“Rights of the man are separate and independent of the State.” Critically analyze the perspective of Laski.

Laski defines rights as "those conditions of social life without which no man can seek, in general, to be himself at his best" (A Grammar of Politics, 1925). The statement in the question captures one half of his position accurately and misstates the other.

Where the statement holds. Laski is a pluralist, and his target is the monistic sovereignty of Austin and Hegel. Three claims follow:

• The state does not create rights; it recognises and maintains them. A right exists because a social function requires it, not because a statute confers it.
• Rights are therefore a test of the state, not its gift. The state's claim to obedience is conditional on its maintaining them, which is why Laski defends the citizen's right of resistance and calls obedience a matter of individual conscience.
• The state is only one association among churches, unions and clubs, with no inherently superior moral claim.

Where it misstates him. Laski is emphatically not a natural-rights theorist. Rights for him are social, not pre-social: they are functional, given for the discharge of duties, and have no meaning outside society. "I have no right to do as I like"; rights are correlative to the common good. Separated from the community, the phrase is empty.

Assessment. The right reading is that rights are independent of the state in origin and justification, but dependent on it for enforcement. Laski's later Marxist turn in The State in Theory and Practice (1935) sharpened this: in a class society the state secures rights unequally, so equality became for him the precondition of rights rather than their rival.