonwealth government. Later republicans accepted Harrington's understanding of the relationship between the ownership of land and the exercise of political power. By the late eighteenth century, Thomas Spence was using Harrington's argument to put a radical case for the abolition of property rights in England and for a sweeping redistribution of land in order to ensure the subsistence of ordinary citizens.

Bradlaugh too saw land as crucial to political power, and he shared Spence's profound concern for the poor. However, his assessment of the situation in his own time was an inversion of Harrington's original theory. 'The bulk of the land', Bradlaugh insisted, 'is in the hands of comparatively few persons, and these monopolise the House of Lords, and materially control the House of Commons.' (Charles Bradlaugh, The Land, The People and The Coming Struggle, 3rd edition. London, 1877, p. 3). Indeed, Bradlaugh insisted that it was actually the aristocracy, rather than the monarch, that exercised real political authority within the country. This had negative consequences not only for politics, but also for subsistence. It was in the interests of landowners to keep rents high and the wages of agricultural workers low, resulting in poverty and poor living conditions for many people. Moreover, members of the aristocracy liked to keep vast swathes of their land uncultivated for their own recreation - for example in the form of grouse moors. This had resulted in 'The diversion of land in an old country from the purpose it should fulfil - that of providing life for the many' to instead providing pleasure for the few. (Bradlaugh, The Land, The People and The Coming Struggle, p. 13). This, Bradlaugh insisted, was a 'crime'. Similarly he described the game laws as 'a disgrace to civilisation' and as proof of the influence of the landed aristocracy over the legislature, and the negative character of that influence. Bradlaugh's solution was not to abolish property rights, as Spence had advocated, but rather to compel landowners to act more responsibly. As he argued in a speech in the House of Commons in 1888: 'the ownership of land should carry with it the duty of cultivation or utilisation'. The authorities should, therefore, 'compel the possessors of land to use it for the general welfare' (Charles Bradlaugh, 'The Compulsory Cultivation of Waste Lands' in Speeches by Charles Bradlaugh, ed. J. M. Roberts, 2nd edition. London, 1895, p. 116). Most of the land may no longer lie with the commoners, but it should still be used for the public good.

Charles Bradlaugh by Harry Furniss, 1880s-1900s. National Portrait Gallery: NPG 3555. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

As well as being a founder member of the National Republican League and a member of various land reform groups, Bradlaugh also helped to establish the National Secular Society and acted as its president from 1866 to 1871 and again from 1874 to 1890. Bradlaugh was particularly critical of the hypocrisy of the aristocracy who exploited and crushed the poor for their own ends, but then listened to the sermons of bishops, endowed churches, and talked of the importance of saving souls. Bradlaugh was keen to defend both the truth and the morality of secularism. While uncompromising in his atheism, Bradlaugh made reference back to the more subtle freethinking commonwealthmen of the early eighteenth century. In 1877 he established 'The Freethought Publishing Company'. The notion that this may have been an allusion to Anthony Collins's A Discourse of Freethinking of 1713 is reinforced by the fact that Bradlaugh also wrote his Half hours with the freethinkers under the pseudonym Anthony Collins.

Bradlaugh's philosophy, then, involved a critique of the key institutions of the Crown, the Aristocracy, and the Church. While he addressed these issues separately, he was well aware of the connections and overlap between them, and the threat that all three could pose to the people. Throughout his career Bradlaugh worked to uphold the public good, and to place the interests of ordinary people at the heart of politics, he had every claim to be a republican.

Experiencing Political Texts 5: Dialogues

In previous blogposts in this series I have discussed the use of fiction for political ends, and the blending of fact and fiction, in Yanis Varoufakis's Another Now (2019) and James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). One genre in which fact and fiction are often knitted together is the dialogue. Early modern political thinkers made much use of this form, and while Varoufakis's book is not explicitly set out as a conversation it does adopt the essence of that form in its exploration of the views of the three main characters: Iris, Eva and Costa. Moreover, in the Foreword, the narrator Yango Varo admits to the kind of artistic licence or invention that is typical of political dialogues, reporting that:

In an attempt to do full justice to my friends' ideas and points of view, I have found it necessary to recount these debates as if I had been witness to them myself, pretending to inhabit a past from which I was mostly absent, fleshing out conversations I never participated in. (Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, London: The Bodley Head, 2019, p. 6).

There is, of course, an irony here in that Varo is himself a fictional character, but his account of 'fleshing out conversations' describes very accurately what early modern political thinkers were doing when they produced dialogues.

In an article in the Guardian advertising his book, Varoufakis offered some insight into why he chose to examine the views of his characters in this way:

In a bid to incorporate into my socialist blueprint different, often clashing, perspectives I decided to conjure up three complex characters whose dialogues would narrate the story - each representing different parts of my thinking: a Marxist-feminist, a libertarian ex-banker and a maverick technologist. Their disagreements regarding "our" capitalism provide the background against which my socialist blueprint is projected - and assessed. (Yanis Varoufakis, 'Capitalism isn't working. Here's an alternative', The Guardian, 4 September, 2020).

Thus for Varoufakis this form provided him with a means of putting onto paper a dialogue that had been playing out in his own head, and a means of working out some of the conflicts between different commitments and views held by him and other members of society.

Dialogue form was much used by early modern political thinkers and especially by seventeenth-century English advocates of republican government. It could be employed very simply to address and challenge alternative views, or to bring alive a debate between two or more positions, but there are also examples of more sophisticated usage, such as that which is in evidence in a manuscript dialogue written by the seventeenth-century political thinker Algernon Sidney.

Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) is best known for the manner of his death and his posthumous work Discourses Concerning Government, which was published by John Toland and John Darby in 1698. Sidney had fought for parliament during the Civil Wars and had gone into exile on the continent after the return of Charles II to power in 1660. He returned to England in 1677, but was implicated in the Rye House Plot of 1683. An arrest warrant was issued against him on 25 June 1683 and in November of that year he was brought before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys. Since only one witness would testify against him and two were required for a conviction, the papers confiscated from his desk at the time of his arrest were deployed as a second witness. He was found guilty of treason and was executed on 7 December 1683.

Algernon Sidney by Bernard Picart (Picard) (1724). NPG D30364. Reproduced from the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons licence.

Sidney wrote 'Court Maxims, discussed and refelled' early in 1665. It took the form of a dialogue between two friends Philalethes and Eunomius. Philalethes is a courtier who puts forward the 'court maxims' of the title. These supposedly self-evident propositions are used to argue in favour of monarchical government and the private interests that sustain it. They are challenged by Eunomius, a commonwealthsman, who presents the case for the public or common good and for republican government. While the question of whether Philalethes is ultimately converted by his friend is left open, Eunomius does have the last word insisting that monarchy can rarely be the best form of government. In one sense this is not surprising, since we would expect the author of the Discourses Concerning Government to have favoured the public good over private interests, and republican government over monarchy. Yet the meaning of the names that Sidney gives to his characters complicates the matter. 

The name Philalethes literally translates as 'lover of truth', yet Sidney gives this name not to the character with whom his own sympathies lie, but to the advocate of private interest and absolute monarchy. Eunomius, by contrast, was the name of the 4th Century Bishop of Cyzicus, a controversial figure who challenged the conventional understanding of the Trinity, particularly the relationship between God and Christ. Since anti-Trinitarianism was still considered a heresy in the late seventeenth century this choice of name was provocative.

If we read Philalethes's silence at the end of the dialogue as indicating that he has been converted by Eunomius, then Sidney's point is perhaps simply that the love of truth does eventually win out over Philalethes's personal views and prejudices - or rather over the views he has had to 'conform' himself to at court (Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, discussed and refelled, ed. Hans Blom and Eco Haitsma Mulier, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 2). As Philalethes explains at the beginning of the dialogue, there is little time at court to examine the truth of things, so he relies instead on what others tell him (p. 9). Moreover, he acknowledges that those court maxims are often at odds with reason. Yet Sidney is perhaps also being deliberately playful in offering as the explicit aim of his dialogue the refutation of self-evident propositions expressed by a lover of truth. He is perhaps implying that what is presented as 'truth' needs to be handled with care - or perhaps even re-conceived - an argument that Eunomius of Cyzicus and others who shared his views in the early years of the church would also have made. Moreover, writing at a time when rule in England had recently shifted from a commonwealth to a monarchy, Sidney perhaps hoped that his readers might apply that lesson in their own world, and examine for themselves the extent to which the attitudes and principles of the new regime were in accordance with reason.

Experiencing Political Texts 3: The Power of the Paratext

The end of Yango Varo’s Foreword to Another Now, which gives the date.

As readers we often skip over or neglect the additional material that precedes and follows a text - such as the preface, dedication and acknowledgements. Yet this material can serve an important function in both literally and metaphorically framing a text. For this reason literary theorists have started to take it more seriously, inventing the term 'paratext' to describe it and investigating the ways in which it directs the reader's attention and shapes their reading. In last month's blogpost I focused on the blending of fact and fiction in political texts, setting Yanis Varoufakis's recent work of 'political science fiction', Another Now, alongside James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana of 1656. In texts that blend fact and fiction, paratextual material serves a particularly important function and this is certainly true of Varoufakis's book.

The Foreword to Another Now is signed by the narrator of the work Yango Varo (clearly a fictionalisation of Varoufakis's own name) and is dated 10:05 a.m. Saturday 28 July 2036. This immediately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work and, more specifically, to the fact that it is set in an imagined future. The content of Varo's Foreword introduces the three main characters of the novel: Iris, who we are told in the opening sentence died a year ago; her friend Eva, who we learn was not at Iris's funeral; and Costa, who was present but chose to observe from a distance. Yango, a friend of all three, plays the role of communicator, being the purported author of what follows. He is directed by Iris and Costa to tell the story contained in Iris's diary, which she bequeathed to him before her death. Yet he is also instructed not to reveal any of the 'technical details' it contains. This makes little sense initially, but as the narrative unfolds the meaning of both the 'directive' and the 'injunction' become clear. The Foreword, then, sets up the work both by introducing the characters and plot, but also by posing puzzles or raising questions in the mind of the reader that will be resolved in the main body of the work.

Title page to Oceana including the dedication and epigram. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Copy author’s own.

