Harold J. Laski

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.

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.

What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of William than the blunder of the French monarch.

Patience, foresight and generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition of his kingship.

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…

Locke may not possess the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first of English political thinkers.

He yet stated more clearly than either the general problem of the modern State.

But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.

He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible retort to the theory of Divine Right.

For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral…

But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown.

Few great thinkers have so little perceived the psychological foundations of politics.

It can only be for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience.

Locke thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his Leviathan though he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker.

Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident.

But because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient variety in the conceptions of justice.

The result is uncertainty and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable.

But just as Locke's natural state implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of hard necessity.

It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains them--life and liberty and property--will be…

Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group.

On the contrary, it is a contract with the community as a whole which thus becomes that common political superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish infractions of it.

Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had before the institution of political society.

He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be replaced.

If God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must seek a human explanation of political facts.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.