James Harrington, born in January 1611, holds a unique and revealing role in the intellectual history of the English Revolution. Unlike Levellers, Diggers, or advocates for social equality, he was a prominent theorist of the rising gentry—the class that overthrew the old monarchy but was wary of social change extending beyond property rights. Despite his background, Harrington offered a profound insight: that "political power flows from property," highlighting the crucial link between landownership and political authority.
This single sentence, stripped of its republican veneer,
reveals a truth that bourgeois political science has long tried to hide.
Harrington recognised that the English Revolution was not merely a conflict
between a tyrant and his rivals but a reflection of a deep shift in land
ownership. The dissolution of monasteries, the sale of crown estates, and the
gradual decline of feudal tenures all changed the economic foundation of
English society. The monarchy did not fall simply because Charles I was
stubborn; it collapsed because its economic base had eroded. As Harrington
explained, “The cause lay in the soil, in who owned it and who worked it.”
This was a significant breakthrough. Harrington recognised,
even if imperfectly, that political structures originate from property
relations. Marx later acknowledged him—quite dryly, in a footnote—as one of the
“imaginative” thinkers who had seen the link between economic systems and
political authority. While Harrington did not yet see property as a social
relation of production, but rather as a thing to be allocated, he nevertheless
understood enough to reject the conspiratorial explanations popular at his
time.
The Gentry’s Republic
Harrington’s materialism was confined to the interests of
his class. He was a thinker for the gentry, not the common people. His
well-known “agrarian law,” which set caps on land holdings, was more about
safeguarding existing power than promoting equality. It aimed to block the
return of a landed elite that could threaten the republic. Harrington sought to
halt the revolution at the stage where the property-owning middle class had
already gained control.
The lower orders—the copyholders, the landless labourers,
the urban poor—were excluded from political life. Harrington’s commonwealth was
not a democracy; it was a constitutional mechanism for stabilising the rule of
property owners. His elaborate system of rotation, indirect elections, and the
separation of debating from voting was designed to prevent factional
domination, but equally to prevent the masses from exercising political power.
It was republicanism for gentlemen.
This was the core contradiction of the English Revolution.
The Levellers and Diggers derived much more radical conclusions from the same
assumptions. If political authority is tied to property, then true democracy
would demand the elimination of property distinctions. Gerrard Winstanley and
the Diggers recognised this so clearly that it scared both Cromwell and the
propertied republicans. In contrast, Harrington aimed to stop the revolution
right at the start of social change.
Harrington, Winstanley, Milton, Spinoza: A Comparison of
Revolutionary Thought
The English Revolution and the broader seventeenth-century
crisis sparked the emergence of a group of political thinkers whose ideas are
closely linked to the social classes they represented. Harrington, Winstanley,
Milton, and Spinoza were not merely detached intellectuals; they embodied the
specific interests of different social groups and reacted to the decline of
feudalism alongside the rise of bourgeois society. Their differences extend
beyond ideas—they are fundamentally rooted in material circumstances,
reflecting the evolving conflict over property arrangements. Comparing them
dialectically reveals how each thinker sheds light on a particular aspect of a
transitioning world, while also being limited by their class perspectives.
Harrington: The Gentry’s Materialist
Harrington marks a turning point in modern political science
by recognising that “political power flows from property.” He saw the English
Revolution not as a conflict of personalities, but as a reflection of changes
in landownership. His republicanism represented the ideology of a rising gentry
class aiming to secure its newfound dominance. He was the first to
systematically connect property distribution with political structure, offering
a proto-materialist view of the revolution: “The cause lay in the soil, in who
owned it and who worked it.” His constitutional ideas sought to prevent
oligarchic reassertion, but his agrarian law prioritised protecting property
over promoting equality, excluding the propertyless from political
participation. He aimed to halt the revolution at the point where gentry power
was solidified. Consequently, Harrington is viewed as an early theorist of
bourgeois republicanism—knowledgeable but ultimately limited by class
interests.
Winstanley: The
Proletarian Prophet of the Revolution
Harrington voiced the ambitions of the gentry, while Gerrard
Winstanley expressed the nascent awareness of the modern working class. The
Diggers were more than just agrarian communists; they were the first political
movement to follow Harrington’s premise logically. If power correlates with
property, then democracy must mean the abolition of private property. Their
radical materialism was rooted in the lived experience of dispossession and
envisioned common ownership, anticipating socialist ideas. They critiqued both
monarchy and bourgeois republicanism as forms of class control. Historically,
their ideas were premature because the productive forces had not yet advanced
enough to support a society beyond private property. They also lacked a clear organisational
strategy to challenge the army and the state effectively. Winstanley embodies
the revolutionary strain that the English Revolution could not fully realise.
