Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:47:58.696Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

James Harrington on the Hebrew Commonwealth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2014

Ronald Beiner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical power and theocratic authority are enduring ones, and that we have reason to continue to engage intellectually with critics of priestcraft like Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. Within that broader context, this article concerns itself with Harrington in particular, focusing on his efforts in his polemical writings of the late 1650s to draw resources for Erastian politics from a Hobbes-inspired account of the Hebrew republic.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 169 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a sketch of other recent relevant scholarship, see Beiner, Ronald, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 124n20 and 131n61. Two other just-published articles directly addressed to this theme are the chapters by Marco Barducci (“Harrington, Grotius, and the Commonwealth of the Jews, 1656–1660”) and Somos, Mark (“Irenic Secularization and the Hebrew Republic in Harrington's Oceana”) in European Contexts for English Republicanism, ed. Mahlberg, Gaby and Wiemann, Dirk (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 Champion, Justin, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 174.Google Scholar

3 Examples of theocratic politics, or theocracy-aspiring politics, in the Islamic world easily come to mind, but the continuing relevance of theocracy is not limited to contemporary Islam. One non-Islamic example would be the continuing meddling of the Serbian Orthodox Church in attempts to negotiate accommodations between Serbia and Kosovo. Or if one imagines that problems of this kind are limited to the monotheistic religions, perhaps on the assumption that no religious tradition could be more politically benign than Buddhism, consider the recent reports of radical Buddhist monks helping to incite anti-Islamic ethnic violence in central Myanmar. Hence the theocratic potential of all of the world religions is brought home to us especially starkly in this last example. I'll run the risk of being accused of anachronism in asserting that the fundamental problem wrestled with by Harrington and the other great secularizing early modern thinkers—the problem of affirming the sovereignty of the civil sphere and combatting its subordination to the clerical realm—is one that is still very much with us.

4 My purpose in Civil Religion was to convey the scope of this broader intellectual movement animating modern political philosophy. Also relevant are two companion essays of mine entitled “Civil Religion and Anticlericalism in James Harrington” (forthcoming in European Journal of Political Theory) and “Shaftesbury's Characteristics and the Problem of Priestcraft” (forthcoming in Challenging Theocracy: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, ed. Toivo Koivukovski, David Edward Tabachnick, and Hermino Teixeira, to be published by University of Toronto Press).

5 For alerting me to the importance of this point (namely, the strong republican self-consciousness of the theocrats who animated Iran's 1979 revolution), I owe thanks to Nader Hashemi.

6 Editor's introduction to Harrington, James, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), x–xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar; this edition is cited hereafter as Oceana.

7 The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 537Google Scholar; cf. 563, referring to “sympathy … between the mitre and the crown.” Pocock's edition is hereafter cited as Political Works, and parenthetical page references refer to this work.

8 Goldie, Mark, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Pagden, Anthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Coleridge's treatment of the Hebrew commonwealth as an archetype in chapter 4 of On the Constitution of the Church and State offers another example. He is interested in some of the same aspects of the regime that interest Harrington and Spinoza, but again, he interprets them in ways that bolster his own political vision. Given that the essential purpose, for Harrington as for the others, is to find scriptural vindication for a particular conception of civil government, Pocock badly misstates his intended point when he claims (uncharacteristically) that “whether [the Mosaic state] had been a monarchy under the high priests or a republic mattered less, at least to Harrington, than that the priest had claimed no authority independent of the elect nation's civil structure” (“A Discourse of Sovereignty,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Phillipson, N. and Skinner, Q. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 410CrossRefGoogle Scholar). It mattered enormously to Harrington to be able to show that the Hebrew commonwealth is a commonwealth.

10 This point, which strikes me as a fair one, was made by Eric Nelson in a critical response to an earlier draft of this article.