Harrington too framed his text with paratextual material. The main body of Oceana is preceded by an epigram from Horace, a dedication to Oliver Cromwell, an 'Epistle to the Reader', and 'The Introduction or Order of the Work' - which presents Oceana (England) and its neighbours Marpesia (Scotland) and Panopea (Ireland). However, since I have written extensivesly about Harrington's ideas - including his use of literary strategies - I will focus here, instead, on another early modern political text: the 1675 English edition of Niccolò Machiavelli's political works produced by Harrington's friend Henry Neville (The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel, Citizen and Secretary of Florence, London, 1675).

Harrington and Neville had been close friends since before the publication of Oceana in 1656, and they worked together to promote Harrington's constitutional model, particularly during 1659 when implementation seemed most likely. According to a contemporary and friend, John Aubrey, Neville supported Harrington 'to his dyeing day', continuing to visit him even when Harrington's mind was affected by illness (Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. K. Bennett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, I, p. 322).

The third edition of Neville’s translation of Machiavelli’s works. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Neville appears to have shared - and even extended - his friend's playfulness. Neville added to his edition of Machiavelli's political works a letter supposedly written by Machiavelli to his friend Zanobius Buondelmontius in which he offered a vindication of himself and his writings. On the surface this was a conventional addition to a scholarly text - it was not unusual at the time to include additional material relating to the author. A more careful reading, however, reveals the letter to be a fraud or joke. In fact, as in Varoufakis's Foreword, even the date on the letter (1 April 1537) is suggestive. April 1st is, of course, April Fool's Day. Moreover, since Machiavelli had died on 21 June 1527, the letter was supposedly written almost ten years after his demise. The letter also refers to John Calvin's flight from Picardy to Geneva which, since it occurred in the 1530s, was something of which the real Machiavelli could not have been aware.

Machiavel’s Letter to Buondelmontius. Taken from the third edition - as previous image.

These features affects how we view the content of the letter, but that content in turn provides a clue to Neville's purpose. The topic of the letter is the corruption introduced into Christianity by the Catholic Church. Neville's 'Machiavel' points out that there is no evidence in the Bible for beliefs central to Catholic doctrine, such as purgatory, the worship of saints and idols, and the inquisition. These 'innovations', he suggests, were introduced by the Catholic clergy to increase their temporal power and to keep the people in ignorance. Using a term that had been coined by Harrington, he blames 'Priest-craft' for much of the current trouble, yet he remains hopeful that God will inspire Christian princes to bring about a return to 'the true Original Christian Faith', reminding them that in order to do so they will have to root out all traces 'of this Clergy or Priest-craft' or their efforts will be in vain.

In tricking his readers by including this fictional letter, Neville was deliberately echoing what he saw as the longstanding and calculated efforts of the clergy to deceive the laity. His aim in doing so was perhaps to draw the attention of his readers to their own foolish credulity, and to inoculate them against future deception. Having been stung by his prank, they would perhaps think more carefully in future about the ideas presented to them by others. Such trickery is less common as a literary technique today, and Varoufakis's Foreword is more deliberately part of his narrative. But, in an age when 'Fake News' has become a political weapon, and conspiracy theories are rife, I would hesitate to suggest that the credulity Neville identified has completely disappeared.

Experiencing Political Texts 2: Fiction and the Future

Earlier this year the well-known Greek economist and member of the Greek Parliament Yanis Varoufakis published a book entitled Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. The purpose of the book is to set out the key features of a 'fair and equal' society, or to present the case for - and a vision of - a society based on democratic socialism. Keen as I am to see this ambition made into a reality, what struck me on reading Varoufakis's trailer for the book in The Guardian was less its content than its form or structure. Instead of setting out his argument in a conventional, factual, way - presenting key principles and justifying them - Varoufakis has adopted a fictional format, what he describes as 'political science fiction'. He presents his case, or as he puts it 'narrate(s) the story', via three characters: Iris, a Marxist-feminist; Eva, a libertarian ex-banker; and Costa, a maverick technologist.

Several of the techniques that Varoufakis employs, including his blending of fact and fiction, are reminiscent of the literary devices used by early modern authors of political texts, which are the focus of my current research project. Varoufakis's book can be used as a springboard for thinking about the value of such devices, the role that they played in specific texts in the past, and the use they might have today.

The Occupy Movement forms the basis for the transformations that take place in the ‘Other Now’. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

At the heart of Another Now is the idea of an imagined alternative society, which we could attain if only we make changes in our present (which is of course what Varoufakis is hoping to make us do by writing his book). While trying to develop a highly complex computer program Costa inadvertently finds a wormhole that gives him access to an alternative universe and the means to communicate with his alter-ego, whom he calls Kosti, who lives in that world. By sending messages back and forth through the wormhole, Costa learns that up until the banking crash of 2008, Kosti's life - and the world in which he lived - were identical to Costa's own. However, after that point this 'Other Now' took a very different direction, with several grassroots organisations using crowd sourcing and people power to dismantle the entire capitalist system. Over the space of several years these groups created a world in which employees are equal shareholders in the companies for which they work; all receiving the same basic pay along with bonuses that are decided upon by their colleagues. Banks no longer exist, instead each citizen has three digital accounts over which (s)he has direct control, subject to certain restrictions: a legacy account into which a sum of money is put at birth; a current account; and a savings account.

The title page of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Copy author’s own.

Readers of my last blog post, will perhaps notice the parallel with what I have suggested James Harrington was doing in adopting a semi-utopian format for his major work The Commonwealth of Oceana, which appeared in 1656. In the first section of that work, called 'The Preliminaries', Harrington set out the principles on which his political theory was built and offered an account of English history from before the Norman Conquest up to April 1653 when Oliver Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament, which had ruled as a single chamber following the execution of King Charles I on 30 January 1649. At that point, however, Harrington's account moves from history to fiction. Though written in 1656 he narrates not what actually happened between 1653 and 1656, but rather 'another now'; an alternative reality that could have emerged if different decisions had been taken by Cromwell and those around him. Harrington has the character Olphaus Megaletor (who represents Cromwell as he ought to have been) gather around him a 'Council of Legislators' who research various past commonwealths from ancient Athens and Sparta to Venice and the Dutch Republic, and construct an ideal commonwealth from the best elements of each. That commonwealth is then instituted by Olphaus Megaletor in his position as the Lord Archon. Moreover, like Varoufakis, Harrington also projected his story on into the future to indicate the consequences that would have unfolded if that alternative path had been taken. The Corollary at the end of the work takes the story on into the next century. Olphaus Megaletor has just died, at an impossibly old age, and the commonwealth is flourishing. The population has increased by almost a third and the coffers are so full that the nation had been able to go three years without raising taxes. For Harrington, as for Varoufakis, fiction can be used as a tool to justify, and thereby to bring about, a change of course in the present.

Yet, as both authors seem to recognise, the power of fiction lies not only in deploying the author's imagination, but also in engaging the imagination of the reader. As I suggested in last month's post, Harrington's decisions regarding the form of his major work were also influenced by his understanding of people (especially his fellow countrymen) and how they thought about and engaged with politics: 'The people of this land', he accepted, 'have an aversion from novelties or innovation' and 'are incapable of discourse or reasoning upon government' (James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 751). Yet he was confident that if they were given the opportunity to experience a good constitutional model they would recognise it as such. People might never agree to introduce a new form of government, but if they were able to 'feel the good and taste the sweet of it' they would then 'never agree to abandon it' (Harrington, Political Works, ed. Pocock, pp. 728-9). People were more likely to be convinced by political innovation if they experienced it rather than reading accounts of it and there was also a sense of their having to be led towards doing so. Harrington's book was his attempt to do just that. As an author (rather than a politician or head of state) he was not in a position to implement the system in the real world, but by presenting a fictional account he could provide his readers with the opportunity to 'experience' his model within their imaginations. His hope was that this would convince enough of them to make his 'airy model' a reality.

Varoufakis seems to have a similar attitude to the relationship between politics and fiction for readers as well as authors. Not only is the form of Another Now directed at engaging readers' imaginations by offering an alternative vision of the present and future, but this point is made explicit in the opening pages of the book when Iris gives the diary to the narrator and insists that the 'dispatches' in it should be used 'to open people's eyes to possibilities they are incapable of imagining unaided' (Varoufakis, Another Now, p. 2). 

‘The Council of Legislators’ section of The Commonwealth of Oceana.

I have no idea whether Varoufakis has read Oceana. Harrington is not listed in the index to Another Now, but it is perhaps revealing that, just over half way through, there is a reference to what economists call a 'self-revelation mechanism design': arrangements that motivate people to act honestly, 'as in the famous method of dividing a pie between two people, whereby one cuts the pie and the other chooses which they want' (Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now, Bodley Head, 2020, p. 138). Those familiar with Harrington's ideas will immediately recognise this as the story of the two girls dividing a cake that is a well-known feature of Oceana.

In an age of Fake News it often feels as though the malleability of facts is dangerous and that blurring the line between fact and fiction will further dupe the public. However, works like Another Now and Oceana remind us that these techniques can also be productive and can be used to reinvigorate, rather than to undermine, the public good. Perhaps, in this brave new world, fiction is one of the most powerful political weapons we have at our disposal.

Experiencing Political Texts 1: Endings and Beginnings

While it is January that is named after a god who looks both forwards and backwards, for those of us working in educational establishments in the UK, the early autumn is also a good time for simultaneous reflection on the past and forward planning. In this spirit, this month's blogpost will look back to a project I have recently completed and offer a preview of a new project I am planning.

On 25 September Republicanism: An Introduction was published by Polity Press. As we approach the final month of the Presidential election campaign in a country that has long claimed to exemplify republican ideals, the United States, the questions: what is republican government? and what is required in order for it to function effectively? are more pertinent than ever. As I explain in my book, the older definition of a republic was a system in which government operated in the interests of the common or public good. The violent clashes that have taken place recently between Black Lives Matter protestors and Trump supporters throw doubt on any claim that there is a single, shared understanding of the common good in the US today. Of course, in the now more commonplace definition of republican government as the antonym of monarchy, it may seem that the US is unquestionably a republic, but can this judgement survive in the face of rule by a billionaire who wields far greater powers than any sitting monarch in the world and who gifts members of his own family positions of high office?

I explore these definitions more fully in a blogpost I have written for Polity Press. The book takes a chronological approach, starting with the ancient ideas and practices that formed the basis of later republican theories, before examining how those theories developed and were put into action in the context of the Renaissance, early modern Europe and the Enlightenment, and the English, American and French Revolutions. It then considers the ways in which republican ideas have been adopted by new groups, and adapted to new ends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Overall, the book argues that republicanism is a dynamic, living language, the survival of which is predicated on its adaptability, and which retains the potential to offer answers to the pressing political issues of the twenty-first century.

