The theory of natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in its form than in its substance.
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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It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic they implied.
Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done.
The unconscious deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the motives that are avowed.
Action is less their elimination than their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have the full materials for judgment.
Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely unanswerable.
The things that men desire correspond, in some rough fashion, to the things they need.
Natural rights are nothing more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests.
History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of its achievement.
But upon the value of certain things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder.
Forms, indeed, will vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries of science.
Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a static world.
They come, of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power.
Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength.
Rather do they point to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience.
The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.
Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude.
It was not an attitude which reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.
There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence.
What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature.
He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself.
A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end.
It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper.
It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur.
What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be.
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