That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science.

For if labor was the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as though degradation was the sole payment for its services.

They did not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable, but whether it was ethically right.

No one can read the history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its rightness.

Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation of history.

With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.

It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses.

Wealth, in its view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men.

The impulses it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was turned to ends of which he…

He thus made possible not only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression.

Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud and glad to share.

I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness.

I seek to inquire into the terms upon which it is attainable in the Western world, and, more especially, to find those rules of conduct to which political authority must conform if its subjects are, in a genuine sense, to be free.

I am arguing, first, that liberty is essentially an absence of restraint.

It implies power to expand, the choice by the individual of his own way of life without imposed prohibitions from without.

Men cannot, as Rousseau claimed, be forced into freedom.

They do not, as Hegel insisted, find their liberty in obedience to the law.

They are free when the rules under which they live leave them without a sense of frustration in realms they deem significant.

They are unfree whenever the rules to which they have to conform compel them to conduct which they dislike and resent.

But I am arguing that any rule which demands from me something I would not otherwise give is a diminution of my freedom.

My thesis involves the view that if in any state there is a body of men who possess unlimited political power, those over whom they rule can never be free.

For the one assured result of historical investigation is the lesson that uncontrolled power is invariably poisonous to those who possess it.

They are always tempted to impose their canon of good upon others, and, in the end, they assume that the good of the community depends upon the continuance of their power.

Liberty always demands a limitation of political authority, and it is never attained unless the rulers of a state can, where necessary, be called to account.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.