These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.
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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The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the…
Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good.
The rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries.
Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close.
No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of…
Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue.
Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate.
He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon.
No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the…
What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote.
Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed.
The rest is vanity; the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.
He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas.
No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war.
The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends.
But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand.
For the motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood.
That which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to be enduring.
For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state.
Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small.
The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles, but the roots were absent from their national experience.
That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
