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The recent publication of Eric Nelson's important book, The Hebrew Republic,Footnote ¹ would seem to offer an opportune occasion to take another careful look at James Harrington's fascinating writings on the commonwealth of the ancient Hebrews. We should be interested in the lessons Harrington hoped to draw from that commonwealth for the republican understanding of politics not only for the light it can shed on Harrington as an exemplar of mid-seventeenth-century republicanism, but—quite a bit more importantly—for what mid-seventeenth-century republicanism can yet teach us about confronting and navigating the still-perilous terrain of religion and politics. As Justin Champion has highlighted, Harrington was the theorist who first coined the term priestcraft.Footnote ² We no longer employ this seventeenth-century polemical vocabulary, yet the challenges of “priestcraft” and its implications for political life still afflict us (very much so), and almost certainly always will. If Harrington's having coined the term priestcraft is not merely a minor curiosity in the history of anticlerical discourse, but on the contrary constitutes a significant aspect of his intellectual legacy (which I suspect that it does)—namely, as a notable contributor to the rise of modern European secularism—then we would again have good reason to pay particularly close attention to the texts that contained the seed of that sizeable legacy. The political containment and domestication of religious orthodoxy and the political power of churches and priests remains on the agenda of contemporary politics,Footnote ³ and therefore we ought to probe as thoroughly as we can the intellectual roots of the project to render religion “civil”—a project that preoccupied or even obsessed leading thinkers within the Western canon from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Locke to Montesquieu to Rousseau and beyond.

Of course, I am not foolish enough to suggest that seventeenth-century political thought, Harringtonian or otherwise, can offer us an immediate roadmap for coping with twenty-first-century quandaries concerning theocracy or theocratic political authority. But the function of theory is to open up space for reflection on dilemmas of political life that tend to recur perennially. And my claim is that Harringtonian texts (including ones that have fallen, unjustly, into historical neglect or quasi-oblivion) still continue to do that. Insofar as we concede the benefits of wrestling with the enduring problem of religion and politics in dialogue with great texts of the Western canon, what this involves is not necessarily reading and being instructed by Harrington on his own, but more likely reading him within the broader current of modern political thought aimed at curbing clerical power and asserting the supremacy of civil authority.Footnote ⁴ It would certainly be too much to expect that a resumed dialogue with Harrington or other great thinkers in the canon of Western theory could supply maxims for meeting the challenges that confront contemporary political practice. Nonetheless, coming to see our own predicaments as the continuation of an epic intellectual struggle taken up in the seventeenth century may contribute to a better sense of why some of these problems are so intractable. The term priestcraft can be a bit misleading if it is taken to refer narrowly to rule by priests. The current president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, is a cleric whereas his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not a cleric. Yet Rouhani's politics are manifestly more pragmatic, less “theocratic,” than Ahmadinejad's politics. The real issue, clearly, is secular politics versus theocratic (faith-driven) politics in its various incarnations. The example of contemporary Iran also gives us reason to question Harrington's view that republicanism is necessarily opposed to cleric-dominated politics, for theocratic Iran very much prides itself on being an Islamic republic.Footnote ⁵ Still, without committing ourselves to any specific Harringtonian claim, rereading Harrington may help to impress upon us that keeping civil authority from being swamped by religious authority remains a perennial political concern.

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Any of the three main texts composed by Harrington subsequent to the publication of The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) would be worthy of close study in this regard—namely, Pian Piano (1657), The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658), and The Art of Lawgiving (1659)—for all three are preoccupied with issues of theology, ecclesiology, and scriptural hermeneutics that are central to Harrington's core civic-republican concerns. We will start with the earliest and most compact of these post-Oceana texts since that probably offers the readiest way of illustrating the potential fruits of such a renewed hermeneutical exercise brought to bear on the study of Harrington. Naturally, we should avail ourselves of The Prerogative of Popular Government and The Art of Lawgiving to fill out our account of Harrington's views; but as I hope to show, much of what we seek is already available in Pian Piano. In the introduction to his 1992 edition of Oceana, Pocock ventured the suggestion that it is in the post-Oceana polemics concerning religion and theology that we witness “the strongest force driving Harrington to write and publish.”Footnote ⁶ This is an entirely plausible view, and gives us ample reason to probe these texts in a careful way. In The Prerogative of Popular Government, Harrington himself explains why religion, and the political taming of religion, constitutes the key issue: “where [the clergy] die at the root a prince may sit a while, but is not safe.”Footnote ⁷ That is, if priestcraft could be definitively defeated, this would guarantee an equally definitive end to monarchy.

