Harold J. Laski

Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge.

Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder.

At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke's side.

He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.

Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor.

The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim.

He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism.

The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in…

Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious.

Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality than Rousseau's.

The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state.

Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits shall we place upon the power of government?

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions.

Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion.

The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship.

That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.

The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles, but the roots were absent from their national experience.

Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small.

For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state.

That which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to be enduring.

Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood.

For the motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.

But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand.

The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends.

No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war.