James Harrington

Overview

James Harrington (1611–1677) was an English political theorist whose utopian treatise The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) argued that a state's form of government is fixed by its underlying distribution of property, above all land: where one ruler owns most of the land, absolute monarchy results; where a narrow aristocracy holds it, mixed monarchy follows; but where land is widely distributed, only a republic can remain stable — the maxim historians summarize as "empire follows the balance of property."[1] To keep land distribution from re-concentrating, Harrington proposed an agrarian law capping individual land holdings (at an income of roughly £2,000 a year) — an early proposal to regulate land ownership by statute, over two centuries before Henry George proposed capturing land's rent directly through taxation rather than capping holdings by size.[1][2] Oceana was seized by order of Oliver Cromwell while in press and released only after the intercession of Cromwell's daughter Elizabeth Claypole; it appeared later in 1656.[1] Fred Harrison's Ricardo's Law cites Harrington's land-power thesis in its prologue and in discussing the historical link between land concentration and political power.[2]

Harrington's argument is a structural, pre-Georgist ancestor of the claim that land monopoly is a political as well as an economic problem: control of land is control of the state, not merely a source of private income. Where Harrington's remedy was a legal ceiling on how much land any one person could hold, the Georgist tradition instead targets the rent land produces, leaving ownership and holding size unregulated — a difference in mechanism that later land-and-power theorists, including John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Herbert Spencer, inherit and revise in their own ways.[1]

See Also

• Land Monopoly — the concept Harrington's balance-of-property thesis anticipates
• John Locke — later 17th-century property theorist working the same land/power terrain
• Thomas Paine — later land-and-common-inheritance theorist in the same lineage
• Ricardo's Law (Fred Harrison) — the book that traces this lineage from Harrington forward

Sources

1. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) — used for the "empire follows the balance of property" thesis, the agrarian-law land cap, and the Cromwell/Claypole publication history (A-claims). Full text (Project Gutenberg); biographical dates and publication history also corroborated by Wikipedia — James Harrington (author).
2. Fred Harrison, Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam (2006), Prologue, Ch. 7.2, Ch. 13.2 — used for situating Harrington in the land-power lineage this wiki traces toward George (B-claim, locator given; not independently page-verified in this session). Book page