Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle.
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 populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons.
The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation.
How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom.
The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.
For the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment.
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.
The stage was set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer represented the facts at issue.
It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general problems of the modern State.
Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister.
The party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative government.
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…
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.
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.
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…
Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even while he rejected his methods.
But the certainties of the future lay on his side.
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.
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.
For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled by Divine Right.
It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy who never slumbered.
Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James.
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.
All at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
