Thomas Spence and James Harrington: A Case Study in Influence

This chapter examines the evidence for the standard claim that the seventeenth-century writer James Harrington and his utopian text Oceana were the decisive influence on Thomas Spence's ideas about land. In his introduction to The Political Works of Thomas Spence, H. T. 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’. Other scholars such as Malcolm Chase and Thomas R. Knox have also identified the influence of Harrington, although they have been divided over its extent. This chapter offers a more systematic account of the relationship between Harrington and Spence in order to understand the nature and extent of any possible influence of Harrington on the latter.