Harold J. Laski

We know that no State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without representation.

We know that there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest in it.

It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.

Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life.

The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that…

We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance.

Our real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has social value.

Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy.

It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself.

No system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general…

If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men.

Yet the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved inadequate.

Novelty, which is assumed to be the outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which civilization depends.

It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the nature of man is not adapted.

In part it is a rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal.

That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it deserves more examination than it has received.

The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to…

He justifies the privileges of the English Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion.

No one will object to privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham will…

Nor did he admit the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men.

He took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents.

The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook.

He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.

The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn.