Chancery folio (267 x 165 mm). Title printed in red and black. (Marginal toning to title-page, light offsetting and spotting throughout.) Contemporary dark calf (rebacked to style, endpapers renewed, fore-corners repaired). Provenance: contemporary marginalia and underlining.

FIRST EDITION OF HARRINGTON'S MASTERPIECE OF POLITICAL THEORY, in which, next to Thomas More's Utopia, is perhaps the most famous attempt at envisioning a model commonwealth" (Pforzheimer). A work of utopian fiction, here Harrington envisions the country of Oceana, with a republican constitution, bicameral legislature, and other features that would have a profound influence on thinkers such as Montesquieu, Hume, Blackstone, and Locke, as well as thinkers of the American Revolutionary generation such as John Adams. Pforzheimer 449; Wing H-809.