During the 1920s, Harold Laski worked on producing a comprehensive account of a political philosophy appropriate for the new age of social democracy that was just emerging. During the 1930s, however, his optimistic political outlook waned and with this he modified his position and, in its place, presented a materialist account of British constitutional arrangements. This paper explains this later development of his thought. It examines the unfolding of his argument through his studies of the crisis of parliamentary democracy, the nature of the modern state and his materialist analysis of the British constitution and offers critical reflections of the significance of this phase of his work.

Over the last 150 years, the standing that the British constitution once held in the minds of the people has suffered a remarkable decline. Uncertainty about its supposedly fixed characteristics has been such that it is now extremely difficult to present an account of its nature and meaning in an impartial manner. Against this background, this chapter presents a simplified history in which, over six successive phases and in response to prevailing political concerns of the period, the meaning of ‘constitution’ changes in subtle ways. Reflections on this development helps us set contemporary constitutional controversies in an appropriate context. It also enables to see more clearly the significance of a basic question which modern constitutional development had hitherto managed to suppress: the constitution of what?

This Companion provides an introduction to the theory and history of the rule of law, and thus to one of the most frequently invoked – and least understood – ideas of legal and political thought. Not so long ago, the “rule of law” was regarded as a rather esoteric expression, one employed by common lawyers – alongside such expressions as the Rechtsstaat, État de droit, and Stato di diritto that their continental confrères invoked – to identify certain technical features of the legal systems in which they worked.

In his lectures on the history of political thought given at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Michael Oakeshott, the most important English political philosopher of the twentieth century, emphasized the remarkable accomplishments of the Romans. While they may not have produced philosophers of such distinction as Plato and Aristotle, the Romans had shown “a genuine genius for government and politics.”1 The fruits of this political genius were evident in the establishment of “a political community, a civitas, a state, out of tribal societies,” in “creating the Roman people, the populus Romanus, out of a miscellany of different peoples,” and in generating the sense of a people united in a distinctive mode of association.

On 12 May 2010, after five days of negotiations following the general election, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats concluded a Coalition Agreement for Stability and Reform. Since many conventional practices of governing, especially relating to Cabinet government and collective responsibility, have evolved in the context of single-party majority governments, the formation of a coalition government, the first in peacetime since the 1930s, might itself be viewed as a constitutional innovation. But of perhaps greater significance is the fact that the Liberal Democrats were unwilling to enter into coalition without a formal agreement being struck over certain measures of constitutional reform. For the first time in modern political history a government of the United Kingdom was founded on a binding commitment to introduce a programme of constitutional reform.

The ambition underpinning this joint undertaking should not be underestimated. That the British constitution presents itself as a flexible scheme of institutional arrangements that has evolved from habitual practice, with many aspects of this scheme being susceptible to change through the ordinary processes of legislation, is widely understood. But there is considerable distance between conservative and liberal philosophies of government. Conservatives believe that political values emerge from a tradition of civility, whereas liberals place greater faith in the power of reason; conservatives regard law, whether in the form of judicial precedent or enacted legislation, as codified social practice, whereas for liberals law specifies general standards of right conduct; conservatives believe that good government rests on an elite conscious of its responsibilities, whereas liberals, being suspicious of all power-holders, advocate the need for formal institutional limitations on the exercise of all aspects of governmental power. The Conservatives are a unionist party who believe in strong government formed on a simple majority principle reflected through the institution of a sovereign Parliament. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, advocate a federal principle of sharing power across the various levels of government, legitimated by elections based on proportional representation.