11 For the text, see Oceana, 245. In interpreting this text in the civil-religionist way that I do, quite a lot would seem to hang on Harrington's choice of verb tense: It hath been a maxim with legislators. The use of the present perfect progressive tense suggests that this is a general maxim of wise statesmen rather than one limited to the pagan era. As Nelson helpfully drew to my attention, the Somos essay cited in note 1 above also presents Harrington as a resolute “secularizer.” Ultimately, deciding between Nelson's view that the interest in ancient Israel on the part of seventeenth-century Erastian thinkers flows from “deeply felt religious convictions” (The Hebrew Republic, 4; cf. 128) and my view that it was animated by secularizing civil-religion concerns would require penetrating what Hobbes in Leviathan, chap. 8, called the (holy or profane) “secret thoughts of a man.” And as Hobbes was entirely right to underscore, that is impossible.

12 Cf. Oceana, 40, where Harrington refers to The Nature of the Gods as Cicero's “most excellent book.”

13 This is one of my themes in “Civil Religion and Anticlericalism in James Harrington,” cited above. The phrase “Heathenish Commonwealth” is from Toland's “The Life of James Harrington” that introduces the Toland edition of Harrington: see xxvi of the 1737 edition published in Dublin. Toland claims that Richard Baxter named his anti-Harringtonian book The Holy Commonwealth precisely as a pointed rebuke to Harrington's “heathenish” version of republicanism.

14 Pocock, “Historical Introduction,” in Political Works, 76.

15 Ferne: “lamentable it is to see so many (especially gentlemen of good parts) so opinionate … in matters of religion” (371; cf. 370, already quoted, and bottom of 382). On p. 384, Harrington asserts that theologians have corrupted scripture with their mistranslations and misreadings, and only lay scholars are equipped to set this right. See Beiner, Civil Religion, 107 and 111–12, for a discussion of the same theme in Spinoza.

16 This debate about “meddling in matters of religion” gets pursued under the rubric of the sixth query (382–83). Harrington is emphatic that only lay scholars (such as Grotius, Selden, and Cunaeus), not theologians, can be trusted to make available reliable accounts of the Hebrew commonwealth. As already noted, Champion points to the text on p. 372 as representing the very first occurrence in print of the term “priestcraft”; it occurs again on p. 384. However, as Rahe, Paul A. (Against Throne and Altar [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 210)CrossRefGoogle Scholar points out, Harrington's coinage was anticipated, a decade previously, by Henry Marten's slightly less tuneful “Clergy craft.”

17 Cf. 378: “a commonwealth without the senate must of necessity degenerate into anarchy.” See also bottom of 544.

18 Concerning Harrington's reliance on the example of ancient Israel, see Nelson, The Hebrew Republic; and Remer, Gary, “After Machiavelli and Hobbes: James Harrington's Commonwealth of Israel,” in Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought, ed. Schochet, G., Oz-Salzberger, F., and Jones, M. (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2008), 207–30Google Scholar. Another very helpful discussion of Harrington's engagement with the Hebrew commonwealth is offered by Justin A. I. Champion in “Mosaica respublica: Harrington, Toland, and Moses,” forthcoming in Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, ed. Gaby Mahlberg and Dirk Wiemann, to be published by Ashgate.

19 One should not fail to notice the important suggestion here that the political sovereignty inhering in Moses was passed neither to Joshua nor to Aaron but rather to the senate. This is in fact crucial to Harrington's subtle narrative: it suggests that what fundamentally defined the Mosaic regime was neither Moses as founder, nor Aaron as high priest, nor the “Jethronian prefectures” cited by Ferne, but precisely the Sanhedrin. One might say that in this sense the Mosaic regime was essentially an aristocratic regime.