Last month's blogpost on this site, which focused on the material culture of republican rule, was the last in a series about myths of republican government, exploring current political issues on which the history of republican thought offers useful insights. Yet that post simultaneously pointed towards my next project.

The cover of Thomas Hollis’s edition of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana, Houghton Library, Harvard University: HOU GEN *EC65.H2381 656c (B) Lobby IV.2.18. I am grateful to staff at the Houghton for giving me permission to include this here and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance. Note the owl on the front cover which indicates the wisdom of the text.

In early modern Europe, improvements in the mechanics of printing, rising literacy levels, and a series of political crises, combined to provide both the means and the market for an outpouring of political texts. Historians of political thought have paid great attention to the content or substance of those texts; analysing the language used, the arguments made, the debates to which they contributed, and the historical contexts out of which they emerged. Far less attention has been paid to the form of these texts, by which I mean both the genre(s) in which they were written and their physical or material aspects. There was no uniform genre for early modern political works, they could take the form of philosophical treatises, dialogues, travel literature, utopias, even poetry or drama. Moreover, many of them playfully blended fact and fiction. Similarly, the material dimensions of political texts - including their size, paper quality, frontispieces, typeface and binding - varied enormously and often provide clues as to their intended audiences and relate closely to the arguments they were designed to convey. Moreover understanding the ways in which those texts circulated as physical objects is also crucial to making sense of both the intentions of their authors and the ways in which they were received and used by readers.

Paying attention to these aspects of early modern political texts is crucial if we are to understand fully the functions of those texts. Often they were designed not merely to inform their readers and convince them of the validity of the arguments presented, but to prompt their readers' engagement with those arguments and even incite them to action. This was particularly important for republican texts, which were often explicitly concerned with provoking a shift from otium (contemplation) to negotium (action).

The elaborate frontispiece to John Toland’s edition of James Harrington’s The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (London, 1737), Copy author’s own.

It was my work on James Harrington that first drew these neglected aspects of early modern political texts to my attention. Scholars have long found it difficult to explain why Harrington veiled his greatest work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in a rather laboured utopian form. The common argument - that it was a way of avoiding censorship - is inadequate given that a work advocating commonwealth government was in line with the views of the authorities in 1656 and that he actually removed the utopian veil from the works he produced in 1659-60 - a much more dangerous moment to voice republican arguments with the return of the monarchy looking increasingly likely. Rather, as I argued in my book, Harrington used the utopian format to indicate that what he was offering in that work was an alternative vision of England's future - one that departed in crucial ways from the actual path that had started to be taken after the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653. Moreover, the fictional elements were designed to give the impression to his readers that the events he was describing were actually taking place, thereby providing them with the opportunity to imagine his ideal commonwealth and effectively to try it on for size - albeit in their imaginations rather than in reality. This fitted with Harrington's underlying philosophy that people are more likely to be convinced of the viability of new systems and institutions if they experience them rather than just read about them. This strategy also extended beyond the genre of the work to its physical form, with the constitutional orders printed in black type to make them look to seventeenth-century readers like official proclamations issued by the Government.

As my initial research has revealed, Harrington was by no means unique in using this sort of strategy. Examining the form of other early modern political texts therefore has the potential to enrich and expand our understanding of those texts, the arguments their authors were advocating, and the impact they were designed to elicit in their readers. Over the next few months I will offer a number of case studies of early modern political writers whose attention to form was central to their mission and purpose.

Exploring these methods and considering how effective they were in achieving their ends has implications for our reading of those texts today and for the ways in which they are presented to modern audiences. It raises questions, for example, about the relative advantages of accessing the text in its original form, in a modern paper edition, or in a digital version. It also prompts us to think about whether there may be ways of reflecting the material elements of a text (its size, paper quality etc.) in digital form. Finally, all of this raises questions about how political arguments are articulated today. Does the format in which we receive political information or opinion affect how we understand or approach it? How far does the layout of a text determine the extent to which we engage with or interact with it? Do we respond differently to political ideas that come to us in hard copy (in a newspaper or printed book) as compared with those that we access digitally? And how do different digital formats affect our understanding? In both these contexts, paying attention to form as well as to substance may yield some interesting observations.

Myths Concerning Republicanism 3: Republics Require Virtuous Citizens

The events of the last two weeks have brought to the fore the relationship between the individual and society. The spread of Covid-19, as well as our ability to access food and other basic necessities, depend on whether people behave in their own or the public interest. Moreover, many commentators have noted that this crisis has brought out both the best and worst in people. Though this blogpost was written before the Coronavirus situation in the UK escalated and we were confined to our homes, exploring the role that virtue can and should play in society now seems particularly pertinent.

Those who have written about the history of republicanism tend to agree that two key concepts lie intertwined at its heart: liberty and virtue. Recent scholarship has placed greater emphasis on the former. Particularly influential has been Quentin Skinner's argument that there is a distinctive understanding of liberty popular with past republican thinkers, which insists that freedom requires not just the absence of physical restraint (as the liberal understanding would suggest) but also not being dependent on another person's will. This understanding of liberty as non-dependence is central to Philip Pettit's influential attempt to establish neo-republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism today. It is no doubt easier for current advocates of republican government to emphasise liberty, which remains a fundamental and respected value in the twenty-first century, than to try to argue in favour of virtue, a value that, aside from aficionados of virtue ethics, brings with it connotations of ancient self-sacrifice and Christian moralising.

Another myth about republican government that potentially amounts to an objection to its revival in the present, then, is that it requires the exercise of an unreasonable degree of virtue on the part of citizens. As with the other myths that have been explored in this blog, there is some justification for this.

Jacques-Louis David, ‘Brutus and the Lictors’ reproduced thanks to the Getty’s Open Content program.

The ancient philosopher Cicero did much to cement the importance of virtue within the republican tradition. In his book De Officiis (On Duties) he took from Plato's Republic two crucial pieces of advice for those taking charge of public affairs: 'first to fix their gaze so firmly on what is beneficial to the citizens that whatever they do, they do with that in mind, forgetful of their own advantage. Secondly, let them care for the whole body of the republic rather than protect one part and neglect the rest' (Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, Cambridge, 1991, p. 33). Elsewhere in the work he voiced the idea that makes such behaviour seem impossible. Noting that, of the many fellowships that bind humans together, the most precious is the republic, he went on: 'What good man would hesitate to face death on her behalf, if it would do her a service?' (Cicero, On Duties, p. 23). 

This idea that republican virtue requires the subordination of one's private interests to the public good, and that a good republican must be prepared to make immense sacrifices for the good of the whole, was reiterated in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most powerful reflection of it is to be found in the art work of the French revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David. His painting Brutus and the Lictors (1789) drew on a famous story from Roman history to explore the central themes of patriotism and the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the state. Lucius Junius Brutus, who had been responsible for expelling the Tarquins from Rome and thereby establishing the republic, discovered that his sons had been acting to restore the monarchy. He prioritised the good of the state over his own family by sentencing his sons to death for treason. While David's picture captures the enormous weight of Brutus's sacrifice, the message is clear that he made the right decision.

This understanding of 'virtue' is still in evidence today in the respect shown to veterans and their families. Moreover it is currently on display among those working in the NHS, care homes, supermarkets, and other essential services who are continuing to attend work despite the risks to their own health. Nevertheless few would welcome the notion, under normal circumstances, that civilian citizens should regularly be expected to put their lives or those of their family on the line for the public good.

I want to offer two thoughts in response to this myth. First that if we understand what is required in less extreme terms we can perhaps find some value in grounding our society more firmly in virtue - in a concern for the public good rather than mere private interests. Secondly, that some republican theorists were well aware that expecting human beings willingly to make huge sacrifices for the good of the public was unrealistic. They suggested, instead, that laws and systems of rewards and punishments could be used to create a situation in which people could be motivated by self-interested concerns to behave in a way that benefited the public as a whole. This approach might offer some possibilities for future policy.

To some degree those of us living in countries with a welfare state already accept the principle of sacrificing individual advantages for the good of the whole. The National Health Service in the UK, for example, is premised on the belief that free health care at the point of need is a public good and that individual citizens must sacrifice a portion of their income in order to pay for it. Similarly, here in the UK taxes ensure that free primary and secondary education is available to all children up to the age of 18, and this is paid for by all citizens regardless of whether they themselves have children, or indeed whether they choose to send their children to state schools.

We could extend this idea to other aspects of society. In an article that I linked to in last month's blogpost, George Monbiot argues that the choice we have to make is between 'public luxury for all, or private luxury for some'. He encourages us to imagine a society in which the rich sacrifice their private swimming pools and the middle class their private gym membership, reinvesting that money in high quality public sports facilities that are open to all. A society where a purpose-built public transport system provides swift, efficient, and comfortable travel for everyone, making it rational for individuals to leave their cars at home or abandon them altogether. One in which private gardens of varying sizes are exchanged for vast public parks complete with imaginatively thought out, well constructed, and properly maintained playgrounds that provide opportunities for all children to play and have fun, while in the process improving their health and wellbeing

Portrait of Pieter de la Court by Abraham Lambertsz van den Tempel (1667). Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The problem is how we persuade people to make such sacrifices. We can find some answers by examining republican arguments of the past. While some republicans - particularly those of a strongly religious bent such as John Milton and Algernon Sidney - insisted on the need for genuine virtue on the part of rulers and citizens alike, others - including the Dutch thinkers Johann and Pieter de la Court, the Englishman James Harrington, the Frenchman the Abbé Mably, and the American John Adams - did not have such high expectations of the human capacity for virtue. They accepted that the majority of people would not be willing to make sacrifices for the public good unless it was clearly in their interests to do so. Consequently they argued that laws should be designed so as to direct people towards virtuous behaviour or that other incentives - such as honours and rewards - could be used to induce people to act in the public interest.

Harrington's whole constitutional system was designed with this end in mind. His most famous articulation of the argument was his story of two girls dividing a cake between them. If one girl cuts the cake, but the other gets first choice as to which piece she wants, the first girl will be led by her own self-interest (in this case understood as her desire to get the largest piece of cake) to divide the cake as evenly as she possibly can. Harrington used this as a metaphor for the organisation of legislative power within the state. He insisted on a bicameral legislature and argued that the upper house or senate should make legislative proposals, but the lower house should have the final say as to whether to accept or reject them. By this means the senate would be induced only to propose legislation that was in the public interest, since if they put forward measures in their own interests, the lower house would reject them.

