His disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of political conflict.
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.
gutenberg.org
His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance.
His unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of…
The State, in fact, may have the noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also mortal men.
They came to see that without self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power, such happiness must go unfulfilled.
They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the State of which they were part.
It is even possible to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in revolt.
They were surely to be pardoned if, reading the Reflections of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with which privileges they did not share were defended.
We may even see how a monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely occupied with the public good.
We may well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria; but that does not make it any the less corrupt.
Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment.
Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.
What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be.
It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper.
A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end.
He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself.
What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature.
There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence.
It was not an attitude which reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude.
The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
Rather do they point to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience.
Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