Harrington has been rightly classified as a theorist of civil religion.Footnote ⁸ When we put Harrington alongside other civil religionists such as Hobbes and Spinoza, we can see that furnishing one's preferred vision of politics with foundations far more ambitious than those available from merely secular reason is a characteristic mark of the theorist of civil religion. It was important for Harrington no less than for Hobbes and Spinoza to give an extended account of the nature of the Hebrew commonwealth—as either exemplary or cautionary or as both. As I hope to show, delving into some of Harrington's post-Oceana oeuvre helps quite a bit in giving us a better appreciation of what that account was. As already flagged, this will largely take the form of a commentary on Pian Piano, though I won't hesitate to draw on other works of the late 1650s as well. Our reading of Harrington is more or less founded on the axiom (which vindicates itself as a reasonable one to the extent that our interpretation generates fruitful insights) that Harrington, in these “theological” works, was doing pretty much the same thing that Hobbes and Spinoza were doing: supplying their chosen political theories with revelation-based theological credentials. Without exception, these thinkers come up with scriptural interpretations that cohere with their own theoretical project: Hobbes's reading of the Old Testament supports his political philosophy; Harrington's reading of the Old Testament supports his political philosophy; Spinoza's reading of the Old Testament supports his political philosophy; Locke's reading of the Old Testament supports his political philosophy. What I called above the “axiom” of our interpretation suggests that what these thinkers are doing is not interpreting scripture for the sake of interpreting scripture, but rather mobilizing scripture on behalf of a particular vision of politics.Footnote ⁹ Admittedly, other accounts can be given of what is involved in articulating a political vision paired with a particular biblical hermeneutics. If one sees a direct correspondence between a given set of political-philosophic principles and a given interpretation of scripture, rather than assuming that the latter must be in the service of the former, it may be seen as the other way around; or indeed, it may be that they simply evolved in tandem, without either being yoked instrumentally to the other.Footnote ¹⁰

Nelson, in The Hebrew Republic, tends to presume that the obsession of seventeenth-century political thinkers like Harrington with drawing support for their political vision from interpretations of the Old Testament tells us that modern political thought is less devoted to erecting its conceptions of political life on securely secularized foundations than is generally thought. As will be evident in the interpretation that follows (as well as in what I have published elsewhere), I am skeptical that that is the right conclusion to draw from Harrington's preoccupation with scriptural hermeneutics. That is, I am strongly inclined to think that Harrington appropriates themes from the Hebrew Bible because such tropes serve his rhetorical purposes as a champion of the republican tradition—and, no less, as a resolute foe of clerical power. One fairly decisive piece of evidence for the view that Harrington was fundamentally driven by something other than considerations of piety is his civil-religionist appeal to the idea of exploiting “the present superstition” for its potential political utility since it is “that which is always the most powerful with the people.”Footnote ¹¹ Admittedly, this is in the context of a discussion of pagan superstition, which on Harrington's view was rightly debunked by Cicero.Footnote ¹² (In effect, Harrington, in the passage I have cited, endorses the religious skepticism of Cicero while criticizing the priestly credulity of Plutarch. Moreover, adding to the significance of the Plutarch/Cicero juxtaposition is the fact that while Cicero too participated in religious rites, he, unlike Plutarch, held his office as augur by virtue of being a Roman magistrate, not by virtue of being a priest.) Yet there are good reasons to believe that like Machiavelli, Harrington considered paganism, superstitious or not, to be politically superior to Christianity, and in that respect his commonwealth was intended to be, as John Toland approvingly called it, a “Heathenish Commonwealth.”Footnote ¹³ In any case, whether one reads Harrington's texts as I read them or as Nelson reads them, either way one has a compelling reason to attend closely to Harrington's writings about ancient Israel in order to mine them for a better understanding of his broader theoretical purposes; and my aim in what follows is to look closely at Pian Piano and some of his other polemical writings of the late 1650s for just that reason.

Pocock gives quite a good encapsulation of Harrington's version of the enterprise that interests us—namely, the enterprise of bolstering one's political vision with a parallel or corresponding reading of scripture (and of the Old Testament in particular)—when he writes: “increasingly concerned with that equation of republic and theocracy which had given rise to the millennial utterances at the end of [Oceana, Harrington] set out to show that both ancient Israel and the apostolic Church manifested the republican form of government.”Footnote ¹⁴ Harrington himself makes this purpose explicit in Oceana: “as the kingdom of God the Father was a commonwealth, so shall be the kingdom of God the Son” (Oceana, 232). If a plausible case can be made that the text of the Old Testament presents God as intending Israel to be a republic, then partisans of a true commonwealth in Cromwell's England would have, in effect, divine sanction for their own political project.