Portrait of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

A different method was proposed by Mably. He insisted that human reason and virtue were too weak to act alone  and that only a small proportion of people in any society would be capable of being led by reason at all times. Yet, he believed that even some of the strongest passions, if carefully orchestrated, could become virtues by being directed towards the public good. Offering rewards for public-spirited behaviour could ensure that ambition or the desire for fame and glory could be channelled towards positive ends. There is a close link between these methods and what modern behavioural scientists call nudge theory.

It would be naïve to think that society could be transformed overnight, but it would also be wrong to think that governments are impotent in these matters. Changes can be made by those courageous enough to do so. On 29 February 2020 the government of Luxembourg introduced free public transport  across the entire country. In addition to seeing public transport as a public good, this is also a move designed to bring an even greater public benefit - that of improving the environment. There is evidence to suggest that this move alone may not be sufficient to encourage car users to make fewer journeys. But when pull factors - such as free public transport - are combined with push factors - an increase in parking fees, congestion charging, and increased fuel taxes - the desired outcome can perhaps be achieved. The pertinent question, then, is not whether citizens are virtuous enough to put the public good before their own private interests, but rather whether politicians are courageous enough to put in place the measures that would induce them to do this.

Myths Concerning Republicanism 2: Republican Government has always been Aristocratic

January's blogpost explored the myth that republican government is necessarily anti-monarchical. This month I want to consider another myth: that republican government is inherently aristocratic or élitist in character and therefore unsuited to the democratic nature of twenty-first-century states.

Print of Geneva in 1630. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

There is some justification for this characterisation. In the ancient world republican government was associated with slavery, the exclusion of women from the political sphere, and the restriction of political participation to certain groups. Indeed, the exercise of citizenship depended on the work carried out by non-citizens (including slaves, women, servants, and foreigners), which made it possible for citizens to devote their attention to political matters. Moreover, later republican governments were criticised for descending into oligarchy. Venice's Grand Council was initially composed of all male inhabitants but due to citizenship being restricted to the descendants of those original citizens, by 1581 it was accorded to just over 1% of the population. In the Genevan republic the cost of claiming citizenship became more expensive over time, restricting who could take it up. In addition, power was increasingly moved away from the General Council - comprising all citizens - and towards smaller bodies that were dominated by a few families.

Frontispiece to The Federalist Papers. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of the modern representative republic proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it undercut the need for citizens to be supported by non-citizens by making citizenship a less onerous activity. Yet, at the same time, it created a political élite distinct from the wider citizen body whose role it was to govern. For some thinkers this was a positive move. They saw representation not simply as a necessary evil in the large states of the modern world, but as a good in itself. In The Federalist Papers James Madison insisted that in a representative government 'public views' would be 'refined' and 'enlarge[d]' by being passed through 'the medium of a chosen body of citizens' who would be wiser than the rest and therefore better able to determine the true interest of the nation. He went on: 'Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.' (Publius, The Federalist Papers, X).

Yet, as debates at the time make clear, this was not the only way of organising representative government. Anti-Federalists in America, and various individuals and groups in Europe, proposed representative systems that maintained a closer connection between elected delegates and those they represented. The mechanisms they advocated included short terms and regular rotation of office, powerful local assemblies, binding mandates, and even the popular ratification of laws. The way in which the modern representative republic was organised did serve to create a narrow political élite, but that was a deliberate choice rather than the only option available.

Where the Federalists chose to build on the aristocratic tendency within republican thought, an alternative more democratic strand also existed

Portrait of James Harrington from The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington… ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Some republicans insisted that popular participation (rather than anti-monarchism) was the defining feature of republican government. William Walker argues that the ancient historian Sallust saw the establishment of the tribunate as more important to the Roman Republic than the displacement of the monarch by consuls (William Walker, 'Sallust and Skinner on Civil Liberty', European Journal of Political Theory, 5:3, 2006). Likewise, for James Harrington it was not the presence or absence of a single figurehead at the apex of the system that determined whether or not a regime was a commonwealth, but rather whether or not the people (via their popular assembly) had the final say over which legislation was passed and enacted (Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 2019). Similarly, John P. McCormick has argued that Niccolò Machiavelli offered an anti-élitist critique of republican practice. In contrast to Francesco Guicciardini's "senatorial" model of politics, he favoured a "tribunate" model which embraced popular deliberation and employed extra-electoral methods to secure the accountability of those in power (John P. McCormick, 'Machiavelli Against Republicanism On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments", Political Theory, 31:5, 2003, 615-43).

Both Machiavelli and Harrington were also advocates of the idea that extremes of wealth and poverty would pose a direct threat to the survival of the republic. Machiavelli famously argued that if the system was well-constituted the public should be rich, but the citizens poor (Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 475). This idea has a modern echo in the notion that we must choose between public luxury for all or private luxury for some. Other thinkers called for balance and moderation. Harrington claimed that: 'There is a mean in things: as exorbitant riches overthrow the balance of a commonwealth, so extreme poverty cannot hold it nor is by any means to be trusted with it.' (James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, 1992, p. 77). A similar view was endorsed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who insisted that in order to secure civil freedom: 'no citizen [can] be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, 1997, p. 78). The problem with wealth and luxury, Rousseau insisted, was that they exerted a corrupting influence, encouraging the citizens to put their own private interests above those of the republic.

The Leaders of the Knights of Labour with Terence Powderly in the centre. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is also evident that even after the emergence of representative republics, the language of republicanism could be used by marginalised or excluded groups against their oppressors. As Alex Gourevitch has demonstrated, this tactic was deployed to great effect by 'The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor', the first labour organisation in the United States of America to admit both white and black workers (Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth. Cambridge, 2015). Its leaders deliberately used republican arguments to criticise wage labour. George McNeill spoke of the 'inevitable and irresistible conflict' between the system of wage labour and republican governance (p. 100). The reason for this, as Terence Powderly explained, was that the wage labour system generated economic inequalities that were translated into political inequalities. Drawing directly on the understanding of liberty as non-dependence, and on arguments that had been used in the seventeenth century to insist that subjects were unfree even under a mild and gentle monarch, the Knights insisted that a worker would be a slave even if employed by 'the gentlest man in the world' 'if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will' (pp. 14-15). The solution, they argued, was to establish cooperatives so that workers could collectively own and manage the factories in which they worked. By applying the conception of liberty as non-dependence to the economic as well as the political sphere, these labour republicans succeeded in making republican arguments applicable not just to independent property owners, but to all workers - white and black, male and female.

While republicanism has taken an aristocratic form in both theory and practice in the past this was often a deliberate strategy rather than a necessity. The history of the republican tradition can provide arguments in favour of popular participation in government, warnings against excessive inequalities among citizens, and evidence of the importance of economic as well as political inequalities (and of the relationship between the two). Rather than dismissing republicanism as inherently aristocratic, then, it might be more profitable to draw on these resources to create a version of republicanism suited to the democratic states of the twenty-first century.

Civil Religion from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

October proved to be a busy month for conferences. Just days after having returned from Wolfenbüttel invigorated by discussions around 'Translating Cultures' I was part of a team organising a conference at Newcastle University on the subject of 'Civil Religion from Antiquity to Enlightenment'. Here too there were a number of outstanding papers that stimulated thought and provoked discussion on this fascinating, but understudied topic. The downside of hosting a conference at your own institution is that it is not easy to prevent other commitments from encroaching, so unfortunately I was not able to attend all of the sessions. The following reflections, then, are based on those that I was able to hear.

The biggest questions sparked for me concerned definitions. What do we mean by 'civil religion'? Has it been understood consistently in all times and places? And is civil religion best understood as a tradition, a concept, or an approach?

Ronnie Beiner, author of Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 2010), drew on Rousseau's distinction between civil religion - the subordination of religion to politics - and theocracy - the subordination of politics to religion. In the modern world, Beiner explained, there is a third way of conceptualising the relationship between religion and politics - the idea of complete separation. This is the conception that lies at the heart of the fully secularised polity favoured by liberals, where religion should not play any role at all in the political sphere.

Mark Goldie in his paper 'Civil Religion in Early Modern England' began by acknowledging the distinction between civil religion, theocracy and secularism, but went on to suggest that there is an alternative approach to civil religion which understands it to be deeply embedded within Christian theology rather than constituting a dissolution of it. In Goldie's view, early-modern civil religion was a Christian project. The issue was not Christianity, but Priestianity. Considered in this way civil religion is concerned as much with reformation and a return to the apostolic church as it is with the subordination of religion to politics.

William Prynne after Unknown artist, line engraving. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D26979. Produced under a creative commons license.

Various other speakers flagged up the importance of this approach, particularly in an English context. Esther Counsell showed how Puritans like Alexander Layton and William Prynne saw the reframing of the church on the model of civil religion as the basis for reform. Nor was this understanding of civil religion as a Christian project merely a feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In both his paper, and the forthcoming book on which it is based, Ashley Walsh demonstrates the richness and vitality of the idea of a Christian version of civil religion in eighteenth-century Britain.

Yet, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England there was no single answer to the question of the appropriate relationship between religion and politics. Polly Ha flagged up some of the difficulties faced by the Anglican establishment. In theory it sought to introduce a 'civil' reformation, yet in practice incivility, discord, and dissent soon challenged this ideal, raising difficult questions as to the boundaries of civil and religious jurisdiction. This was a theme picked up by Connor Robinson in 'Reformation, Civil Religion, and the University in Interregnum England', which examined the role of universities, at least in the eyes of some, as vehicles for the implementation of civic reformation. John Coffey outlined the wide variety of attitudes to church-state relations that were being voiced by the 1650s. Presbyterians insisted on religious uniformity and the existence of a national church. Magisterial independents, by contrast, firmly rejected the idea of a national church, but accepted that the magistrate could have authority over national religion and the policing of heretics. Radical independents went further still, repudiating magisterial enforcement of orthodoxy and the policing of heresy. Their position was very close to that of the Godly republicans who called for the complete separation of Church and State. Harringtonian republicans, by contrast, adopted a more moderate position that again supported the idea of national religion (though not, Coffey asserted, a national church) and insisted on congregationalism, while still defending toleration for gathered churches. It became very clear that there is no single early-modern English version of civil religion

The theme of complexity was arrived at from a different direction by Charlotte McCallum and Jacqueline Rose, who focused on the potential sources of the idea of civil religion for early-modern English thinkers. McCallum, in a paper on the early-modern translations of Niccoló Machiavelli's works into English, noted that Machiavelli himself offered not one, but two versions of civil religion: false religion used for political purposes (perhaps a negative reading of Beiner's Rousseauian definition) and the appropriation of religious values as good civic values in the style of Numa (which fits more with Goldie's approach). Not surprisingly, McCallum showed that most seventeenth-century writers favoured the latter and actually used Machiavelli's acknowledgement that religion could perform a valuable political role to 'prove' that atheism was wrong. Rose, in a paper entitled 'Civil Religion and the Anglo-Saxon Church', probed the intriguing question of why the Anglo-Saxon system, which might appear a useful home-grown example of civil religion, was not widely used in that way by early-modern writers. Showing the problems that the presence of the clergy within Anglo-Saxon Parliaments raised for those intent on limiting priestcraft, Rose insisted that we should be careful not to collapse royal supremacy into civil religion. What we have, she concluded, is not a single discourse, but a series of languages that overlap with and cross over each other in complex and complicating ways.

