Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine?
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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Yet the definition of what limits were to be set to toleration was far from easy.
Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians became finally impossible.
It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his generation.
The problem, now as then, was its translation into institutional terms.
The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom.
In the largest sense, his questions are still our own.
Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did.
We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset.
Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion.
Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions.
Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits shall we place upon the power of government?
The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state.
Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality than Rousseau's.
Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious.
The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in…
He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism.
The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim.
Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor.
He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.
At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke's side.
Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder.
Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge.
And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
If we reject Locke's view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character is not less remote from our speculations.
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