20 It may be that both in the case of Spinoza and in that of Harrington, reading Hobbes triggered the insight that if Israel became a monarchy with the episode narrated in 1 Samuel 8, then it must have been a commonwealth (republic) prior to this episode. See Beiner, Civil Religion, chap. 11, for an analysis of parallel concerns in Spinoza. But chapter 1 of Nelson's The Hebrew Republic makes clear that Hobbes was hardly the first thinker to attempt to spin a political philosophy out of this text. Moreover, we have already cited Harrington's own view, enunciated in the context of denying that his debt to Hobbes is as large as it appeared to his critics, that the republican reading of 1 Samuel 8 in fact goes as far back as Josephus. Nelson's thesis is that the key reason why a whole range of seventeenth-century political theorists became preoccupied with the meaning of 1 Samuel 8 is that “a tradition of rabbinic commentary [on the relevant texts] became available to the Christian West only during the Hebrew revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (The Hebrew Republic, 26). Also very interesting is Nelson's claim (25) about Hobbes's “alarmed response to what had become of republican political theory in the 1650s.” Nelson's suggestion is that Hobbes was so appalled that his interpretation of 1 Samuel 8 had helped to give impetus to forms of republicanism like that of Harrington (or worse, Nedham or Milton) that he felt obliged to excise that whole discussion from his 1668 Latin version of Leviathan. As regards the republican appeal to 1 Samuel 8 by Nedham and Milton, see Nedham, Marchamont, The Excellencie of a Free-State, ed. Worden, Blair (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011), 72–73Google Scholar; and Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 7, ed. Ayers, Robert W., rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, 424 and 449–50 as well as the additional references flagged in 359n15. For corresponding texts in Sidney, see for instance Sidney, Algernon, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. West, Thomas G. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990)Google Scholar, 39, 130, 323–24, and 336–39; and Nelson, The Hebrew Commonwealth, 52.

21 Cf. the beginning of Harrington's reply to the fourth query, where he states that the Hebrew regime could not have been a monarchy on account of “the elders that stood with Moses” (380).

22 Whereas Harrington is everywhere else in his theorizing insistent on Moses's reliance on Jethro for the construction of his commonwealth, in his debate with Ferne Harrington strenuously denies that the institution of the senate owed anything to Jethro's counsel. The message is that the senate is divinely mandated, rather than the product of merely prudential ordering. It is highly uncharacteristic of Harrington to claim, as he does at the end of Pian Piano, that specifically the institution of the Sanhedrin counts as “such civil power … as cometh nearest unto God's own pattern” (387). It tells us just how important the Sanhedrin is for Harrington with respect to his project of appropriating Israel as a model for republican politics (but see note 31 below).

23 Harrington's highlighting of Moses's dual status as “prince or archon” and as “general” naturally prompts one to think of Cromwell's status as “archon” of what was still fundamentally a commonwealth. One should note that Harrington's account is an important departure from that of Hobbes. For Hobbes, there is certainly no shared sovereignty between Moses and the Sanhedrin; and Hobbes ties sovereignty to the theocratic authority associated with the high priest rather than to the military authority inherited by Joshua (see Beiner, Civil Religion, 51, 58n60, and 127–29). In the most fundamental sense, Moses was his own high priest, and therefore Aaron was indeed “subordinate”—but to Moses, not to the Sanhedrin. (On 649, Harrington claims, surprisingly, that for Melchizedek [Genesis 14:18] but not for Moses, the offices of the king and the high priest were fused into one office, but it is hard to imagine that, de facto, this was not true of Moses as well.) For Hobbes, no less than for Harrington, it is essential that one not have a high priest with authority (“whether in matter of religion or state”) separate from that of the civil sovereign; but of course Hobbes would agree with Ferne that this sovereignty must be unitary, not shared with a senate.

