Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars

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Clarendon Press, Oct 16, 1997 - History - 188 pages
The English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century produced two political thinkers of genius: Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington. They are known today as spokesmen of opposite positions, Hobbes of absolutism, Harrington of republicanism. Yet behind their disagreements, argues Arihiro Fukuda, there lay a common perspective. For both writers, the primary aim was the restoration of peace and order to a divided land. Both men saw the conventional thinking of the time as unequal to that task. Their greatest works — Hobbes's Leviathan of 1651, Harrington's Oceana of 1656 — proposed the reconstruction of the English polity on novel bases. It was not over the principle of sovereignty that the two men differed. Fukuda shows Harrington to have been, no less than Hobbes, a theorist of absolute sovereignty. But where Hobbes repudiated the mixed governments of classical antiquity, Harrington's study of them convinced him that mixed government, far from being the enemy of absolute sovereignty, was its essential foundation.
 

Contents

Polybius and Mixed Government
8
Fortescue and Parker
17
Introduction
23
Philip Hunton and Henry Ferne
29
Conscience and the Constitution
35
Equality and Sovereignty
41
29
47
LEVIATHAN AND THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC
66
HARRINGTONS THEORY OF BALANCED
91
Faction and Equality
102
HARRINGTONS THEORY OF BALANCED
111
Sovereignty and Mixed Government
123
The Absorption of Ancient within Modern Prudence
134
Appendices
141
Toleration and Sovereignty
150
Mutual Fear and Commonwealth by Institution in Hobbes
162

The Two Preliminaries of Oceana
72
Fear and Necessity
80

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