James Harrington and His Perception of History: From Narrative to Theory

Abstract

In the article, the author tracks the dynamics of the views on history of the well-known seventeenth-century English politician and philosopher James Harrington, considering and analysing them in the broad context of changing attitudes to history in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern period. The author maintains that in Harrington's texts one can find a combination of traditional approaches, characterised by an attitude to history as a set of historical arguments in favour of different political positions, and new approaches, associated with an awareness of the differences between the past and the present and the impossibility of direct application of historical models to the present. He examines a number of discussions between Harrington and his contemporaries devoted to analysing various historical events and processes. In particular, the author examines the different assessments of the political structure of Greek Sparta and ancient Israel. He demonstrates the influence these assessments had on the complex formation of Harrington's and his contemporaries' attitudes towards different models of political government, such as the republic. The author examined the novelty of Harrington's position in terms of analysing the causes of the Civil War in seventeenth-century England. New interpretations of the dynamics of societies' political development proposed by Harrington are largely related to his vision of the interaction between economic conditions (balance of land ownership) and political power in its various forms (monarchy, aristocracy, republic). A key conclusion of the study is that Harrington's historical approaches combine, in an intriguing and imaginative way, mere historical description as a narrative practice with a desire to create and develop a political theory that claims to analyse the dynamics of historical events and to elaborate the various political positions associated with the republican tradition.