24 Political Works, 378; cf. 474, on “the main cause of monarchy.”

25 Harrington elaborates this thesis in full detail in the fourth query (380–81), citing a lengthy catalogue of examples of tyranny, bloodshed, and political disorder in monarchical (postrepublican) Israel and Judah. (Obviously, the very fact that Israel had split into two distinct states was part of this story of political tumult.) Cf. The Art of Lawgiving, bk. 2, chap. 4. As is underscored by this text (640)—as well as the corresponding text in The Prerogative of Popular Government (525)—what concerns Harrington in 1 Samuel 8 is not only its implication that monarchy is erected on a republican foundation, but also Samuel's prophetic warning to the people about the ills that monarchy will generate (verses 11–18). The critique of Hebrew monarchy offered by Harrington (and its lessons for contemporary politics) shares much in common with the parallel narrative offered by Spinoza.

26 Harrington's official (proto-Marxian) line is that monarchy becomes problematical, that is, loses its normative legitimacy, if and only if the material “base” and the political “superstructure” fall out of sync. But it is hard not to suspect that his true view (truer than the official line) is that monarchy is inherently normatively flawed.

27 As regards the notion of Israel as an “archetype,” note Harrington's statement on p. 464 that in composing Oceana, “I have not varied from the authority of Israel in a tittle.”

28 For a comprehensive discussion, see Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, chap. 2. Interestingly (and not accidentally), Spinoza and Rousseau are just as interested in appealing to the Hebrew institution of the jubilee in articulating their versions of republicanism as Harrington is: see Spinoza, Baruch, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd ed., trans. Shirley, Samuel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 198–99Google Scholar; and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar, 313n.

29 “God, by the ballot of Israel … divided the land” (462). As Harrington explains on p. 521, this simply means that the Hebrews used sortition to distribute the land of Canaan.

30 Again, see the text on p. 462 quoted in the previous note. On p. 459, however, he is more equivocal: the “democratical or popular” balance in Israel was introduced by the legislator, namely “God, or Moses.”

31 The “advertisement to the reader” on p. 496 encourages the reader to reflect on whether Israel “were not erected by the same rules of human prudence, with other commonwealths”—with the obvious implication that it is Harrington's own strongly held view that there is no difference between Israel qua republic and Sparta or Rome. But if so, in what sense did God have some special role in instituting the senate or the agrarian law? Clearly, the appeal to God as legislator is no more to be taken literally in Harrington than in, say, Machiavelli or Spinoza. See also the title of the conclusion of Book 2 of The Art of Lawgiving (652) for further confirmation that any talk of “divine patterns” is merely rhetorical.

32 The “footstep” image refers back to the challenges from Wren quoted at the bottom of p. 461 and the top of p. 462.

33 One of the journal referees pointed out that whether it can be interpreted in this way or not depends on whether one sees Harrington's republicanism as in theoretical continuity with Aristotle's republicanism, and this is an issue that has elicited controversy rather than consensus in the Harrington literature. This seems a fair point, although Harrington's revival of the Aristotelian idea of ruling and being ruled in turn does not necessarily commit him to a revival of other aspects of Aristotelian political philosophy. The larger issue here is whether republicanism constitutes in some sense a unitary intellectual tradition, or whether there are competing (Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian) republican traditions. Without question, it is a crucial issue, but one that I won't attempt to take up here.

34 Cf. 519: As originally legislated by Moses, “all ordination of magistrates, as of senators, or elders of the Sanhedrim, of the judges, or elders of inferior courts, of the judge or suffes of Israel, of the king, of the priests, of the Levites, whether with the ballot or viva voce, was performed by the chirotonia or suffrage of the people.” Harrington calls this “the constitution of Moses” (520), and adds, “nor … is it or ever was it otherwise in any commonwealth” (ibid.). Harrington claims that there was only one exception to this universal norm of ordination by popular suffrage, namely Moses's appointment of Joshua to the unique task of securing a commonwealth that did not yet exist (522–23; cf. 530–31, replying to Henry Hammond).

35 Cf. 641. As one can see from chapters 10–12 of 2 Chronicles, Rehoboam was in fact only partially deposed: ten of the twelve tribes revolted against him, but he continued as king of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin—resulting in the division of the Hebrew state into the separate states of Israel and Judah.

