In 29.19 of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu situates James Harrington (1611–77) among the utopian thinkers in the history of political thought. He writes: ‘Thomas More, who spoke rather of what he had read than of what he thought, wanted to govern all states with the simplicity of a Greek town. Harrington saw only the republic of England, while a crowd of writers found disorder wherever they did not see a crown.’ Harrington attempted to establish the best regime beyond human realisation rather than the most practical regime in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Montesquieu doubted the possibility of modelling a modern commonwealth after ancient republican principles for two reasons. First, Harrington's vision of politics inadvertently demanded an impractical degree of self-denying virtue out of citizens. Second, Harrington's republicanism insufficiently addressed the particularities of modern commercial life, whose challenges only became amplified following Europe's financial revolutions. Montesquieu's criticisms reflect his broader warning to moderate legislators that they ought to avoid rationalist system-building approaches towards attaining political goods. Ironically, his counsel echoes Harrington's own insistence that politics must be grounded in historicity, in prudent empiricism rather than rational design or ‘geometry’. This begs the question: what shrouded Harrington's perception of England's liberty?

With these considerations, one might defend Harrington's socalled ‘utopianism’ on two fronts. First, his republican vision corresponded with a unique historical situation. Henry VII's assault on the feudal peerage in late fifteenth-century England kick-started a socioeconomic transition where the balance of property shifted in ‘the people’s’ favour. In addition, the beheading of Charles I in 1649 turned England into a de facto republic to the extent that re-establishing a monarchy appeared as the less likely alternative at the time. For Harrington, these events brought forth an opportunity to do away with ‘modern prudence’, which he associated with the early medieval/feudal tradition, and to establish a commonwealth based on ‘ancient prudence’, which he associated with Sparta, Rome, Athens, the Hebrew Republic, and with contemporary commercial republics such as Switzerland and Holland.