Harrington's interlocutor in Pian Piano is Henry Ferne, an Anglican and royalist cleric who received a copy of Oceana from one of Harrington's sisters, and wrote back letting the sister (and Harrington) know of his acute displeasure with the book. It is striking that the very first objection to Oceana posed by Ferne in the letter to Harrington's sister that provoked Pian Piano was a challenge to Harrington's appeal to the precedent of ancient Israel: Harrington “is not a little mistaken [in Oceana] in thinking the Israel commonwealth or government under Moses so applicable unto his purpose as he would make it” (Political Works, 370). No less striking is Ferne's expression of his awareness of the close affinity between Harrington's views and those of Hobbes with respect to ecclesiological questions (including scriptural support for their views): “what is said in relation to the church, or religion in the point of government, ordination, excommunication, had better beseemed Leviathan and is below the parts of this gentleman” (ibid.). As Pocock points out (“Historical Introduction,” 89), Ferne was by no means the only critic of Harrington to notice the strong resemblance between Harrington's ecclesiological views and scriptural interpretations and those of Hobbes. Matthew Wren hit on a nice turn of phrase when he observed that “Mr Harrington … does silently swallow down such Notions as Mr Hobs hath chewed for him” (Political Works, 423n1). In reply, Harrington points out that the interpretation of 1 Samuel 8 that he shares with Hobbes is traceable back to Josephus; hence “the doctrine that God was king in Israel by compact or covenant … is more ancient than Hobbes” (422–23).

Ferne complains bitterly of the “meddling in matters of religion” (371) by the likes of Hobbes and Harrington (aggravated in the case of Harrington by the fact that, as a landed gentleman, he ought to have known better).Footnote ¹⁵ This draws a powerful retort from Harrington: “whenever the clergy have gained this point, namely that they are the Catholic Church, or that it is unlawful for gentlemen, either in their private capacity to discourse, or in their public to propose, as well in the matter of church as state government, neither government nor religion have failed to degenerate into mere priestcraft” (372).Footnote ¹⁶

Ferne's overarching suggestion in the letter of November 4, 1656, is that it is shameful that a landed gentleman like Harrington has allowed himself to be duped into a revolt not only against monarchy but also against aristocracy and (especially) against the Church of England. Harrington's response, right from the start, hangs on how one interprets the political constitution of ancient Israel. Far from republicanism requiring a repudiation of aristocracy, all bona fide popular commonwealths incorporate a respect for aristocracy in the institution of the senate: “that the senate ever had the supreme authority, as well in matters of religion as state, is not only clear in all other popular governments, but in the Old Testament” (371).Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, virtually the whole of the epistolary debate between Ferne and Harrington that composes Pian Piano is a debate about how to interpret the Old Testament, and in particular, about whether the Old Testament is as compatible with Harrington's republicanism as Oceana claims it to be.Footnote ¹⁸

Pian Piano is basically divided into seven queries, abstracted from the original challenges posed in Ferne's letter to Harrington's sister. In each case, Ferne elaborates on the original objection, and Harrington responds. In the debate over the first query, Ferne basically rejects the idea that either the senate or “the assemblies of the people” had any real power or authority, “both of them receiving laws by the hand of Moses” (373). The idea of Israel as a Harringtonian “commonwealth,” according to Ferne, misrepresents both the monarchical nature of Moses's authority and the relation between God and the people of Israel (again, basically a monarchical authority). Harrington's republican narrative assumes that God's covenant with Israel places “God and the people on equal terms,” that God's laws have validity only insofar as the people consent to them (ibid.). In fact, what the Old Testament teaches is that Israelite theocracy flows from the unilateral authority of God (embodied practically in Moses). How does Harrington respond? He vehemently rejects Ferne's suggestion that it is an act of impiety to present Moses's Israel as a commonwealth. In particular, he argues that close attention to the biblical texts shows that “the authority of proposing unto the people … was derived by the king from the judge, by the judge from the Sanhedrim, by the Sanhedrim from Moses, and by Moses from God,” but the responsibility for “the suffrage, or result” indeed resided with the people (374; my italics).Footnote ¹⁹ In consequence, “God was the king in Israel by covenant, proposed by himself or his servant Moses, and resolved by the people” (ibid.; my italics). The theocratic monarchy of the Old Testament was in fact an elective monarchy (a government not by command but by covenant); and as soon as the people withdrew their consent and demanded a different form of regime—as they did in the key text of 1 Samuel 8Footnote ²⁰—God had no choice but to bow to the people's power of result (ibid.). Notwithstanding the fact that Moses was its founder and God was its king, Israel was a “commonwealth.” Moreover, Harrington insists that Ferne is mistaken to claim that Moses “was a monarch, or stood alone.”Footnote ²¹ From the moment of the institution of the Sanhedrin, Israel was a mixed regime, and Moses became “but prince of the senate, which God appointed to stand with him” (376; my italics).Footnote ²²