The complexities continued after the revolutionary period and on into the eighteenth century, as John Marshall's paper on the extent to which John Locke can be said to have advanced civil religion and Katie East's on debates surrounding religion during the early English Enlightenment made clear. And they become further elaborated if we extend our horizons beyond England, as some speakers did

Statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau next to the Pantheon in Paris. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

Nevertheless, much would surely be learned by tracing other national stories in the same detail as has been done for England. Venice would be an interesting case study, and so too would colonial America, which was touched on in Christie L. Maloyed and Andrew Murphy's paper 'Civil Religion on the Ground: Theory and Practice in Early Pennsylvania'. They showed how some of the ideas that had been developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were not only put into practice, but also transformed in the rather different circumstances of colonial and revolutionary America. A comparison with the French case too might prove particularly revealing. An account that examined Gallicanism, Jansenism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the Cult of the Supreme Being, setting them against traditional understandings of civil religion and the English case could be fruitful. Some of the important distinctions here were flagged up in Delphine Doucet's paper, which showed that Rousseau was at odds with other figures within the traditional canon - not least Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes - in his insistence that both natural religion and toleration were crucial to civil religion, and in his refusal to see priests as civil servants. To what extent this distinctive perspective was coloured by Rousseau's Genevan roots, or indeed, by his French connections, is as yet unclear.

Coming away from this conference, as with the previous one, I very much wished that I had the time necessary to follow up all the fascinating intellectual threads that had been revealed.

Translating Cultures

The main square in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

Last year I attended a 'Translating Cultures' workshop organised by Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck. I found it so collegial and thought-provoking that I was delighted to be invited to attend the follow-up this October. The occasion did not disappoint. The location is one where early-modern historians instantly feel at home: the beautiful Lower Saxony town of Wolfenbüttel has a remarkably well preserved collection of 17th century houses, complete with mottos carved into the lintels. And the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), which hosted our workshop, is a wonderful research library based around the collection put together by Duke August the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

The HAB and its director, Peter Burschel, and head of scientific programmes, Volker Bauer, were very hospitable hosts, but the positive and stimulating atmosphere also owed much to the excellent conference organisers, Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck, and to the other participants, who without exception delivered thoughtful and engaging papers. Gaby has offered a summary of the workshop here, but I would like to take this opportunity to offer my own reflections on some of the themes that surfaced during the two days. In particular, the papers provided food for thought on three issues that I have been pondering myself recently: language, genre, and materiality.

Given our focus on translation, it is not surprising that several papers touched on the limitations of language and the difficulty sometimes of conveying a particular idea or concept in a foreign language. Lázló Kontler in his paper on the translation of Montesquieu into Hungarian, pointed out that 'parliament' is a difficult word to translate into Hungarian. It ended up being translated as 'word house' which while alluding to the etymology of the word, seemed rather quaint and provoked smiles around the room. Several papers developed this point to suggest that certain ideas or concepts might be easier to express in one language than in another. In his paper on the Book of Job, Asaph Ben-Tov noted that, while this was not (as some in the early-modern period had believed) a Hebrew translation from an Ancient Arabic source, there was nevertheless a sense in which the ideas it contained could be more easily understood in Arabic than in Hebrew. Nor is this just a question of the written word. Jaya Remond in discussing colonial botanical texts, raised the idea that images might themselves be viewed as a language made up of lines and dots, and that a picture might evoke an object much more effectively than could ever be achieved in words. Rachel Foxley went even further in exploring language, translated words, and the power they wield. She looked at the translation of terms from Latin and Greek as a way into thinking about how the language of innovation and revolution developed in seventeenth-century England. She showed that, while the Roman term 'novae res' evoked a sense of innovation that was linked to the restless crowd and to demagoguery, this was set against an Aristotelian understanding of the means by which more gradual change by the authorities might bring about revolution. In this way, ancient languages of innovation were deployed by both sides in the build up to the English Civil War.

Portrait of Aphra Behn by Robert White, after John Riley line engraving, published 1716. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D30183. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

Not only were specific terms or languages felt to be most appropriate for conveying particular concepts or ideas, but the choice of genre may also be important. In her paper on Aphra Behn's translations of French works, Amelia Mills made the fascinating observation that Behn's version of Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de L'Isle d'Amour not only translated the language from French to English, but also transformed an original prose work interspersed with small sections of verse into a work that was entirely in poetic form. As a group we speculated about Behn's motivations in doing so. Perhaps she viewed poetry as higher form and was using the transformation to show off her skills, or perhaps she felt poetry to be a more appropriate mode of writing for a woman at that time.

Several papers noted the fact that in the early-modern period historical writing was often seen as a good vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. Helmer Helmers described the deliberate efforts of the Dutch government to produce histories of the Dutch Revolt for European dissemination. The state invested more than 40,000 guilders in histories of this key event that were translated into German, French, and Latin. Emanuel van Meteren's history of the Dutch Revolt proved particularly popular going through 111 editions and translations between 1596 and 1647 including no fewer than 74 German versions. Almost as popular were the Italian translations of the historical works of William Robertson, examined by Alessia Castagnino, with more than 50 translations appearing in the early-modern period. In her paper on the 1627 French translation of Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VII, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq delved into the question of why that work should have been of interest to the French at that time, concluding that the reign of Henry VII offered a useful antidote to French absolutism. It held a revealing mirror to Louis XIII in presenting a King who sought to reconcile warring parties and to promote religious concord.

French translation of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government by P. A. Samson. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Several participants touched on another genre of writings which while not translations in themselves, are closely connected to them - reviews. For Thomas Munck these offer one valuable way of gaining an insight into the 'imagined community of readers' that can prove so elusive to those of us working on the early-modern period. Reviews were presented as particularly useful in this regard as they need not be purely national in focus, and therefore when dealing with translated works may provide insight into transnational communities of readers. Thomas - and Gaby Mahlberg in her paper on German reviews of Algernon Sidney's Discourses - noted that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reviews start making comments about the nature and quality of the translations themselves, suggesting an emerging understanding of what was considered a good translation. In my own paper on the reception of James Harrington's ideas in revolutionary France I pointed out that while reviews are not translations, a review in a different language from the original work can perform some of the same functions, not least in providing an account of the argument and key points of the work for a foreign audience and many early-modern reviews included lengthy quotations translated directly from the text, thereby constituting at least a partial translation. Both French and German reviews of Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government that appeared in the early eighteenth century are a good example in this regard. The idea that the basic content of a text could be disseminated without an actual translation appearing was also picked up by Lázló Kontler who noted that Montesquieu's ideas had already been much debated in Hungary long before the first full translation of The Spirit of the Laws appeared in 1833.

Finally, various papers touched on the materiality of texts, including translations, and what texts as physical objects and associated artefacts might reveal about the aims, audience, and reception of texts. William Robertson, Alessia Castagnino explained, deliberately laid out the original text of his history of Scotland so that it could appeal to two distinct groups of readers - on the one hand scholars and on the other a more general, casual public - placing the notes and other scholarly apparatus in such a way that they could be accessed, but did not interfere with the flow of the narrative. The Italian translators, however, eschewed this method, instead producing separate translations for different audiences. Crocchi's 1765 translation was deliberately aimed at government and administrative officials, men of letters and science, whereas Rossi's 1779-80 translation was directed at a wider audience. The absence of illustrations and other supplementary elements ensured that the volume was cheap, costing the same as just 24 eggs, prompting Alessia to joke that  Italians could choose between Robertson's history and a very large omelette.

The interior of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

A number of the translations discussed at the workshop were also linked to or associated with other objects. For example, the Collection Magliabechi, put together by Raimondi on behalf of the Medici and discussed by Luisa Simonutti, involved the gathering and production not just of books but also of seeds for the Medici garden. Moreover, the collection includes not just the books themselves, but also some of the original plates that were used to produce the lavish images that adorned them. As far as I am aware, Thomas Hollis did not send seeds from England to Europe or America, but he sent more or less everything else. Moreover, as Mark Somos demonstrated in his paper, Hollis sought to link texts with other texts, and with objects and networks. This is evident from the extensive marginalia that he added to the copies of books he sent to libraries around the globe. As Mark argued, Hollis's aim was to guide his readers through the works, pointing them to related works (sometimes even giving page numbers) and creating a trail for them through republican writings. I was particularly fascinated by the observation that his technical comments on the works of John Milton (an author almost always featured in the donations he sent) often refer to Harrington, suggesting that Hollis wanted his audience to read Milton through the lens of The Commonwealth of Oceana.

It is a sign of a good workshop that it prompts one to ponder new projects and future work. It is testimony to just how good this one was that I left eager to pick up Hollis's trail for myself and to follow his texts across Europe and North America. For now, though, I think I will have to remain content with looking forward to next year's workshop.

James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography

On 3 October my intellectual biography of James Harrington will be published by Oxford University Press. While I have already said much about that book, its origins and its arguments, in my blogposts, I could not let this date pass without revisiting some of the aims of that book and how working on it has affected my research interests and priorities.

