ABSTRACT
At the time of its publication in the autumn of 1656, few would have predicted that James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana would go on to enjoy a long and fruitful afterlife. It did not immediately receive the sort of acclaim, or even provoke the kind of controversy, that its author had hoped. 2 In part the problem was one of form and style. Model constitutions do not make particularly entertaining reading, and Oceana is also written in very dense prose. Furthermore, while it was apparently about an imaginary country, Oceana was very clearly a blueprint for a successful English republic, and for this reason the applicability of Harrington’s ideas to other places was far from evident. Moreover, the work not only relates to a particular country, but also to a very specific moment in that country’s history, namely the English Interregnum. Given that England has been ruled as a monarchy more or less continuously since 1660, a republican constitutional model has had little apparent practical relevance since that date.