Interpretation of the Old Testament is also central to Ferne and Harrington's fundamental dispute over whether monarchy is or is not the best regime (second query). Ferne affirms as his ultimate principle that “order is the main concernment of government, and order is more perfected by reducing to unity, or having still one chief in the order” (376–77). But Ferne's “unity” is really a duality, for “God [led his people] by the hand of Aaron and Moses: Moses chief in the whole government, and Aaron the chief in the priesthood” (377). Again, Harrington faults Ferne for insufficiently close reading of the texts: after the institution of the Sanhedrin, the high priest was “subordinate unto it, whether in the matter of religion or state” (377–78). As already pointed out, the Sanhedrin “was to stand … with Moses; therefore Moses, from the institution thereof, was no more than prince or archon of it and general of the commonwealth; in each of which functions he was succeeded by Joshua” (378).Footnote ²³

Harrington ends the second query with a compacted analysis of what amounts to the fall of the commonwealth (378). Following the death of Joshua, the Israelites (“mindless of the excellent orders of their commonwealth”) allowed their senate as well as their lesser courts to lapse, and what resulted was degeneration into anarchy and needless warfare. In response to this anarchy there was, during the period covered by the Book of Judges, a resort to dictatorial power in the Roman sense—for dictator in the Roman sense is, Harrington claims, precisely what “judge” means (ibid.; cf. 474). But this stopgap failed to stem the anarchy and corruption into which Israel had fallen, and this (“the true cause” of the turn away from the republican regimeFootnote ²⁴) in turn impelled the people toward “monarchy, under which they fared worse.”Footnote ²⁵ This change of regime brought about “the execrable wickedness of most of their kings (the like whereunto was never known),” and eventually, the nadir of captivity for Israel and Judah. “This,” Harrington needles Ferne, “is that unity and order which you celebrate” (378). Monarchical unity is “the unity of a person that may do what he list” (379), which is hardly a recipe for true political order.

The next query raises the (for Harrington) decisive issue of the distribution of landed property. Ferrne concedes that the Hebrews “had a kind of agrarian,” but he insists that this division of land by lot “notwithstanding left place for a sufficient difference and excess in dignity of persons, bounds of estates, measure of wealth and riches” (ibid.). In short, Ferne denies that the agrarian policy was as egalitarian as it would need to have been in order to furnish a model or archetype for Harringtonian republicanism. In reply, Harrington offers scriptural evidence that the majority of the land was indeed in the hands of the people, and thus Israel lacked the material basis for a viable monarchy: that is, one had a “popular balance” rather than a properly “monarchical balance” (379–80). Lacking the appropriate material basis for sustaining a monarchical regime, the kings of Israel and Judah sought to distract the people with destructive wars. This unhappy history has much to teach Harrington's contemporaries—as Harrington does not fail to point out—for according to his analysis in Oceana, this experience of “infirm and troubled” monarchy, owing to a mismatch between the regime and its material foundation, was precisely replicated in Stuart England (ibid.).Footnote ²⁶

A fuller elaboration of Israel as an archetype of Harringtonian agrarian law is offered in Book 1, chapter 11 of The Prerogative of Popular Government (458–64).Footnote ²⁷ On Harrington's view, “the balance of a government” (459) unavoidably follows the balance in the distribution of property (a democratic balance in the holding of property produces democratic or republican government; an aristocratic property balance produces mixed monarchy; a monarchical property balance produces despotism). Changes in the balance of property produce corresponding changes in the balance of political power. Therefore, if one wants to ensure that a form of government originally intended to be republican remains republican, one must establish a legislative device perpetuating a democratic balance in the distribution of land. Hence the indispensable need, in a republican constitution, for an agrarian law. Did the Hebrews have such a law? Indeed they did: “the jubilee was a law instituted for preservation of the popular balance from alteration” (463).Footnote ²⁸ There is no clearer way of determining God's political (or constitutional) intention than by looking at how the balance of property was first established. It was originally based on a divine lottery; hence “God, in ordaining this balance, intended popular government” (462).Footnote ²⁹

Especially conspicuous in this chapter is the language of divine purpose (or as Harrington goes so far as to call it on p. 459: “divine right”). Harrington emphasizes repeatedly that it was God who was responsible for the egalitarian distribution of landFootnote ³⁰—just as, in Pian Piano, it was God who was responsible for introduction of the senate. Clearly, the institutions that matter most to Harrington are the ones that receive divine imprimatur.Footnote ³¹ On page 463, he declares that it is precisely in the institution of the agrarian balance that one can discern “the clearest footsteps of God in the whole history of the Bible,”Footnote ³² which is probably the most emphatic invocation of divine intention that one can find in Harrington. And on the same page, in response to Wren's suggestion that the Hebrew institution of the jubilee may not have been sufficient for the purpose assigned to it by Harrington, Harrington avers that this calls into question “the prudence of God”—rather than, as elsewhere, “the rules of human prudence [on a par] with other commonwealths” (496; cf. 652).

