It breeds oppression and ignorance, and poisons improvement by preventing individual initiative.
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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Only in a return to a nation of freeholders can Ogilvie see the real source of an increase in happiness.
What is striking in the book is its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed as to…
He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of history is throughout economic.
Like them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and logical.
They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to political possibility.
They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led.
They search for principles of universal right, without the perception that a right which is to be universal must necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its application.
They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible.
The business of government had been made the private possession of a privileged class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from the minds of most men engaged in its direction.
The loss of America, the heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most…
They represented the new sense of power felt by elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid intrigues of the previous half-century.
Their emphasis upon government as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the governed.
For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle of the aristocracy.
It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes of Europe and America before they would give serious heed; and even then they met antagonism with nothing save…
Yet the doctrines remained; for thought, after all, is killed by reasoned answer alone.
And when the first gusts of war and revolution had passed, the cause for which they stood was found to have permeated all classes save that which had all to lose by learning.
He represents the sturdy nationalism of Arbuthnot's John Bull, the unreasoned prejudice against all foreigners, the hatred of all metaphysics as inconsistent with common sense, the desire to let things be on the ground that the effort…
His Treatise on Civil Government (1781) is in many ways a delightful book, bluff, hardy, full of common sense, with, at times, a quaint humor that is all its own.
He analyses the theory of consent in such fashion as to show that if its adherents could be persuaded to be logical, they would have to admit themselves anarchists.
He has no sympathy with the state of nature; the noble savage, on investigation, turns out to be a barbaric creature with a club and scalping knife.
Government, he does not doubt, is a trust, or, as he prefers, somewhat oddly, to call it, a quasi-contract; but that does not mean that the actual governors can be dismissed when any eccentric happens to take exception to their views.
He thinks the constitution very well as it is, and those who preach the evils of corruption ought to prove their charges instead of blasphemously asserting that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Their right to self-government he denied as stoutly as ever George III himself could have desired.
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
