Liberty, Property and Popular Politics by Pentland Gordon;Davis Michael;

Author:Pentland, Gordon;Davis, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CHAPTER 8

Thomas Spence and James Harrington: A Case Study in Influence

Stephen M. Lee

This essay will attempt to identify the extent to which the political thought of Thomas Spence (1750–1814) was influenced by the works of James Harrington (1611–77). In his introduction to The Political Works of Thomas Spence, Harry Dickinson noted that Spence ‘was much influenced not only by the Bible, but by the idealised societies of Thomas More’s Utopia and James Harrington’s Oceana’, and ‘accepted James Harrington’s thesis that political power was derived from the possession of property, especially landed property’.1 Other scholars have also identified the influence of Harrington, although they have been divided over its extent. Malcolm Chase argued that ‘much of the distinctiveness of Spence’s thought was derived . . . from . . . James Harrington’, most particularly in his ‘concern to isolate property in land as the key to political power’.2 Chase, in addition, noted that both Spence and Harrington also:

confidently shared a belief that landed property was capable of a meaningful and enduring redistribution. Likewise, they were dismissive of the claims of mobile property to form the basis of political citizenship or national fortune or stability. The terms in which this belief was expressed by Spence suggest a close acquaintance with Harrington’s work.3

As further evidence of this ‘special affinity’, Chase highlighted the similarity between the names of the ‘allegorical societies’ that the two authors imagined (Oceana and Crusonia/Spensonia), noted that Spence read from Harrington’s work at his trial in 1801, and reminded the reader that in Pig’s Meat – Spence’s weekly journal that ran from 1793 to 1795 and consisted largely of extracts from other writers – the writer most often quoted was Harrington.4 Earlier work had drawn similar connections, and G. I. Gallop stated that ‘James Harrington was a major influence on Spence’, while Olive Rudkin identified ‘one writer who had a real influence upon Spence, and he is James Harrington’.5 Thomas R. Knox, however, was more cautious and, while he conceded that Harrington is the only writer towards whom Spence might possibly display a ‘hint of a significant debt’, he argued that in general Spence used a somewhat limited knowledge of English political theorists ‘to legitimate, not to inspire’ his own ideas.6

Overall, with the partial exception of Chase, the direct or indirect influence of Harrington on Spence has been asserted rather than demonstrated in a literature that has been more concerned with Spence’s own influence on later radicals.7 This essay therefore aims to provide a more systematic account of the relationship between Harrington and Spence. Any such inquiry must begin with some brief consideration of the methodological problems to which the concept of ‘influence’ gives rise. Quentin Skinner has given detailed attention to the problems of attempting to identify the influence of one writer or text on another and highlights a danger especially relevant to the Harrington/Spence example:

An argument in one work . . . may happen to remind the historian of a similar argument in an earlier work, or may appear to contradict it. In either

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