Another aspect in which the commonwealth of Israel serves as a privileged archetype of a Harringtonian regime gets presented in Book 1, chap. 12 of The Prerogative of Popular Government (473–76), namely rotation. Rotation goes to the core of the idea of political equality: “Equal rotation is equal vicissitude in, or succession unto, magistracy conferred for equal terms” (473)—which it is possible to read as a seventeenth-century updating of Aristotle's basic conception of republican citizenship as defined by the ideal of “ruling and being ruled in turn.”Footnote ³³ As Harrington puts it, “as the agrarian answereth unto the equality of the foundation or root, so doth rotation unto the equality of the superstructures or branches of a commonwealth” (ibid.). Did Israel satisfy this fundamental requirement of republican government? On pages 474–76, Harrington sets out the Hebrew practice of “the monthly election of two thousand deputies in each of the twelve tribes [therefore totaling twenty-four thousand deputies at any one time]” (475). This “congregation” (or assembly: ecclesia) then elected in turn “priests, officers and magistrates” (ibid.).Footnote ³⁴ It was indeed this ecclesia that elected Solomon as king and elected Zadok as his high priest (475–76; cf. 526–27). This latter point is surprising since it suggests (contrary to suggestions elsewhere) that Israel did not cease being a commonwealth when it became a monarchy. Harrington anticipates that “prov[ing] an order in a commonwealth [by instancing] a monarchy” will be received as contradictory, but he stands his ground: since kings were subject to popular deposition (Harrington offers the example of RehoboamFootnote ³⁵), having a monarchy was not inconsistent with Israel continuing to be a commonwealth (476).Footnote ³⁶ In effect, Harrington presents the political institutions of Israel as those of representative government: even after Israel became a monarchy, it was the ecclesia more than the kingship that defined its political order, and the ecclesia was indeed composed of political representatives subject to regular rotation.

With Israel, as with any commonwealth, the people are the final disposers of binding law. As Harrington lays out best in Book 1, chapter 7 of The Prerogative of Popular Government, the political business of a commonwealth is divisible into “proposition” and “resolution”—that is, God (as creator), or Moses (as legislator), or the senate (as supreme authority), propose laws, and these propositions get “resolved” (i.e., decided) by the people voting either to assent to them or not to assent to them. Hence: “the laws or orders of a commonwealth derive no otherwise … [than] from their authority received and confirmed by the vote or command of the people” (421). That is, on Harrington's account, even God, no differently than Moses or the senate, was merely the “proposer” of the laws, dependent on the people for their “reception and confirmation.” Harrington cites Exodus and Deuteronomy to the effect that God does his proposing via Moses (421–22), but what is decisive theoretically is the distinction between proposition and resolution, irrespective of who serves as proposer. Proposing is proposing, and resolving is resolving, and (Harrington is emphatic) only the people can bear responsibility for the latter.

There is of course one last feature of a properly Harringtonian regime that Harrington needs to trace back to the Hebrew commonwealth in order fully to vindicate the exemplarity of Israel. It is, quite possibly, for Harrington the most important of all, namely, its policy regarding the limitation of clerical power, and the institutions by which it ensures that religious authority is not abused. It may seem strange to speak of limiting religious authority in the context of an ancient theocracy that even Harrington himself sometimes speaks of as being ruled by God. Still, Harrington does see aspects of religious liberty not only in Greece and Rome but also in ancient Israel. This last and arguably most important feature of the Hebrew commonwealth is flagged in Pian Piano right at the start of Harrington's response to Ferne's original letter (371). Ferne, we will recall, had denounced “meddling in matters of religion” by the lay gentry.Footnote ³⁷ This implies that theologians hold a monopoly when it comes to interpretation of the political significance of the Old Testament. In reply, Harrington asserts that “the senate ever had the supreme authority, as well in matters of religion as state [not only] in all other popular governments, but in the Old Testament”;Footnote ³⁸ and since “the senate is the more peculiar province of the gentry,” interpretation of the requirements of religion is emphatically not a monopoly held by priests or theologians. This account of the Hebrew senate has the dual effect of supporting Harrington's Erastian interpretation of the Mosaic regime and (because of the text's highlighting of the senate as “the more peculiar province of the gentry”) asserting his own legitimate right, as a gentleman-scholar, to interpret scripture.

In the same context, Harrington highlights the fact that the Hebrew commonwealth was typical (or archetypical) of republican regimes in combining a national religion with respect for liberty of conscience: “the liberty of conscience or prophetic right in the commonwealth of Israel, as in others, was such as by which Christianity, notwithstanding the national religion, might grow” (ibid.; my italics). There was indeed a national religion (the religion of Moses), but this national religion did not preclude freedom of religion (any more than paganism did).Footnote ³⁹ Harrington cites the Gospel according to St. John to the effect that “there was nothing in the [Jewish] law why [John the Baptist] might not introduce his baptism, and therefore why he might not gather churches, or instruct the people in his way.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Admittedly, the practice of the Jews fell well short of their own legal norms—hence there was persecution of Christ and his followers (371; cf. 505–6 and 513–14). But, Harrington counters, this has to be understood as “the abuse of their power”—that is, as a departure from their legal regime rather than required by it (371).