36 This yields a significant tension in Harrington's account. On p. 525, Harrington states that in bowing to the Israelites’ desire for monarchy, God chose “rather to abandon this sottish and ungrateful people unto the most inextricable yoke of deserved slavery.” But if, as is suggested on p. 476, monarchy is merely a modification of what remains a fundamentally republican regime, why is he deploying this highly charged language of monarchy as a “yoke”? And on p. 528, Harrington writes: “Israel, from the institution of Moses to the monarchy, was a democracy or popular government,” implying that popular government lapsed when monarchy commenced (cf. bottom of 528, top of 529). Perhaps one could fudge this by saying that in a sense Israel did, and in a sense it didn't, remain a commonwealth when it opted for the kingship of Saul. (Obviously, it remained a commonwealth to the extent that the very institution of Saul's monarchy rested upon the acclamation of the people; but it ceased to be a commonwealth to the extent that Saul's successors became ever more tyrannical and corrupt.)

37 Cf. 382 (Ferne's answer to the sixth query): “divines have … cause to complain when [learned gentlemen] are too bold with holy things.”

38 Cf. 386: the Sanhedrin “had the government of the national religion.”

39 On p. 371, Harrington points out that “both [Jesus] and his apostles observed the national religion,” which makes the (for him) important point that there is no necessary incompatibility between associating oneself with the received religion, and exercising one's liberty of conscience by preaching and winning converts for one's own version of that religion.

40 The unstated implication is that Christianity owes its own genesis to the liberty of conscience available in pre-Christian republics, but fails to extend the same courtesy to those subject to its own jurisdiction (hence Ferne's attempt to browbeat Harrington into submitting to orthodoxy).

41 Cf. Harrington's equation of “liberty of conscience” and “prophetic right” (471).

42 Political Works, 186; cf. Pocock, “Historical Introduction,” 95.

43 Hence p. 371's reference to the “supreme authority” of all republican senates (including that of Israel). However, one could ask (anticipating Rousseau): If the people can revoke at any time the fundamental nature of the regime, and if laws are not laws until the people assent to them, why aren't the people the supreme authority (i.e., the holders of sovereignty)? If one takes full account of Harrington's discussion of the distinction between proposing laws and resolving them (Prerogative of Popular Government, bk. 1, chap. 7), I think one has to conclude that real sovereignty, for Harrington no less than for Rousseau, indeed rests with the people. Cf. 549 (commenting on Athens): “the people were sovereign.” (Did Rousseau read Harrington? There is no way to know, since Rousseau never cited him. But he surely had read Book 29, chapter 19 of The Spirit of the Laws, in which Montesquieu had elevated Harrington into a pantheon consisting of only five truly exemplary philosopher-legislators. Wouldn't this have given Rousseau a compelling reason to acquaint himself with an author whom Montesquieu characterizes according to his ardent passion for republicanism?) Richard Tuck's forthcoming Seeley Lectures (entitled The Sleeping Sovereign) bear aptly on the issues sketched in this note.

44 Collins, Jeffrey R., The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 190 (cf. 126–28, 130, 197, and 261–62); see Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 365–67 (chap. 42)Google Scholar. Tuck, in “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes” (in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Hunter, M. and Wootton, D. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1992], 111–30)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows that Hobbes, both in Elements of Law and in De Cive, was still committed to a doctrine of chirothesia (apostolic succession). It is only in Leviathan that Hobbes makes the decisive ecclesiological move toward ordination as chirotonia (by popular suffrage)—thereby outraging his Anglican erstwhile friends and allies.