Something I've learned from my research into Harrington is the multivalence and malleability of key political terms not least 'republic' and 'democracy'. Harrington has conventionally been characterised as a leading republican thinker - particularly since the publication of John Pocock's groundbreaking research on him in the 1970s. Yet Harrington's republicanism was complex and he failed to adhere either to the conventional constitutional definition of a republic as a government without a single person at its head, or to the necessity of a genuinely virtuous citizenry. He accepted the possibility, even the potential benefits, of having a single figurehead at the apex of a republican system of government, as long as that individual was not treated as sovereign and was carefully constrained in the exercise of executive power. Indeed he even suggested that the former king Charles I or the protectors Oliver or Richard Cromwell could have performed this role if they had behaved differently. He also argued bitterly with other republican thinkers in the late 1650s, eschewing the conventional republican understanding of civic virtue and instead adopting a Hobbesian view of human nature and acknowledging the role of self-interest in public affairs.

A Proposition in order to the Proposing of a Commonwealth or Democracy, one of several Harringtonian works that explicitly advocates democracy. Taken from James Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington… (London, 1737). Author’s own edition.

In some ways, given his firm commitment to the primacy of popular power, Harrington might be more appropriately described as a 'democrat' than a 'republican'. It is certainly significant that while he generally avoided the term 'republic' (preferring instead the more ambiguous 'commonwealth'), he did describe the system that he advocated as a 'democracy'. Yet, Harrington's understanding of this term is equally idiosyncratic. He certainly saw the people as performing an important role within a commonwealth, making them the final arbiters as to whether a piece of legislation should be enacted or not, and insisting on measures to make officeholders accountable to those they represent. But, at the same time, he argued that the popular will should be tempered by the wisdom of the few, assigning them the right to frame legislative proposals; and he imposed other restrictions on the democratic participation of citizens. Ultimately, as Colin Davis has argued, Harrington's aim was to protect the popular will and the pursuit of the public interest from the danger of demagoguery and party diverting it in the direction of particular interests (J. C. Davis, 'James Harrington and the Rule of King People', in Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts, ed. Xavier Márquez, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 65-72).

A second lesson I have drawn from this project is the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the history of political thought, while at the same time acknowledging the difficulties inherent in doing so. Harrington has tended to be understood as a narrowly political thinker - while Pocock paid attention to his economic, historical, scientific, and religious ideas, these aspects of his thinking have not received much attention from subsequent scholars. Yet a full understanding of Harrington's position requires an appreciation of all aspects of his thought, unhindered by the imposition of disciplinary divisions that only emerged long after his death. Harrington applied his understanding of democracy not just to politics but also to religion. Ultimately, not only could the political, religious, military, and judicial organisation of Oceana be mapped directly on to its economic foundations, but the whole system was grounded in Harrington's philosophical understanding of the nature of human beings and their relationship to God, the state, and the universe.

The Manner and Use of the Ballot in which Harrington makes use of a visual image as a means of bringing his ideas alive for his reader. Taken from Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works.

What this implies is that a full understanding of Harrington's ideas requires the skills of the historian, economist, and the theologian. Also important are those of the literary theorist. Harrington sought to convey his ideas not just via the content of his works, but also through the genres in which he wrote, and even placed emphasis on the material form of his texts. The form of Oceana blended royalist and parliamentarian genres (illustrated by the use of different typefaces), just as his arguments were designed to reconcile these groups to his proposed constitutional framework. Moreover, Oceana, and his other works, were written in the light of his belief that people learn better via experience than by instruction. His adoption of a quasi-utopian format, his thick sensory-rich descriptive passages, and his occasional use of visual devices, were all designed to bring his model alive for his readers to allow them to experience it in their imaginations.

Finally, as earlier blogposts have made clear, researching Harrington over the last three years has made me particularly attentive to the continued currency of his ideas today, and of the utility of understanding past political events and debates as we propose future solutions.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 6. Sir John Fortescue

James Harrington is often seen as an aristocratic republican who like others in that tradition placed power in the hands of a narrow political élite. It is certainly true that he believed that within every society there was a natural aristocracy whose members were 'wiser, or at least less foolish, than all the rest' (James Harrington The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge, p. 23). For this reason, in his constitutional system, he insisted that only the senate should debate legislation, the lower house being restricted to voting to accept or reject the senate's proposals. Yet his views were more complicated than this might suggest. As noted in last month's post, he was explicitly committed, via the mechanism of an agrarian law, to ensuring that landed property within the country did not become concentrated in the hands of a few, but would in future be relatively evenly spread among the population. Moreover, he was emphatic that his natural aristocracy was determined not by birth, but by wealth and election, embracing the role that social mobility could play within society. 

Harrington's relative political inclusivity is encapsulated in his manipulation of the traditional idea of the body politic. He was innovative in how he used that metaphor, subverting an idea conventionally used to shore up kingship so as to support democratic government. (The full case for Harrington's democratic credentials is made in my forthcoming book). Yet, novel as his conception was, it was indebted to the ideas of the fifteenth-century legal and political theorist Sir John Fortescue.

Sir John Fortescue by William Faithorne, line engraving, published 1663. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License from the National Portrait Gallery - NPG D22739.

Fortescue, who lived c.1395-1477, was a key figure in the government and judiciary of fifteenth-century England, serving as MP eight times between 1421 and 1436 and being made Chief Justice of the King's Bench in January 1442. Exiled following the defeat of the Lancastrians under Henry VI at the Battle of Towton (1461), Fortescue ploughed his extensive knowledge and experience into works such as In Praise of the Laws of England. Having repudiated his former support for the Lancastrians following the Battle of Tewkesbury (1471), he was pardoned and presented his work The Governance of England to King Edward IV.

In his works Fortescue employed the metaphor of the body politic. Though the use of this idea dates back to Plato and Aristotle, the understanding of the concept in the early modern period owed much to medieval developments. An analogy was drawn between the human body and the state (and within it usually between the head and the king) and both were generally viewed as microcosms of a divinely inspired natural order

Fortescue was crucial in adapting the metaphor to fit the particularities of the English system. His major contribution to political thought was to contrast 'royal dominion', which he associated with continental nations, and especially France, with the 'political and royal dominion' of England. As he explained at the beginning of The Governance of England:

There are two kinds of kingdoms, one of which is a lordship called in Latin dominium regale, and the other is called dominium politicum et regale. And they differ in that the first king may rule his people by such laws as he makes himself and therefore he may set upon them taxes and other impositions, such as he wills himself, without their assent. The second king may not rule his people by other laws than such as they assent to and therefore he may set upon them no impositions without their own assent. (Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, in On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood, Cambridge, 1997, p. 83).

This understanding required Fortescue to adapt the conventional notion of the body politic. He accepted that a people cannot constitute a body without a head, and therefore when a people 'wills to erect itself into a kingdom or any other body politic' it 'must always set up one man for the government of all that body' (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, p. 20). Nevertheless, he insisted that the body was prior to the head, drawing on Aristotle's theory about the heart being the first part of the body to be formed: 

And just as in the body natural, as the Philosopher said, the heart is the first living thing, having in itself the blood which it sends forth to all the members, whereby they are quickened and live, so in the body politic the intention of the people is the first living thing, having in it the blood, namely, political provision for the interest of the people, which it transmits to the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is nourished and quickened. (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, pp. 20-1).

The heart, representing the people, is then both prior to the head and crucial for giving life to the whole. Moreover, Fortescue likened the laws of a nation to the sinews of the physical body in their capacity to hold that organism together. And he argued that just as the head of a physical body cannot change its sinews 'or deny its members proper strength and due nourishment of the blood' so a king could not change the laws or deprive the people 'of their own substance uninvited or against their wills' (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, p. 21).

Harrington's articulation of the body politic analogy combined Fortescue's insights with observations based on William Harvey's theory regarding the circulation of the blood (which I discussed in more detail in an earlier post):

So the parliament is the heart which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser store, the other less and full of a purer, sucketh in and gusheth forth the life blood of Oceana by a perpetual circulation (Harrington, Oceana, p. 174).

The frontispiece to William Harvey, Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Florence, 1928). Reproduced from a copy held in the Special Collections department of the Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Pybus X.v.09.

Here the heart represents not simply the people, but specifically the legislature. In addition Harrington, like Fortescue, emphasises the role of the blood, though he uses this to justify his theory of rotation of office. Just as blood moves around the body being constantly replenished but never completely replaced, so rotation ensures that the popular element of the political system is continually in existence and yet regularly renewed. Harrington's account of the body politic, then, builds on that of Fortescue, but pushes it in a more democratic direction through the emphasis on rotation and the associated idea that all should rule and be ruled in turn. At the same time, using that metaphor and associating the legislature with the heart, implied that there would still be a single figurehead at the apex of the system. In Oceana that position was to be held by the Lord Archon, a role that Harrington appears to have designed for Oliver Cromwell. Yet, just like Fortescue, Harrington insisted that such a ruler had to be constrained by the laws.

Harrington's body politic metaphor thus encapsulates the complexity of his system. While he was clearly influenced by classical and Renaissance thinkers from the republican tradition, their ideas were combined with native legal perspectives such as that offered by Fortescue. Similarly, Harrington's republicanism was not simply aristocratic, but also incorporated important democratic and monarchical elements. While some republicans were intent on securing the rule of a narrow political élite, the recent tendency to see that as the republican position and, consequently, to dismiss the insights that republicanism could offer us today is a mistake. The republican tradition was not uniform. Competing views were expressed by its exponents and it was flexible and adaptable. It has the potential to offer a more open and democratic vision of government, one that could serve us in the twenty-first century.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 5. Petrus Cunaeus

In previous blogposts I have explored the ways in which James Harrington drew on the ideas of earlier thinkers. So far my focus has been on figures who remain well known today: Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon. But Harrington was also inspired by thinkers whose names have not survived so well in popular memory. 

Petrus Cunaeus, reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One of these is the Dutch author Peter Cunaeus whose book De Republica Hebraeorum appeared in 1617 as part of a series of works produced by the Dutch printer Elsevier on past and present republics. It was translated into English by Clement Barksdale in 1653, not long after the English had established their own 'Commonwealth or Free State'. 

Harrington was particularly interested in two aspects of Cunaeus's account of the Hebrew Commonwealth. The first of these was the law of jubilee. This stated that every fifty years land that had been bought or alienated in the intervening period would be returned to its original owner. Cunaeus referred to this practice as the 'lex Agrarian Hebraeorum', which was translated by Barksdale as the 'Agrarian Law' (Petrus Cunaeus, Of the Common-Wealth of the Hebrews, translated by C. B., London, 1653, p. 13). Cunaeus did this in order to encourage comparison with other ancient practices, and especially the Roman agrarian law. Since Harrington explicitly advocated the establishment of an agrarian law for Oceana, this terminology - and Cunaeus's endorsement of the practice - was useful to him. The terms of Harrington's agrarian law were not identical to the Jewish idea of jubilee; he did not call for land to be returned to its original owner after a set period, but rather restricted the amount of land that could be passed on to one heir, effectively undermining the principle of primogeniture. Yet, both systems were designed to limit inequality without threatening social stability. 

