The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship.
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 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.
In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent.
Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic.
The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification.
The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy.
Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we should disturb beyond repair the…
We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved.
The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn.
Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform.
We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble.
The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience.
There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good.
Men of great property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right--these seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.
He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence.
He knew too well how little reason is wont to enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of innovation to its power.
He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation.
His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision.
Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good.
Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong.
The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril.
Principles were thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application.
Government, for him, was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the existing system.
Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name of expediency.
He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