He is the negation of Harrington, representing the voice of those excluded from
the gentry’s republic.
Milton: The Intellectual of the Revolutionary Bourgeoisie
Milton’s stance is complex and somewhat contradictory.
Unlike Harrington, who defended property, or Winstanley, who was a communist,
Milton was a poet-theorist representing the revolutionary bourgeoisie. He
championed liberty, opposed tyranny, yet was ultimately reluctant to challenge
the sanctity of property. His republicanism, rooted in human dignity and
reason, strongly critiqued monarchy as both a spiritual and a political form of
oppression. He envisioned liberty beyond narrow constitutional limits, yet
maintained his republican ideals, aligned with the interests of educated,
propertied citizens. Milton hesitated to accept the Leveller and Digger
proposals that challenged property relations. His idea of freedom was more
individualistic than social. In this way, Milton occupies a middle ground
between Harrington and Winstanley: more progressive than Harrington, but less
radical than Winstanley. He embodies the most idealistic phase of the bourgeois
revolution.
Spinoza: The Continental Counterpart—Materialism Without
Revolution
Spinoza, writing in the Dutch Republic, faced a different
social context but dealt with similar contradictions. His political philosophy
is the most philosophically detailed among the four, though also the most
removed from immediate revolutionary action. It is based on a profound
materialism grounded in natural necessity rather than divine command. He
advocates for democratic participation as an expression of collective
rationality and recognises that freedom is inseparable from the conditions that
enable it. His materialism remains philosophical rather than rooted in history.
Unlike Harrington, he did not see property as a key factor in shaping political
systems. His democratic theory assumes social stability, which
seventeenth-century England lacked. Thus, Spinoza can be seen as the
philosophical counterpart to Harrington: both are materialists, but
Harrington’s focus is on class struggle, whereas Spinoza’s is on metaphysics.
The Bourgeois Legacy
After the monarchy was restored in 1660, Harrington’s ideas
did not vanish; they went underground and later influenced the radical Whig
movement and shaped the American and French revolutions. However, class
restrictions persisted. The American republic, grounded in Harringtonian ideas
of balanced government and property-based citizenship, was constructed on
slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and a constitution—Madison
openly acknowledged—that aimed to safeguard the interests of the “opulent
minority” against the majority.
Harrington’s republicanism thus served as a key ideological
basis for bourgeois rule: a political system that claims equality but is
supported by deep economic inequality.
Why Harrington Matters Today
We revisit Harrington not due to curiosity about history,
but because his identified contradiction has become most apparent. The
accumulation of wealth among a global financial elite has weakened bourgeois
democratic institutions. Elections are bought, legislatures are controlled, and
the state operates as the capitalist class's executive arm. The fundamental
myth of bourgeois republicanism—that political equality can exist alongside
significant economic inequality—has broken down.
Harrington’s strength was demonstrating that this fiction
was fundamentally false. Political structures are linked to property relations,
and a society dominated by capital will create a state that benefits capital.
Beyond Harrington: The Socialist Resolution
Harrington was unable to conclude what history called for
due to the limitations of his era. While he recognised that property influenced
power, he did not believe that democracy necessitated abolishing private
control over the means of production. This insight would come only with the
rise of the modern working class and the theoretical contributions of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, and Trotsky. The English Revolution resulted in a republic dominated by
property owners; in contrast, the socialist revolution aims to establish a
republic of cooperative producers. Only by the working class gaining political
control, dismantling the bourgeois state, and socialising the means of
production can the contradiction Harrington observed be resolved.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
- Harrington,
James. The Commonwealth of Oceana. London, 1656.
- Winstanley,
Gerrard. The Law of Freedom in a Platform. London, 1652.
Secondary Sources
- Marx,
Karl. Capital, Vol. I. London: Penguin Classics, 1976.
- Hill,
Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
- Pocock,
J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975.
- Wood,
Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London:
Verso, 2002.
- Holstun,
James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution.
London: Verso, 2000.
- Hammersley,
Rachel. The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.