The idea of an agrarian law was not popular at the time, even most seventeenth-century republicans followed Machiavelli in rejecting the practice. It is, therefore, all the more striking that Harrington followed Cunaeus in explicitly challenging Machiavelli's account of the fall of the Roman republic. Against Machiavelli, Cunaeus and Harrington insisted that it was the mismatch between the distribution of land and the holding of political power - essentially the failure to properly implement an agrarian law - that had caused the Roman republic to fall. Given the controversy surrounding agrarian laws, even among those who favoured republican government, Cunaeus's account was also useful to Harrington in its insistence that the law of jubilee was instituted by Moses at God's behest. Here, as elsewhere in his use of the Hebrew Commonwealth, Harrington was able to claim divine support for a controversial idea.

Image of Moses as taken from the frontispiece to The Oceana and other works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Religion also lay at the heart of the second aspect of Cunaeus's De Republica Hebraeorum that was important to Harrington. According to Cunaeus, God had given authority in both civil and religious matters to the civil magistrate. Instead of being viewed as separate jurisdictions, civil and religious affairs were both under the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Once again this prefigured Harrington's own insistence in The Commonwealth of Oceana that a national church be preserved; and that it, and its clergy, were to remain under the authority of the state, although he also insisted that liberty of conscience should be granted to members of other Protestant sects. On this point, too, Harrington's use of Cunaeus set him apart from other English republicans at the time, most of whom advocated the complete separation of church and state.

Paying attention to Harrington's use of Cunaeus serves to correct the understanding of English republicanism that has tended, at least until the early twenty-first century, to ignore its religious dimension. Being able to draw a parallel with the Hebrew Republic provided a religious justification for some of the more innovative elements of Harrington's programme. At the same time, we can see that the question of how to organise religion was itself central to his concerns. Thanks to Cunaeus, Harrington was able to view the Hebrew Commonwealth as an ancient example that could usefully be deployed in early-modern constitution building.

These observations also have resonance today. Separating church and state has not always worked as an effective means of ensuring toleration for religious groups, not least because it tends to set up a contrast between religious organisations and the secularism of the state. Harrington certainly believed that toleration could be better secured under a system in which the civil magistrate oversaw the state religion, but also allowed freedom of conscience to separatist groups. The question of what the relationship should be between politics and religion remains a live issue today and one on which the sometimes simplistic solutions of the present might be complicated and enriched by attention to past discussions.

The relationship between property and political power has also proved to be a hot political topic in recent months. Research by Guy Shrubsole suggests that 1% of the people now own half of the land in England (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author). Moreover, without government intervention even greater disparity is likely in the future, since landowners can use the income they gain from rent and capital appreciation to buy yet more property. This was why Harrington argued for government intervention to reduce future inequality. In the light of Shrubsole's research Peter Hetherington has pointed in a similar direction, suggesting that the solution is to end 'the inheritance and capital gains tax breaks which make trading land so attractive to the few at the expense of the many' (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/england-private-landowners-uk-reform-inheritance-tax). Yet many of those in positions of power remain unwilling to address the issue. At a time when the frontrunner in the Tory leadership campaign, Boris Johnson, has pledged to raise the higher-rate income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000, thereby cutting the tax bills of 3 million higher-income earners by approximately £3,000 (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/10/tory-leadership-race-what-are-candidates-promises-on-tax), we might wish to reconsider the mechanisms for redistributing wealth in the modern world and whether they are fit for purpose.

An Interlude: Thinkers as Readers

Programme for the workshop ‘David Hume as Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume’, 03.05.19.

In my last few blogposts I have been examining some of the thinkers whose works influenced James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. There are more figures I want to explore in future posts, but this month I want briefly to digress, by looking at someone who was influenced by him: David Hume. This is prompted by the fact that on 3rd May I attended a stimulating workshop at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh entitled 'David Hume as a Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume'. The workshop was organised by Max Skjönesberg and Robin Mills and included excellent papers by various scholars each of whom examined the ways in which the works of a particular thinker or genre influenced - or, in the words of the workshop’s subtitle, provoked - Hume. Working on my own paper for this workshop, at the same time as thinking about the various authors who inspired Harrington, led me to reflect more generally on this approach to the history of political thought, what it reveals, and how it could be used to enhance and enrich more conventional studies.

Of course, focusing on authors as readers of other authors immediately brings to the fore various problems. Several speakers at the workshop raised the question of what might constitute reliable evidence of one author having read another. The catalogue of a thinker's personal library, or one to which we know that thinker had access (as in the case of Hume and the Advocates Library), can be useful in this regard. The presence in such a catalogue of a particular book makes it possible, in some cases even probable, that the thinker had read that work, but on its own it cannot prove that (s)he did so. Even when it can be established that a thinker did read a particular work - for example where annotations in their own hand are found in a copy of the work, or where references are made in a commonplace book, diary or correspondence - it does not necessarily follow that that reading then influenced their own thought or writings. 

A more fruitful indication is evidence of one author borrowing (whether explicitly or implicitly) from another. In future, further advances may be made in this area as a result of improvements in digital technology, such as the development of sophisticated machine reading software. Yet it is also important to remember that a lack of critical engagement with a work does not necessarily constitute proof that the author has not been influenced or provoked by it. Furthermore, awareness of the ideas of a particular thinker may develop by reading abridgements or reviews rather than the work itself, or via discussions in settings such as debating societies or political clubs.

Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

A second observation to be made is that influence itself does not always take a simple form. This is something that I was particularly aware of in exploring Hume's reading of Harrington. Occasionally it is possible to identify an example of one thinker directly appropriating an idea from another. Hume, for example, adopts Harrington's preference for the rule of laws rather than men, though we might query whether he derived this directly from Harrington's works or via an intermediary and, indeed, whether Oceana was the true origin of that idea. Elsewhere we can find examples of thinkers embarking from a similar starting point, but moving in different directions, or of them using different methods to achieve similar ends. Alexandra Chadwick offered an example of the former in her paper on Hobbes and Hume, where she showed that they started from similar foundations in terms of their views of human nature and psychology, but diverged with regard to the vision of mankind and society that they sought to paint. Working the other way around, I noted that Hume shared Harrington's concern with accountability, but rejected his mechanism of rotation of office, and instead sought alternative measures to achieve that end. 

Joseph Collyer, portrait of David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery SP IV 7711.

This idea shades into another way of thinking about influence, which was explicitly articulated by Tim Stuart-Buttle, whereby one thinker generates problems or questions that are then addressed by later generations. This astute observation raises further questions and complexities. It might equally be the case that two contemporary thinkers engage with similar problems or adopt similar approaches not because one has influenced the other, but simply because they are operating within a common political and cultural context. Tim Hochstrasser suggested that this perhaps explains at least some of the affinities between Voltaire and Hume. Richard Whatmore complicated the idea in a different way, suggesting that it sometimes appears as though an author is only influential when (s)he is totally misunderstood by the next generation. Among the papers at the workshop there were certainly several examples of reading against the grain. For instance, Danielle Charette suggested that Hume did not read Machiavelli in the traditional way, but instead sought to move beyond the moralism of many eighteenth-century accounts, modelling instead how Machiavelli might be read fruitfully in the modern world.

While undoubtedly complex, there can be no doubt that juxtaposing authors in this way and examining in detail the connections - and the divergences - between their ideas, can enrich our understanding of the thought of both thinkers. On the basis of this, I was led to wonder whether focusing on reading might provide us with a new dimension to the exploration of intellectual history. Reading offers a middle way between the traditional 'great thinkers' approach to the history of political thought and the contextual methodology pioneered by members of the Cambridge School. Cambridge School historians quite rightly challenged the assumption that the great thinkers of the past were simply conversing with each other and were unaffected by the historical events and more trivial and quotidian intellectual debates going on around them. They have shown, for example, that Hobbes was deeply affected by the experience of living through the English Civil War and was responding to contemporary debates, such as that surrounding the swearing of the Engagement Oath - an oath of loyalty to the new regime in the aftermath of the regicide. Yet this emphasis on historical and intellectual context can sometimes lead us to forget that these people also read and responded to the writings of prominent thinkers who had gone before them. By adding some consideration of who and what thinkers of the past were reading, alongside what they were experiencing and which intellectual debates they were engaging with, we can perhaps produce a richer and more nuanced understanding of the genesis of their ideas.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana 4: Francis Bacon

Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes may be the two thinkers whose influence on James Harrington's thought has been explored in greatest detail, but they are by no means the only ones who left their mark on Oceana. On the very first page of Harrington's 'Introduction' he cites the name of another influential figure, Francis Bacon. Just as Harrington refers to Hobbes as 'Leviathan', so he assigns a pseudonym to Bacon, calling him 'Verulamius'. This was not, of course, a reference to Bacon's work, but to his title 'Baron Verulam of Verulam' which was derived from the Roman name for St Albans, where he lived. The title would have been readily associated with Bacon, since he referred to himself as Lord Verulam rather than Lord Bacon (Markku Peltonen, 'Bacon, Francis, Viscount St Alban (1561-1626)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). He also named the house that he built in the grounds of his family home at Gorhambury, Verulam House. The house no longer exists, but John Aubrey included a watercolour image of it in his account of Bacon in Brief Lives. 

Photograph of old Gorhambury House near St Albans, Hertfordshire. Image by Rachel Hammersley

This first reference to Bacon in Oceana concerns a quotation that Harrington took from Bacon's essay 'Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates' in which Bacon warns of the dangers for the state if the nobility and gentry are allowed to multiply too quickly. Bacon contrasts the development in England where the process was slow and gradual, with the quicker development in France. He praises Henry VII for enacting a system in which small plots of land could be worked by the owner and would provide for basic subsistence. This meant that, rather than having an economy based on peasants, England became a nation of small-property owners. Bacon perhaps, therefore, inspired Harrington's distinctive theory regarding the relationship between the distribution of land and the wielding of political power. Yet Harrington notes that Bacon, like Machiavelli before him, failed fully to appreciate the significance of the balance of property, harping 'much upon a string which he hath not perfectly tuned' (James Harrington, Oceana, London, 1656, 'Introduction').

