He realized that the party-system--he never used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability.
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 regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to the royal power.
He trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its own power.
The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when, in 1762, Rousseau published his Contrat Social.
With its fundamental doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was needed for the appreciation of its teaching was less a renaissance than discontent.
So soon as men are dissatisfied with the traditional foundations of the State, a gospel of natural rights is certain to make its appearance.
And, once the design of George III had been made familiar by his treatment of Chatham and Wilkes, the discontent did not fail to show itself.
He insists upon the capacity of men and the disproportion between their potential achievement and that which is secured by actual society.
Men are in the mass condemned to ignorance and toil; and the lust of power sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich.
Wallace traces these evils to private property and the individualistic organization of work, and he sees no remedy save community of possessions and a renovated educational system.
Yet he does not conceal from himself that it is to the interest of the governing class to prevent a revolution which, beneficent to the masses, would be fatal to themselves; nor does he conceive it possible until the fertility of men has…
None had more faithfully supported the new dynasty than they; none had been paid less for their allegiance.
Men are all equal, and their natural rights are indefeasible.
Government must be restrained in the interests of liberty.
No man can be governed without his consent; for government is founded upon a contract by which civil liberty is surrendered in exchange for a power to share in public decisions.
It thus follows that the people must be sovereign, and interference with their natural rights will justify resistance.
It remains for them almost entirely a police institution which, once it aims at the realization of right, usurps a function far better performed by individuals.
There is no sense of the community; all that exists is a sum of private sentiments.
His view of the individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual energy.
Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the…
The earth being given to men in common, its invasion by private ownership is a dangerous perversion.
Men have the right to the full product of their labor; but the privileges of the landowner prevent the enjoyment of that right.
The primary duty of every State is the increase of public happiness; and the happiest nation is that which has the greatest number of free and independent cultivators.
But governments attend rather to the interest of the higher classes, even while they hold out the protection of the common people as the main pretext of their authority.
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
