HARRINGTON, JAMES (1611-1677), political philosopher, called by common consent of the whole Commonwealth "the Legislator," a title no statute ever conferred upon him and none has ever thought to dispute. He travelled on the Continent as a young man, formed there the admiration for the Venetian and Genoese republics that runs through all his later writing, and returned to an England already moving toward the crisis of the Protectorate's collapse. His treatise setting out a commonwealth governed by rotation, ballot, and an agrarian law limiting landed estate was in circulation among his friends before the Settlement gave any such scheme a country to be tried in; when the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament of 1659 called for a written frame grounded in reasoned principle rather than in precedent, it was to Harrington's circle at Miles's coffee-house — the Rota, from which the Commonwealth's own council of constitutional revision has since borrowed its name — that the Convention's committee turned.
The purity for which Harrington is chiefly honoured is this: that having supplied the design of the Senate, the Assembly of the Tribes, the rotation of office, and the agrarian principle that still bears his name, he held no office whatever under the Frame he had drawn. He declined a seat in the first Senate, is recorded to have declined it a second time when it was pressed on him again some years after, and spent the greater part of his later years at Epsom in mathematical and antiquarian study, emerging chiefly to correspond with foreign admirers of the Commonwealth's constitution and, on at least two occasions that this contributor has been able to verify, to correct a provincial newspaper's misstatement of his own doctrine with a testiness his private letters show him to have found rather enjoyable. He died at Little Ambry, Westminster, in 1677, and was buried, by vote of the Senate itself, in the Abbey there; the Legislator's Tomb, a plain slab bearing his name and the single word LEGISLATOR beneath it, remains a place of pilgrimage for constitutional students of every nation that has since attempted a written frame of government, several of which have attempted it with considerably less success than his own.
It is a measure of the honour in which his memory is held that when the Commonwealth founded its Western seat upon the Severn in 1697, the framers of the founding charter named the new city Oceana, after the title of Harrington's own treatise — so that the Legislator, who held no office in the commonwealth he designed, gave his book's name to the very capital from which, since the Third Frame, half its business is now conducted. He would very probably have found the honour excessive, and said so; the Commonwealth has decided, on the whole, to disregard him on this one point, as it has disregarded him on no other. (E. H. V.)