'Verulamius' is referred to at several other points in Oceana most often to refer to the dangers of poor counsel and the importance of having wise men in positions of power. In addition to these direct references there are several notable parallels between Bacon's ideas and those of Harrington.

The porch of old Gorhambury House. Image by Rachel Hammersley

Harrington's inductive method, discussed in last month's blogpost, owed something to Bacon. Like Harrington, Bacon explicitly rejected the mathematical approach to natural philosophy. He insisted that mathematics was not a good tool for understanding the world. As evidence of this he referred to the fact that heavenly bodies do not move in perfect circles (Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2001, p. 26). Bacon also challenged the claim that deductive reasoning can yield informative truths. Instead he developed his own distinctive process of eliminative induction (Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, p. 158). This prefigured Harrington's methodology in moving inferentially from experience to first principles, though Bacon also insisted that in the field of natural philosophy it was necessary to then test those principles via fresh experiments (Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, p. 142).

Francis Bacon by John Vanderbank after an unknown artist, 1731? based on a work of c.1618. National Portrait Gallery NPG 520. Reproduced under a creative commons license. According to the English Heritage information board at old Gorhambury, the original image now hangs in the dining room at new Gorhambury.

There is also an interesting parallel between Bacon's attitude towards natural philosophers and Harrington's approach to politicians. Bacon did not believe that natural philosophers could simply be left to pursue their discipline as they saw fit, rather he developed a theory about how they should be governed so that, contrary to their natural inclinations, they would manifest good sense and behaviour in their observations and experiments (Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, pp. 12, 131). This is very similar to Harrington's belief that those in positions of power could not be expected to act virtuously or to put the public good before their own private interests. The trick, he insisted, was to rely on 'good laws' rather than 'good men', and to organise the political system so as to constrain and encourage rulers and ruled alike to behave appropriately.

One reason why the similarities between Bacon and Harrington have not been widely acknowledged is because Harrington, long  labelled as a 'classical republican', has tended to be seen as reviving ancient thought, whereas Bacon is commonly presented as the progenitor of modern ways of thinking. Yet both were in fact intent on charting a course between the two tendencies. Bacon explicitly spoke of finding a middle way between 'extreme admirations for antiquity' and 'extreme love and appetite for novelty' and Harrington referred to his intention to 'go mine own way, and yet follow the Ancients' (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, I, lvi: Works i. 170/iii. 59-60; Harrington, Oceana, p. 3).

Central to the forward-looking aspect of both men's thinking was an idea that has particular resonance today: the notion that knowledge should be useful. Bacon believed philosophy should be valued solely for its contribution to general welfare and insisted that the philosopher should be a public figure acting in the service of the common good. While Harrington was less explicit than Bacon about the need for knowledge to be useful, his own exploration of history and politics was emphatically aimed at exercising a positive impact on the contemporary world and solving some of the key issues of his day. 

The statue of Sir Francis Bacon in St Michael’s Church, St Albans. Image by Rachel Hammersley

Yet while Bacon and Harrington were both interested in the utility of knowledge, neither would have endorsed the crude version of this idea that dominates current political and intellectual agendas. This approach tends to see knowledge as a submissive servant to political and economic ends. Bacon was clear that in order for knowledge to be useful it had to be pursued in a comprehensive and unhindered fashion. In his essay 'The Praise of Knowledge' he pointed out that great discoveries - such as printing, artillery and the needle - were not the outcome of deliberate targeted investigations, but rather were 'stumbled upon and lighted upon by chance' (Francis Bacon, 'The Praise of Knowledge'). The idea was that the pursuit of knowledge by appropriate and methodical means would bring improvements to human life, not simply that political agendas should dictate what should be studied, let alone what the outcome of those studies should be.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana 3: Hobbes Again

Last month's blogpost focused on the relevance of the title and frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan for Harrington's work. In this month's post I want to develop these observations by examining Harrington's engagement with the language and argument of Hobbes's Introduction to that book, and the contrasting approaches to 'political science' of these two seventeenth-century thinkers.

The opening passage of Leviathan not only provided Harrington with his title, as I showed last month, but is also referenced repeatedly in his works. It is, therefore, worth quoting in full:

Postcard depicting an artistic reinterpretation of Hobbes’s Leviathan by Matt Kish.

NATURE (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring, and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge, 1991, p. 9).

Harrington even gave the title The Art of Lawgiving to one of his books. Taken from: The Oceana and other works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

In The Mechanics of Nature Harrington echoed Hobbes in describing 'Nature' explicitly as 'the Art of God' (James Harrington, The Mechanics of Nature in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland, London, 1737, p. xlii). Elsewhere he too presented constitution-building or 'lawgiving' as an art, suggesting that by practising it humans could imitate God's creativity. And like Hobbes, Harrington also drew on the analogy of the body politic:

AS the Form of a Man is the Image of God, so the Form of a Government is the Image of Man.

...

FORMATION of Government is the creation of a Political Creature after the Image of a Philosophical Creature; or it is an infusion of the Soul or Facultys of a Man into the body of a Multitude (James Harrington, A System of Politics in The Oceana and Other Works, p. 499).

Of course, the body-politic analogy had a long history and was, by the mid-seventeenth-century, a rather outdated metaphor. Yet neither Hobbes nor Harrington was using it in a purely conventional way. Both men sought to revolutionise the idea of the body politic and, with it, politics more generally.

Hobbes saw the body politic as an artificial rather than a natural body - more like a machine than a human being. Against this, Harrington was keen to emphasise that while government is a human creation, legislators are still bound to follow the dictates of nature as laid down by God:

Policy is an Art, Art is the Observation or Imitation of Nature, Nature is the Providence of God in the Government of the world, whence he that proceeds according unto Principles acknowledgeth Government unto God, and he that proceeds in defiance of Principles, attributes Government unto Chance, which denying the true God, or introducing a false One, is the highest point of Atheisme or Superstition (James Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government, London, 1658, 'The Epistle Dedicatory').

It is in this context that we can understand Harrington's choice of title as a response to Hobbes. While the Leviathan cannot be constrained by any human form (as the quotation from the book of Job that appears on Hobbes's frontispiece declared), it is nonetheless constrained in only being able to survive in the ocean and not on land.

William Harvey, Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Florence, 1928). Reproduced from a copy held in the Special Collections department of the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle. Pybus C.v.09. With thanks to Sam Petty.

While rejecting the idea of government as machine, Harrington nevertheless did not revert to the traditional notion of the body politic. Where these supported monarchy (with the king generally associated with either the head or the heart) Harrington offered a more democratic interpretation. He also drew an analogy between this interpretation and the ideas of one of the leading scientists of his day - who was also, significantly, a friend of Hobbes - William Harvey.

Harrington justified his bicameral legislature, and the rotation of office that operated in both houses, by reference to Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood:

So the parliament is the heart which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser store, the other less and full of a purer, sucketh in and gusheth forth the life blood of Oceana by a perpetual circulation (James Harrington, Oceana, London, 1656, p. 190).

Through adopting Harvey's notion of the heart as a pump composed of ventricles with distinctive functions, and of the blood as the life-force of the body - here equivalent to the people - Harrington implies that his theory is in tune with current scientific development. Yet the heart, on this account, represents not the king (as Harvey himself had suggested) but the legislature, thereby turning Harvey's (and by association Hobbes's) monarchism against them by showing that the body politic metaphor is capable of a democratic reading.

Harrington's desire to demonstrate his credibility as a scientific thinker has tended to be obscured by the recent emphasis on his status as a classical republican. Yet, like Hobbes, he was keen to put politics on a scientific footing.

Harvey, Exertatio Anatomica, pp. 56-7 from the Robinson Library edition.

Hobbes set out his vision of a science of politics in The Elements of Law and in De Cive. The approach he took was hinted at in the title of the former, which echoed that of the English translation of Euclid's famous work: The Elements of Geometry. For Hobbes, true scientific knowledge was not 'prudence' but 'sapience' and could only be arrived at via deductive reasoning. Hobbes dismissed prudence as mere experience of fact which was used 'to conjecture by the present, of what is past, and to come' (Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, Cambridge, 1928, p. 139). Harrington, by contrast, adopted this inductive approach as the foundation of his scientific knowledge, expressing the basic principle of his own political reasoning as follows: 'what was always so and no otherwise, and still is so and no otherwise, the same shall be so and no otherwise' and he insisted that we can be as certain of this as we are of other scientific principles. Responding to the criticism Hobbes had made of Aristotle and Cicero - that they had derived their politics not from the principles of nature, but from the practices of their own commonwealths, just as grammarians produce the rules of language from the writings of poets - Harrington suggested that this was equivalent to saying that Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood not on the basis of the principles of nature, but through studying the anatomy of a particular body (James Harrington, Politicaster, pp. 47-8). Harrington, thereby, likened his political methodology to the scientific methodology of anatomy:

Certain it is that the delivery of a model of government (which either must be of none effect, or embrace all those muscles, nerves, arteries and bones, which are necessary to any function of a well-ordered commonwealth) is no less than political anatomy (James Harrington, The Art of Law-giving, London, 1659, III, p. 4).

In Politicaster he repeated this point in language that deliberately echoed Hobbes: 'Anatomy is an Art; but he that demonstrates by this Art, demonstrates by Nature, and is not to be contradicted by phansie, but by demonstration out of Nature. It is no otherwise in the Politicks' (Harrington, Politicaster, p. 44). What this indicates is that Harrington was intent on basing his analysis not, as Hobbes did, on deductive logic, but, as Harvey did, on the analysis of specific models, both living and dead. In drawing on Harvey, and in coining the phrase 'political anatomy', Harrington further underlined the modern and scientific character of his thinking, pursuing Hobbes's aim to set politics on a scientific footing, while showing that Hobbes at best offered too narrow an account of what this would involve and at worst had misrepresented scientific methodology.

Harrington was playing a cunning game with Hobbes, opposing his politics 'to shew him what he taught me'. However, it was not successful. While Harrington frequently refers to Hobbes in his work, both explicitly and implicitly, the interest was not mutual. Hobbes never responds directly to Harrington's provocations, and does not appear to have engaged with his ideas. It would seem he had little interest in what he had taught Harrington - or in what Harrington might have been able to teach him.