The standards they formulate are nothing so much as methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new order in which different demands would secure fulfilment.
This passage critiques the standards set by those in power as tools for maintaining their preferred social order.
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More from Harold J. Laski
There are realms of conduct within which, to be free, I must be permitted to act as I please; to be denied self-expression there, is to be denied freedom.
Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Where mistakes are made, where there is corruption, or dishonesty, or abuse, it can be brought home forthwith to its authors.
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