These issues get pursued further in Harrington's reply to the seventh query (385–86). There was always in Judaism a freedom of prophecy such that it was left to the people, preached to by this or that prophet, to decide whether to deem a particular prophet a true prophet or a false prophet.Footnote ⁴¹ The same freedom of prophecy applied when Christianity came on the scene: “Nor doth the Sanhedrim … refuse [John the Baptist] the like prophetic right” (386). The same all-important claims are asserted in Oceana: “prophetic right … was above all the orders of this commonwealth. … And whereas it was not lawful by the national religion to sacrifice in any other place than the temple, a prophet was his own temple, and might sacrifice where he would. … By this right John the Baptist and our Saviour, unto whom it more particularly related, had their disciples, and taught the people. … Wherefore the Christian religion grew up according unto the orders of the commonwealth of Israel, and not against them.”Footnote ⁴²

Thus far, we have attempted to sketch the Israelite regime as Harrington conceives it, drawing upon his post-Oceana polemics. This involves the following. (1) The kingship of God founded on a (revocable) covenant with the people, that is, on popular consent. (2) The supremacy of Moses as a Solon-like or Lycurgus-like founder. (3) The subsequent institution of the Sanhedrin (more divinely inspired than other aspects of the regime), which becomes an essential pillar of the regime and in effect acquires cosovereignty with Moses.Footnote ⁴³ (4) The subordination of Aaron as high priest specifically to the Sanhedrin, not to Moses. Hence: the strict subordination of priestly power. (5) God, or Moses, or the senate, as proposers of the law, but the people as “resolvers” of the law. This, of course, puts democracy at the center of Hebrew republicanism. (6) An agrarian law. This, like the senate, carries a special divine seal, so to speak. (7) Rotation of offices. And (8) civic norms that render the national religion consistent with religious toleration. Some of these aspects of the regime seem to follow a Hobbesian template; others are distinctively Harringtonian. This account of Israel serves to lay out and rhetorically justify the fundamental features of Harrington's republican political vision; but no less important is Harrington's account of the corruption of this regime. What accounts for the undoing of a vision of politics “as cometh nearest unto God's own pattern” (387)? How does it come to be unraveled? The all-important distinction between chirotonia (popular election) and chirothesia (laying-on of hands) analyzed exhaustively by Harrington in Book 2 of The Prerogative of Popular Government is central to Harrington's narrative of the regime's corruption.

As has been pointed out by Jeffrey Collins, Harrington here was actually following Hobbes's lead (and again, this and related instances of debt to Hobbes were mightily present to Harrington's contemporary interlocutors, and highlighted by them as evidence of a culpable complicity with Hobbes).Footnote ⁴⁴ If one takes a work like Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty as one's guide to Hobbes's relation to the republican tradition, one will assume there to be an unbridgeable gulf between Hobbes and the leading republican theorists of his time. But if one looks closely at canonical republican texts like the works of Harrington, a much more complex and interesting relationship between Hobbes and the republican tradition opens itself to view.Footnote ⁴⁵ In fact, Harrington owed a very large debt to Hobbes—again, as was highlighted polemically (but rightly highlighted) by contemporary critics of the political theory developed in The Commonwealth of Oceana. Harrington's commitment to an Erastian civil religion; his preoccupation with the politics of the ancient Hebrews; his scriptural interpretations, and the ecclesiology he draws from the Old Testament; his challenges to Christian orthodoxy—all of these crucial aspects of Harrington's post-Oceana writings not only run parallel to major themes in Hobbes; they are directly influenced by Hobbes's arguments and interpretations, as Harrington himself was not averse to acknowledging. Therefore, while disclosure of a more complex and richer relationship between Hobbes and Harrington is by no means the only reason to take an interest in the post-Oceana debates pursued by Harrington, one can certainly consider better insight into the Hobbes-Harrington relationship as a not insignificant side benefit of such inquiry. I would hazard the suggestion (which clearly implies a challenge to Skinner's Hobbes) that if we are unable to grasp what draws Harrington and Spinoza and Hobbes together in a (largely but not entirely tacit) intellectual and political kinship, it tells us that we are missing something essential in Harrington and Spinoza and Hobbes.

