Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money.
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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This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured.
Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
But its careful periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his questions.
He sees that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted.
Nothing could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's Present Discontents.
Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.
He does not doubt the original equality of men.
Laws are of three kinds--of nature, of God, and of the civil state.
The right of revolution is noted, with justice, as belonging to the sphere of morals rather than of law.
He introduced into English political philosophy that systematic attention to forms instead of substance upon which the whole vicious theory of checks and balances was erected.
He made no distinction between the unlimited sovereignty of law and the very obviously limited sovereignty of reality.
He must have known that to talk of the independence of the branches of the legislature was simple nonsense at a time when King and peers competed for the control of elections to the House of Commons.
It was ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.
His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century and a half.
But as a thinker he was little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions of his time to question its assumptions.
De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone, what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did perceive, his book has real ability and merit.
Like Blackstone, he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty.
Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to unstability.
The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal power against the popular.
The King's interest is safeguarded by the division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the encroachment of the other upon the executive.
His power is limited by parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and so forth.
The theory was not true; though it represented with some accuracy the ideals of the time.
He saw that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English people could unite to…
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
