James Harrington

Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.04: English Writing and Culture of the Seventeenth Century, 1625-1688.
Vol. editors: Jennifer Brady (Rhodes College), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne), Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University)

Dates

Born 3 Jan 1611
Died 11 Sep 1677
Activity 1640-1677

Places

Born in England
Active in England

Activities

Primary

Political Philosopher

Resources

James Harrington developed an agrarian-republican and democratic political theory in his work The Common-wealth of Oceana (1656) which was to prove influential through the eighteenth-century, especially in the United States, and in particular contribute to many of the practical arrangements and ideological assumptions of modern democratic constitutions, notably the separation of executive, legislature and judiciary, and arrangements for secret ballots.

Life

Born in Upton, Northamptonshire, on January 3^rd, 1611, James Harrington was the eldest son of Sir Sapcote Harrington of Rand, near Lincoln in Lincolnshire, and Jane, daughter of Sir William Samwell of Upton. The Harrington family was …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2414 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "James Harrington". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 August 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1990, accessed 23 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here