In any case, as Harrington encapsulates the issue on page 518, “chirotonia is election by the many [whereas] chirothesia is election by one, or by the few.” Or as he puts it on page 538: “the whole difference between popular and monarchical government falls upon these two words; and so the question will be whether the Scriptures were intended more for the advantage of a prince, of an hierarchy or presbytery, than of the people.” In that sense, what is at stake in the chirotonia/chirothesia distinction is the normative status of popular government per se. But it is also, as we shall see, highly relevant to Harrington's narrative of the corruption of republican politics, including the politics of the Hebrew commonwealth. One gets an especially forceful account of the key distinction in the introduction to Book 2 of The Prerogative of Popular Government (502): “chirotonia is popular suffrage, whether given … by the holding up of hands or … without the holding up of hands.” Chirothesia “signifies ordination conferred … by some distinct order from the people [meaning: religious authority distinct from the people], whether with imposition of hands or without it.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Clearly, the essential issue is not whether hands are raised or placed, but whether ordination does or does not involve popular participation. Identifying ordination with chirotonia aligns it with the basic norms of republican politics, namely “election (that is to say of magistrates) or ratification (that is to say of laws) by the many” (ibid.; my italics).

But as Harrington had already suggested in Pian Piano, inscribed in the distinction between chirotonia and chirothesia is an invidious history of the corruption of Hebrew republicanism (a process of corruption later replicated within the history of Christianity).

One cannot help asking: What happened to the Hebrew commonwealth such that it went from being the archetype of a perfect republic like Oceana, to being the inspiration behind a millennium and a half of Christian antirepublicanism? That's the story that Harrington undertakes to narrate in Book 2, chap. 4 of The Prerogative of Popular Government (and to renarrate, in a slightly different way, in Book 2, chap. 5 of The Art of Lawgiving).

Reprising the account offered in Pian Piano, Harrington basically puts the blame on a “presbyterian” conspiracy on the part of power-hungry Jewish priests: “All elections in Israel [were] usurped by the presbyterian party” (534). With “the introduction of chirothesia by the presbyterian party, which must have taken place some time after the [first] captivity,” this presbyterian cabal (supposedly led by Hillel, the high priest) managed to “deface even the work of God himself” (ibid.).Footnote ⁴⁹ How did this usurpation come about? Harrington draws from Maimonides (536) a strikingly simple answer: ordination by chirotonia requires assembly by the people. With the Roman ejection of the Hebrews from “their own country” and their descent into captivity, such popular assemblies were no longer possible.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hence the vacuum left by “the defect of the chirotonia of the people” came to be filled by chirothesia (ibid.).

“Cabal” is exactly the appropriate language to use in this context, since “Cabala” is Harrington's tag for the Israelite dispensation subsequent to its corruption (645). As Pocock observes, one can see already from the title page of Book 2 of The Art of Lawgiving (615) that with the corruption of their commonwealth, the noble republican citizens of Israel have become merely “the Jews.”Footnote ⁵¹ In The Art of Lawgiving's retelling of the story of the corruption of Hebrew republicanism, unlike the versions told in Pian Piano and The Prerogative of Popular Government, there is no mention of Hillel as the arch-subverter, but considerable stress is put on the idea of “the oral law” within Talmudic Judaism, and its claimed supremacy over the written law of Moses. This oral law is what Harrington refers to as “the cabala,” and recognition of its primacy goes hand in hand with a new and unprecedented ascendancy of the principle of chirothesia (645–46). Appealing to the oral law as a higher authority than the written law, the high priest seized control of the great synagogue by appointing an unelected presbytery, thereby subverting the principles of Mosaic republicanism.Footnote ⁵² The great synagogue now became a vehicle of priestly oligarchy (648)—a “cabalistical or Jewish commonwealth” where “the word of a scribe or doctor was avowedly held to be of more validity than the Scripture” (648, 649). This was the reign of the Pharisees (646), and—crucially for Harrington—the “liberty of conscience” that had hitherto been enshrined in the Mosaic constitution gave way to Jewish persecution of Christ and his followers under the cabbalistic (i.e., antidemocratic) rule of the Pharisees (647–48). Hence it was not the people who crucified Christ and persecuted Christians but their priestly overlords.

Of course, Harrington's whole analysis of the Hebrew commonwealth would be of merely historical interest if different principles were applicable to a properly Christian commonwealth (as Oceana is meant to be). Accordingly, Book 2, chap. 5 of The Prerogative of Popular Government is devoted to questions of Christian ecclesiology as intended by Christ and the original apostles.Footnote ⁵³ Harrington's own view is that there is absolutely no difference between a priest or magistrate of the church and a magistrate of the state: both are human offices (hence: “ecclesiastical policy [is] subject unto human prudence”). And on Harrington's reading, exactly the same view is vindicated by the New Testament itself: “Neither God nor Christ ever instituted any policy whatsoever upon any other principles than those of human prudence” (547; my italics).Footnote ⁵⁴ That is, both the Mosaic dispensation and the Christian dispensation were intended to be governed by the principle of chirotonia, not chirothesia Footnote ⁵⁵—however much both the first dispensation and its successor came to be corrupted by the “imposture” (544, top) of priests. Accustomed as they were to the public norms of the Hebrew commonwealth, it would be natural, Harrington suggests on page 562, for the first Christians, in organizing their churches, to retain the primacy of popular suffrage. “Why should they suffer such power in new and private, as they would not endure in their old and public magistrates?”

