Novelty, which is assumed to be the outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which civilization depends.
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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Yet the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved inadequate.
If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men.
No system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general…
It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself.
Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy.
Our real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has social value.
We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance.
The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that…
Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life.
It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.
We know that there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest in it.
We know that no State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without representation.
Few would deny that statesmen are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion…
No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too…
The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their participation in it.
The popular sense of right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen.
It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.
For the case against Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal.
He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors of a whole people.
Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent.
Once it is admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its expression.
The State is morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped.
There is something curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial place.
The answer to a morally bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for…
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