45 Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. On p. 212, Skinner cites Harrington's most conspicuous challenge to Hobbes; on p. xiii, he refers to Oceana as a “classical statement of the republican theory” targeted by Hobbes. In neither place is there any acknowledgment of the rich complexities in the Hobbes-Harrington relationship, which are amply acknowledged by Pocock and others. See for instance Pocock's “Historical Introduction,” 32, 76, 78–82, 83–84, and 89–96. See also Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 183–91 and 277–80, and Collins, , “Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project,” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2009): 361–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 363; Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, 122; Parkin, Jon, Taming the Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182–85Google Scholar; and Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, chap. 11, where Harrington's political theory is dubbed “Hobbesian republicanism.” Last but not least, see Scott, Jonathan, “The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington's Republicanism,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Phillipson, Nicholas and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 139–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which gives very concerted attention to the question of Harrington's debt to Hobbes. On Scott's reading of Oceana, Harrington is so indebted to Hobbes that he virtually relinquishes his claim to being considered a classical republican at all.

46 Cf. 537: “chirothesia being originally nothing else but a way of policy excluding the people.”

47 Harrington concedes that, say with respect to the election of Solomon as king or Zadok as high priest, there may have been a process of anointing as a ceremony confirming the ascent to an office (as a rite of coronation, so to speak). But strictly speaking, the ordination consisted in the election to office rather than any laying-on of hands which may have followed that election. Harrington strikes an unmistakably Hobbesian note when he observes, in reference to the process of anointing: “The opinion that the ordination of the priests and Levites lay in the ceremonies of their consecration is every whit as sober and agreeable unto reason as if a man should hold the kings of England to have been made by the unction of the bishops.”

48 Harrington repeats the same narrative on p. 537, referring to the papacy as a “second presbytery” presided over by a chirothesia-dispensing high priest. When Harrington declares on p. 518 that the essential issue is the three alternatives of election by the many, election by the few, and election by one (with the assumption that the second and third represent forms of priestly usurpation), this nicely maps onto his threefold ecclesiological typology, namely, “gathered congregations” (= democracy), Presbyterianism (= aristocracy), and papacy (= monarchy). There is much here that is reminiscent of Hobbes's famous analysis of the three knots upon Christian liberty in Leviathan, chap. 47. Notwithstanding the phrase “from thence to the bishop” in the text at the top of p. 385, what is missing from Harrington's typology is the episcopal regime: the rule of bishops. But as Harrington bitingly points out to Ferne on p. 386, with the overthrow of the episcopal regime in Cromwellian England, the Anglican version of Christianity had been reduced merely to the status of a gathered congregation. In chapter 47 of Leviathan, Hobbes, again famously, appears to celebrate the same outcome.

49 Cf. 526: “After the captivity, … the Sanhedrim came … to over-reach the people.” In the text on p. 534, Harrington dates the priestly usurpation at around “three hundred years before Christ,” but this chronology seems to fit poorly with his effort to make Hillel the main culprit. Pocock (535n1) suggests that this demonization of Hillel (cf. Pian Piano, 384) was mainly inspired by Selden.

50 Presumably he is now talking about the second exile (which began ca. AD 70). But if this explanation is right, it is hard to see why it wouldn't work equally well for the first exile.

51 Pocock, “Historical Introduction,” 98. There is a strong parallel between the story that Harrington tells of the corruption of “Elohim” into “Cabala” (or of the Hebrew commonwealthmen into the priest-dominated Jews), and Spinoza's narrative of the corruption of republican virtue (see Beiner, Civil Religion, chap. 11). For both Harrington and Spinoza, the nub of the story is the conquest or usurpation of Mosaic Judaism by “the Pharisees.” (Interestingly, one can even find a parallel narrative of Israelite corruption in Nietzsche's Antichrist—charting the decline of the race of the Old Testament from a noble warrior-dominated people to a crafty priest-dominated one; see Beiner, Civil Religion, chap. 30.)

52 As one of the journal's referees helpfully pointed out, there's a subtle tension between Harrington's evident hostility to the Jewish oral law and his clear acceptance of the authority of, for instance, the rabbinical elaboration of the Noahide laws; see Political Works, 713 (“it is a tradition with the rabbis”) and 743.

