For Locke was above all anxious to leave supreme power in a community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself.
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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Government there must be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are dependent upon popular institution.
Where the power of making laws is in a single hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have alternatively oligarchy and democracy.
The disposition of the legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and judiciary are clearly dependent on it.
Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions.
And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that it is the best.
It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to observe.
Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates controlled by popular election.
We have a means for securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that means the force of men has been surrendered.
The formulation of the rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the supreme function of the State.
For at the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the law of nature and their own natural rights.
There is thus a standard of right and wrong superior to all powers within the State.
To deny the right of revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power.
The substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of Parliament--all these are a perversion of the trust…
But Locke retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character of power.
It lacks the essential element of consent without which the binding force of law is absent.
All government is a moral trust, and the idea of limitation is therein implied.
But a limitation without the means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the reserve power in society.
Revolution should not, he urges, be the act of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of the covenant.
The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom.
He proceeds by a denial that any element of theocratic government can claim political validity.
The magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal with the problem of men's souls.
Where, indeed, opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst and last of remedies.
Though Church and State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
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