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.

This chapter describes and analyzes how British pluralists in the early twentieth century critiqued the fusion of nationality and statehood that had hitherto provided a conceptual foundation for political science, and how their critique exposed the discipline to the problem of social order. The chapter also treats the contemporary critical reception of British pluralism in America.

In this concluding chapter, I first bring the story up to date by briefly considering influential developments since the 1990s, especially theories of governance and theories of group identity, which variously reiterate the problem of social order. I then argue that instead of positing, again and again, social order as a presupposition for political inquiry, social order should be turned into an object of political inquiry. To that end, I conclude, we may well need other conceptual and theoretical resources than those provided by the tradition of social science that is the subject of this book. Accepting the social ontology of complexity and diversity on which this tradition has been predicated does not compel us to keep relying on concepts and theories marked by the problem of social order.