James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) has been intermittently famous since publication. Unlike other blueprints for a commonwealth, Oceana did not simply offer reasons for preferring a republic to monarchy. It furnished the first large-scale analysis, and explanation, of the collapse of the Stuart regime. Further, it made an unabashed claim to originality in Harrington's two great discoveries: of the principle of ‘the balance of dominion’ in the foundation, and the separation of ‘dividing and choosing’ in the superstructure. This knowledge might render a republic ‘as…long-lived, as the world’. By 1659 these arguments furnished the basis of a new political science, and satire.

Meanwhile interpretations of Harrington's text have diverged wildly. In the early 1940s Oceana stood at the heart of the celebrated ‘gentry controversy’. In 1945, in a pioneering work by Zera Fink, Tawney's analyst of contemporary economic and social change became a ‘classical republican’. Building on this interpretation, J. G. A. Pocock made Harrington author of a ‘Machiavellian meditation upon feudalism’. Subsequently Harrington's classical republicanism has been depicted as Platonic, Aristotelian, neo-Roman, ‘Virgilianized’, Machiavellian or a synthesis of several of these elements mediated by Polybian constitutionalism. Others have seen in him a utopian, a Stoic, a natural philosopher and the author of a civil religion. For still others Harrington's principal intellectual debt was to Hobbes, an engagement which has been used to problematize the idea of English classical republicanism. In fact this diversity of interpretation reflects a key feature of Harrington's text: its deliberate, and strategic, multi-vocality.