He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces.
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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He sees that the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was demonstrated by the failure of George III.
He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government.
He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in terms of men instead of principles.
He was convinced of the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect on commerce of an absolute government.
Political life, like human life, ends in death; and the problem is to make our egress as comfortable as we can, for the prime evil is disturbance.
The man who put indolence among the primary motives of human happiness was not likely to view novel theories with unruffled temper.
The supposed antagonism between commerce and agriculture he disposes of in a half-dozen effective sentences.
He sees the value of a general level of economic equality, even while he is sceptical of its attainment.
He insists upon the economic value of high wages, though he somewhat belittles the importance of wealth in the achievement of happiness.
Before Bentham, who on this point converted Adam Smith, he knew that the rate of interest depends upon the supply of and demand for loans.
He insists that commerce demands a free government for its progress, pointing out, doubtless from his abundant French experience, that an absolute government gives to the commercial class an insufficient status of honor.
No one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have moved far from the narrow confines of the old political…
But at least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein he had the secret of its true understanding.
He first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be.
He put an end also to the confusion which resulted from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong independent of all positive law.
He took the facts as phenomena to be explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be maintained in part defiance of them.
His utilitarianism was the first efficient substitute for the labored metaphysics of the contract school; and even if he was not the first to see through its pretensions--that is perhaps the claim of Shaftesbury--he was the first to show…
He saw that history and psychology together provide the materials for a political philosophy.
His genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely to effect a new creation in politics.
So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change.
The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English institutions.
Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom.
The liberty of unlicensed printing--less admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a Habeas Corpus and a lettre de cachet, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their…
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
