A Quote by Ernest Gellner
Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.
Related Quotes
[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state - what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations - what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force.
I must emphasise that there is nothing in the Labour Party constituion that could, or should prevent people from holding opinions which favour Leninist-Trotskyism. Certainly Marxism has, and will continue to have an important function in the Labour Party.
The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all
I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering... I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside... what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
In 1925, when Britain went back to the gold standard, that was supported by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Bank of England, the civil service, the CBI, the TUC, the Times, the Economist; that consensus was very strong.
I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.
The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.
I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
Every Labour government has left office with higher unemployment than when it entered.
We are all in the Labour party because we want the Labour party to be a vehicle for social change. There is a thirst for debate in the party, and all those who have joined haven't joined without a purpose.
And if you look at society, the way it works, they are creating, from cradle to grave, left-brain prisoners. To advance in this society, you have to be good at passing exams in school, which are taking in left-brain information overwhelmingly. Then you go to the next level, and so on so that by the time you reach any level of significant influence in society or the institutions of society, you are fundamentally locked into your left brain. Or at least the majority of people are.
We as the governments, workers, employers and civil society must declare a war on child labour. This war cannot be won without strong, committed, coherent, and well-resourced worldwide movement. Equally needed is a genuine and active coordination between intergovernmental agencies at the highest level.
Renunciation - non-resistance - non-destructiveness - are the ideals to be attained through less and less worldliness, less and less resistance, less and less destructiveness. Keep the ideal in view and work towards it. None can live in the world without resistance, without destruction, without desire. The world has not come to that state yet when the ideal can be realised in society.
There are already people en route to join this peaceful, prayerful, nonviolent exercise of our human, treaty, constitutional and civil rights, which are at stake, which are constantly being encroached upon by what seems to be [Donald] Trump tyranny.
We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.
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