Spinoza and Harrington. An exercise in comparison

Abstract

In this lecture I shall offer a comparison between two assemblages of texts which figure in the history of political theory. The two were written by authors who can be identified as inhabiting distinct political systems and non-identical religious cultures; there is no evidence that they were aware of one another, and certainly they were not participating directly in any common debate. But they lived not far apart in time or space; they drew upon shared texts as diverse as the Bible and Machiavelli; they may be viewed as connected by some of the tissues binding western Christian culture in the later seventeenth century, and among these tissues figure certain concepts and procedures used in the construction of political and theologico-political theory. We are entitled, therefore, to ask how and why they made divergent uses of shared cultural resources. We may wish also to ask whether they, and the political and religious cultures to which they belonged, shared common. practical and theoretical problems, and whether these in turn arose from a shared history, political or social, cultural or material, in the common experience of what it is now fashionable to term 'Europe'. Pressures upon historians, on the one hand to treat 'Europe' as a given, on the other to connect the theoretical with the material life, are now so strong that they may be called hegemonic, and all hegemonies ought as a matter of course to be challenged. I shall confine myself to saying that the tracing of such connections must be subject to the rules of evidence and interpretation; when they can be found it is of greatest value to find them, but when they do not emerge we have not necessarily failed in the historian's endeavour. Our mission is to find what we are capable of finding, and to enlarge our capacities as we are capable of enlarging them. Professor Kossmann has done much — and the same may be said of other participants in this conference — to make the vocabulary and theory of politics in the Dutch Republic known to scholars who work in the language I am myself employing; and I am about to juxtapose — let me not numb you with reiteration of the word 'compare' — political treatises written by an author resident in London and Westminster with others written by one resident in Amsterdam and The Hague. Now it could have happened — as perhaps it did with John Selden and Hugo Grotius — that authors resident at these points shared in a medium of communication and in the languages transmitted along it; that they were writing to or about one another and engaging in a common discourse. But this does not seem to have been the case with James Harrington and Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza. Though they died in the same year (1677) I do not think they knew of each other, and