He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes.
— Harold J. Laski
gutenberg.org
The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned.
The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief…
Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order.
Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship.
Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned.
We grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics, to deny it in economic matters.
We grant toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another.
To deny novelty or grievance a right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation of the truth they contain.
The only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies.
It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims.
If the principles that are urged by a few correspond to some widespread experience those who recognize the expression of their experience will inevitably reaffirm it.
But persecution, however thoroughgoing, will never, over any long period, be able to suppress significant truth.
Punishment may persuade some to abandon the effort; and others may be driven by its imposition to conceal their impulse to act upon the view they take.
It is always an assertion that he who has learned from life some lesson he takes to be truth will seek to live that lesson unless he can be persuaded of its falsehood.
It is always a threat to those who operate the engines of authority that prohibition of experience will be denied.
Liberty, therefore, cannot help being a courage to resist the demands of power at some point that is deemed decisive; and, because of this, liberty, also, is an inescapable doctrine of contingent anarchy.
Without Bruno and Galileo there would have been neither Rousseau nor Voltaire.
Those who have fought for the right to think freely in theology or the natural sciences are not less certainly the ancestors of political freedom.
For it is impossible to confine the area in which freedom may be permitted to some special and defined part of conduct.
That is why, also, the maintenance of liberty is a thing that has to be fought for afresh every day, lest an inert acceptance of some particular imposition make the field of action accessible to a general tyranny.
That is why the friends of liberty are always a minority in every society.
The willingness to admit the prospect of difference, the courage to see that one’s private truth is never commensurate with the whole truth, these are the rarest of human qualities.
Men enjoy the exercise of power; no passion has a deeper hold upon human impulse.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
