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This is the first biography of James Harrington in forty years. It addresses the complexities of Harrington's republicanism, examines his views on issues such as democracy and social mobility, and explores his contribution to a range of contemporary debates. Through Harrington's story, we see the development of seventeenth-century ideas and their relevance to the modern world.
James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a long-term process of social change which led to the decay of the old political order. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalised 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 introduction emphasises Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of events in Harrington's life and a guide to further reading.
America's founding fathers were remarkably well-rounded people, not least in their understanding of science. Thomas Jefferson was the only president who could read and understand Newton's Principia. Benjamin Franklin, in 1775, held international fame in science. John Adams had the finest education in science the new country could provide, including "Pnewmaticks, Hydrostaticks, Mechanicks, Staticks, Opticks". And James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, peppered his Federalist Papers with reference to physics, chemistry, and the life sciences. For these men science was an integral part of life - including political life. This is the story of their scientific education and of how they employed that knowledge in shaping the political issues of the day, incorporating scientific reasoning into the Constitution. General readers, students of American history, and professional historians alike will profit from reading this engaging presentation of an aspect of American history conspiculously absent from the usual textbooks and popular presentations of the political thought of this crucial period.
The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an overview of the critical history of eccentricity; and secondly to conceptualise a notion that is often presented as a defining feature of the English “character”. It addresses the key issues raised by eccentricity and brings out interdisciplinary links between science, politics, literature and the arts: the sources and dissemination of the concept of eccentricity; its relationship with the English national character as historical and ideological constructs; the structural need for variation and divergence within accepted social norms; the paradoxical status of the eccentric as outsider – when eccentricity is transgressive and alienating – and as insider – eccentricity as socially acceptable deviation. Fundamentally eccentricity is a normative notion: being ex-centred enables eccentrics to delineate and negotiate boundaries between the margins and the centre, the canon and the norm. The contributors question the links between eccentricity, diversity and originality; the value of individual experience and character; and as a corollary, the struggle to retain individuality against increasing standardization, commoditisation and channelling within the normative discourse of normality. Eccentricity as display and performance is also tackled in several chapters, which focus on reception, image and (self)-representation, exhibition and voyeurism.
Nationalism and patriotism are two of the most powerful forces shaping world history. Maurizio Viroli's wide-ranging study shows exactly why patriotism is a political virtue and nationalism a political vice.
European Contexts for English Republicanism offers new perspectives on early modern English republicanism through its focus on the Continental reception of and engagement with seventeenth-century English thinkers and political events. Looking both at political ideas and at the people that shaped them, the collection examines English republican thought in its wider European context during the later seventeenth and eighteenth century. In a number of case studies, the contributors assess the different ways in which English republican ideas were not only shaped by the thought of the ancients, but also by contemporary authors from all over Europe, such as Hugo Grotius or Christoph Besold. They demonstrate that English republican thinkers did not only act in dialogue with Continental authors and scholars, their ideas in turn also left a long-lasting legacy in Europe as they were received, transformed and put to new uses by thinkers in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Far from being an exclusively transatlantic affair, as much of the established scholarship suggests, English republican thought also left its legacy on the European Continent, finding its way into wider debates about the rights and wrongs of the English Civil War and the nature of government, while later translations of English republican works also influenced the key thinkers of the French Revolution and the liberals of the nineteenth century. Bringing together a range of fresh and original essays by British and European scholars in the field of early modern intellectual history and English studies, this collection of essays revises a one-sided approach to English republicanism and widens the scope of study beyond linguistic and national boundaries by looking at English republicans and their continental networks and legacy.