The fundamental meaning of chirothesia is that it asserts an oligarchical authority just where one ought to have—as Harrington calls it on page 528—“the power of the people.” “It is now above three thousand years since the institution of the Sanhedrim, from which time the ambitious elders first, then the Talmudists, and of latter ages divines, have been perpetually striving for or possessing themselves of this same oligarchical invention of the chirothesia pretended to be derived from Moses” (531).Footnote ⁵⁶ The theme of religious oligarchy also figures importantly in Pour Enclouer le Canon, where the Israelite Sanhedrin is again presented as the archetype of “mere oligarchy, by means of ordination” that is guaranteed to corrupt any commonwealth. The pope and his seventy cardinals modeled themselves on the Hebrew high priest and his seventy elders, and consequences no less fatal to a legitimate republicanism are promised by those among Harrington's contemporaries aspiring to “a government of saints.” Those who claim a government of saints will in fact construct a government of hypocrites, for “the surest testimony of sainthood in rulers is when they are willing to admit of such orders in government as restrain the power to do wickedly, or of lording it over their brethren.”Footnote ⁵⁷

As J. C. Davis has highlighted extremely well, Pocock seems torn between reading Harrington as a “millennialist” thinker, looking to notions of supernatural grace as a way of solving the problem of how to secure the immortality of the republic, and reading him as a resolutely secular theorist who insists upon the natural construction—rather than divine inspiration—of the Israelite commonwealth.Footnote ⁵⁸ The secularist pole of Pocock's interpretation is encapsulated in his frequent (and apt) references to the figure of Moses's Midianite (i.e., heathen) father-in-law, Jethro, as an emblem (the privileged emblem, one might say) of the primacy of nature in relation to grace. If the statecraft of ancient Israel depended decisively on the prudential counseling of Jethro the Midianite, then the Hebrew theocracy was, as Pocock puts it, an “entirely natural form of government,” and Moses's work as a legislator was in principle on entirely the same plane as that of Lycurgus or Solon.Footnote ⁵⁹ In chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli referred to God as the “great tutor” (sì gran precettore) of Moses, but in Harrington, Moses's great tutor is Jethro.Footnote ⁶⁰ The critical appraisal of saint-oriented politics that we have just noted in Pour Enclouer le Canon gives us further reason to be skeptical of the “millennialist” reading that is no less present in Pocock's interpretation: if it is Harrington's view that a republic of saints inevitably generates new forms of the religious oligarchy that he is most concerned to avert, a notion of apocalyptic grace is the last thing that we should expect to see Harrington proposing as a foundation on which to erect his republicanism.Footnote ⁶¹

3

What defines the core of the republican vision as we encounter it in Harrington? Jonathan Scott offers a nice text from Algernon Sidney suggesting that the defining purpose of the English republican tradition was to conceive an idea of an English commonwealth that would synthesize and perfect the republicanism of premonarchical Israel, of Sparta, of Rome, and of Venice.Footnote ⁶² Hence for Sidney, no less than for Harrington or Milton or Spinoza before him, the Hebrew commonwealth remained an essential touchstone for republican reflection. But vehement anticlericalism, for Harrington and those he influenced, was always a constitutive aspect of this core republican vision. It may seem somewhat odd to appeal to the Old Testament in order to preach liberation from priestly domination, but merely juxtaposing Harrington and Spinoza proves to us that Harrington was in no way unique in invoking an image of Hebrew republicanism in order to advance a determinedly anticlerical agenda. Moreover, both Harrington and Spinoza picked up indispensable cues from Hobbes with respect to how to pursue this project. At the end of The Prerogative of Popular Government, Harrington encapsulates his position on politics and “ecclesiastical policies” as follows: “popular government you see is naturally inclined unto the very best, and the spiritual aristocracy unto the very worst” (563). Why is spiritual aristocracy naturally inclined “unto the very worst”? The short answer is that kings love priests, and priests love kings (especially when the king endows the clergy “with good revenues”), with the inevitable consequence that republican liberty is subjected to a double yoke. That is, to be free from priestcraft, politics must be free from kings; to be free from kings, politics must be free from priestcraft.Footnote ⁶³ Harrington's idea of republican liberty was intended to elevate both the political and the religious freedom of citizens to new heights,Footnote ⁶⁴ and the realization of the lofty aspiration embodied in this political vision required, in Harrington's view, a dual and simultaneous assault upon two mutually reinforcing types of illegitimate authority: that of hereditary monarchs and that of clerical hierarchies. In our contemporary political world, the struggle against monarchy has almost completely fulfilled its aims, but the battle against theocratic priestcraft prosecuted in the mid-seventeenth century by such epic figures as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Harrington still has some way to go.