Ocean

Author: James Harrington
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-07-01
Features: This series also includes Politics, The Commonwealth (Part 2), The Works of Mabli, Emile (Volumes 1 and 2), The Napoleonic Code, Labor Organization, and The Enemy of Labor and its Remedy. In form, this book is a political novel, but in essence, it is a constitutional draft proposed by Harrington for contemporary England, which he believed to be a timely and practical political solution. Harrington was a prominent thinker among the Independents during the English Revolution, and his masterpiece is Oceana. When the chaos in England in the mid-17th century prompted Thomas Hobbes to ponder how to establish an orderly state as a safe haven, Harrington was instead seeking to study the underlying driving forces behind the rapid changes in the political landscape of England. Following Aristotle's approach to examining the relationship between property reforms and regime changes, he sought the causes from the impact of economic interests on political development. He argued for his political views using the concepts of "property factors" and "spiritual factors," which were quite distinctive.