The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government.
— Harold J. Laski
gutenberg.org
The contract is thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.
The State has power only for the protection of natural law.
The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of kings.
Its eldest child is charity, and without it there can be no honesty of opinion.
The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism.
We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset.
Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did.
That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied.
But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?
What is needed is a patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty.
Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power.
Liberty means self-government, and self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.
Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their insight.
If the American colonies want to go, let them by all means cut adrift.
How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects?
The charge that he supported the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the other.
He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room.
The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn.
He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate great principles.
The more equality there is in a State, the more use, in general, we can make of our freedom.
It is an attempt to give each man as similar a chance as possible to utilize what powers he may possess.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
