Though his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of…
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 theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688.
Patience, foresight and generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition of his kingship.
What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of William than the blunder of the French monarch.
It was the necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England.
The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance.
What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon Parliament.
All at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.
If a large fraction of the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds, the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted in theory submitted in practice.
Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James.
It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy who never slumbered.
For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled by Divine Right.
What it did was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the consent of Parliament.
The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome.
But the certainties of the future lay on his side.
Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even while he rejected his methods.
The answer, indeed, like all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real…
No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer of his time to the most vital of its questions.
Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an economic régime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the Tudors.
America presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the…
The party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative government.
Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister.
It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general problems of the modern State.
The stage was set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer represented the facts at issue.
That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules.
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