They come, of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power.
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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Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a static world.
Forms, indeed, will vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries of science.
But upon the value of certain things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder.
History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of its achievement.
Natural rights are nothing more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests.
The things that men desire correspond, in some rough fashion, to the things they need.
Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely unanswerable.
Action is less their elimination than their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have the full materials for judgment.
The unconscious deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the motives that are avowed.
Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done.
It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic they implied.
The theory of natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in its form than in its substance.
The answer to a morally bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for…
There is something curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial place.
The State is morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped.
Once it is admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its expression.
Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent.
He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors of a whole people.
For the case against Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal.
It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
The popular sense of right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen.
The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their participation in it.
No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too…
Few would deny that statesmen are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion…
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
