James Harrington’s brief career as a political and historical theorist belongs to the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660.

This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington’s writings, offering for the first time in intellectual history an explanation of the English Civil Wars as a revolution produced by the decay of the old political structure and its substitution by another through long-term change.

The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalised presentation of English history up to the victory of proposing a republic to replace it.