“Rights of the man are separate and independent of the State.” Critically analyze the perspective of Laski. (Answer in 350 words)

- “Rights of the man are separate and independent of the State.” Critically analyze the perspective of Laski. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Laski's proposition is that the state does not create rights, it recognises them. Rights arise from the functions individuals perform in society and therefore serve as the standard by which the state itself is judged. This is a social theory of independence, not a natural-law one.

Body
1. Rights as conditions of self-realisation: In A Grammar of Politics (1925) Laski defines rights as those conditions of social life without which no man can seek, in general, to be himself at his best. Their source is the contribution the individual makes to the common good.
2. The state is logically subsequent: Because rights inhere in function, the state's business is to maintain them, not to confer them. A state that fails forfeits its claim to obedience, and Laski openly grounds a right of resistance on this.
3. Yet not natural rights: Laski rejects abstract pre-social claims of the kind Bentham dismissed as nonsense upon stilts. Rights are social products, correlative to duties, and unintelligible outside a community.
4. Pluralist foundation: Following Figgis, Maitland and Duguit, Laski denies Austinian sovereignty. The state is one association among churches, unions and universities, with no monopoly on its members' moral allegiance.
5. The economic completion: In Democracy in Crisis (1933) and The State in Theory and Practice (1935) Laski concluded that political rights are formal where property is concentrated; capitalism owns the state that is supposed to secure rights against it.
6. The unresolved tension: Rights he calls independent still need recognition and enforcement. Green and Bosanquet reply that an unrecognised claim is a moral demand, not a right; Hohfeld and the legal positivists say the same in analytical terms.
7. Function is indeterminate: Laski offers no criterion for identifying a person's social function or its reward, leaving that determination to the very state he displaced.
8. Eclecticism: Miliband's charge that the constitutionalist and the Marxist in Laski never fused has force; radical conclusions coexist with parliamentary means.

Conclusion
Laski is right that rights are not gifts of the sovereign, and the post-1945 human rights order vindicates him, as does Puttaswamy (2017), which treats privacy as inherent rather than conferred. He is wrong to leave the state merely subsequent: it remains the indispensable guarantor of what it does not create.