James Harrington

Despite not being an active participant in the English Civil War, seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington exercised an important influence on the ideas and politics of that crucial period of history. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he sought to explain why civil war had broken out in 1642, to put the case for commonwealth government, and to offer a detailed constitutional blueprint for a new and successful English government. In thisintellectual biography of Harrington, Rachel Hammersley sets a fresh analysis of this and Harrington's other writings against the background of his life and the turbulent period in which he lived.In doing so, this study seeks to move beyond the conventional view of Harrington as primarily a republican thinker, offering a broader and more comprehensive account of him which addresses the complexity of his republicanism as well as exploring his contributions to economic, historical, religious, philosophical, and scientific debates; his experimentation with vocabulary and literary form; and the relationship between his life and thought. Harrington is presented as an innovative politicalthinker, committed to democracy, social mobility, and meritocracy. Ultimately, this broader examination of Harrington's life and work opens a window on political, economic, religious, and scientific issues which serve to complicate understandings of the English Revolution, and sheds fresh light on therelevance of seventeenth-century ideas to the modern world.

Rachel Hammersley's Harringtonis an accomplished exemplar [of the genre of intellectual biography], deeply researched, and felicitously written, as fluent in the history of Stuart England as in the classical tradition., ...welcome new study of the mid-seventeenth century English political theorist James Harrington..., ...Hammersley's monograph on James Harrington is and will remain an important contribution to the history of modern political thought., This new study by the historian of ideas Rachel Hammersley has no equivalent, and it can only be hoped that this meticulous work, rich in new interpretations, inspires a revival of interest [in Harrington]., Rachel Hammersley has given us a well-crafted, meticulously researched, and beautifully readable study of an important thinker. Her intellectual biography will be an essential resource for all students of republican political thought.

Rachel Hammersley is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at Newcastle University. She has published on the translation and dissemination of English republican ideas in France and on notions of republicanism, democracy, and revolution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has a passion for communicating knowledge of history and past ideas not just to academic audiences, but also a wider readership.