Ocean and Political System (English Version)

Author: Harrington
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2003-05-01
Features: James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist belongs to the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings, offering for the first time in intellectual history an explanation of the English Civil Wars as a revolution produced by the decay of the old political structure and its substitution by another through long-term social change. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalized presentation of English history up to the victory of the New Model Army, explaining the fall of the monarchy and proposing a republic to replace it. A System of Politics, written after the Restoration, is a scheme of history and political philosophy erected on the foundations of his previous works. Professor Pocock's lucid introduction emphasizes Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought, and presents him as among the last English political Platonists and the first philosophical historians. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the history of ideas, early modern history, and political theory, and contains a chronology of events in Harrington's life and a guide to further reading as stated to the reader.