53 Cf. The Art of Lawgiving, Book 2, chap. 6.

54 Cf. ibid., conclusion to Book 2 (652: “not God, nor Christ, nor the apostles, ever instituted any government ecclesiastical or civil upon other principles than those only of human prudence”).

55 Cf. 649: “the government of the church instituted by Christ was according unto the form instituted by Moses.” Harrington goes on to suggest that the one thing that distinguished the two regimes is that Moses “separated the Levites unto the priesthood,” whereas under Christ, closer to the pre-Mosaic regime of Melchizedek, “the royal and priestly function were not separated.” This implies that Moses's religious authority was subordinate to that of Aaron, which is hardly credible; and also implies that Christ exercised a kind of “kingly” authority, which is even less credible.

56 Cf. 535: with the presbyterian coup by Hillel, “the aristocracy of Israel [became] oligarchical.”

57 Political Works, 730–31; and Pocock's commentary at “Historical Introduction,” 106–10. Cf.Oceana, 63.

58 Davis, J. C., “Pocock's Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington,” Historical Journal 24, no. 3 (1981): 683–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see esp. 688, summarizing Pocock's failure to settle on a consistent interpretation. Millennialism is a consistent theme in Pocock's reflections on Harringtonian republicanism, and it is very effectively challenged in Davis's critique. As Davis points out (688–89), direct textual evidence for this aspect of Pocock's interpretation is pretty slender. One possible way of explaining the eschatological note underscored by Pocock that would not require any ascription of piety to Harrington is that Harrington is trying to supply his own version of the messianic rhetoric deployed in chap. 26 of Machiavelli's Prince.

59 “Historical Introduction,” 97; cf. 47, 79, 91–92, 97, and 121. On p. 114, Pocock interprets the very last of Harrington's Aphorisms Political (Political Works, 778) as a vindication of Jethro's Midianite wisdom. See also 109 on Vane's (theocratic) response to Harrington on this issue. Jethro is also discussed in Davis, “Pocock's Harrington,” 689 and 692–93. Political Works, 496, cited by Davis, offers particularly vivid illustration of Pocock's point about the significance of Jethro. See also 177, 209, 305, 547, 617, 629, 652, and 713. As Harrington makes explicit on p. 629, the purpose of emphasizing Moses's close association with Jethro (the king of a heathen commonwealth) is to absolve Harrington of accusations that there is something “irreverent or atheistical” in juxtaposing Moses to pagan statesmen (as both he and Machiavelli do). For texts treating Moses on a par with Lycurgus and Solon, see 376, 400, 421, 524–25, 531–32, 542–43, 558, 628, 629, 631, and 719. See also 7–8 of Appendix I (entitled “Two Problems, historical, political, and theological, concerning the Jewish Nation and Religion”) attached to Toland, 's Nazarenus, 2nd rev. ed. (London, 1718)Google Scholar.

60 Somos, “Irenic Secularization,” 87–96, offers an expansive discussion of how Jethro gets deployed in Harrington's texts.

61 Cf. Davis, “Pocock's Harrington,” 695: “Oceana is not a republic of saints, nor under the rule of a saintly elite.” For Harrington, faithful disciple of Machiavelli that he is, prudence, not providence, is what should be relied upon in solving the problems of politics.

62 See Scott, “The Rapture of Motion,” 141n10.

63 Here I have borrowed a very nice encapsulation suggested by one of the journal's referees.

64 For an important account of Harrington as a “pioneering” partisan of popular government, even by comparison to fellow mid-seventeenth-century republicans, see Hammersley, Rachel, “Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy,” History of European Ideas 39, no. 3 (2013): 365–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 365n65. If Hammersley's argument is correct, then Harrington (and not for instance Spinoza) would likely deserve recognition as the first major figure within the Western canon for whom democracy was emphatically not a pejorative term.