Harold J. Laski

I do not need to remind you that most observers who have sought to estimate the significance of the democratic movement have seen that equality is the key to its understanding.

They search for freedom for no other end but this.

Liberty means, in such a context, the power continuously to exercise initiative in social reconstruction.

And those who find that their wants do not secure attention are, inevitably, tempted to an examination of the moral foundations of such a society.

There is cake for some before there is bread for all.

The whole productive scheme is thereby tilted to the favour of those who possess the power to make their wants effective.

It thinks only of the presence of purchasing power and not of its connotation in terms of social purpose.

The nature of economic inequality is a compulsion to respond to effective demand, and this pays no regard to science on the one hand, or to need upon the other.

Consciously or unconsciously, it starts from the assumption that there is a greater right in some claims than in others.

A society built upon economic inequality cannot attempt that sort of measure.

For the real meaning of democratic government is the equal weighing of individual claims to happiness by social institutions.

There cannot, in a word, be democratic government without equality; and without democratic government there cannot be freedom.

That antagonism is bound to result in violence unless the domination of the many by the few is almost complete, or is tempered by so continuous a flow of concession as results, in the end, in the effective mitigation of the inequality.

It is not only, as I have said, that men think differently who live differently; it is, essentially, that men think antagonistically who live so differently.

The remoteness means that the few will always fear the invasion of their privilege, and the many will envy them its possession.

The lives of the few are too remote from the lives of the many for disagreement about social questions to be possible in terms of peace, if the ultimate organization of the society is not to be changed.

Great economic inequalities are, as he saw, incompatible with a unity of interest in the community.

But he was still emphatic enough about the need for equality to lay it down that no member of his state should possess property more than four times in amount of that owned by the poorest citizens.

When Plato, in the Laws, set out a revised version of his ideal policy for application to the real world about him, he surrendered his demand for the complete communism which had distinguished his Utopia.

And perhaps the supreme irony in the situation was the fact that to be tried as Communists was, for the defendants, perhaps the supreme test of truth to which their faith could be submitted.

His views, of course, were the natural expression of his own experience of life, and, without doubt, sincerely held; but they implied an inability imaginatively to understand alien experience which is pathetic in the limitation it involves.

But that attitude was precisely similar to the Roman offer to the early Christians: they could avoid the arena if they would offer but a pinch of incense on the pagan altar.

It is a technique, I think, which almost always comes into play when dangerous opinion is challenged by the state.

It seeks neither truth nor justice, but surrender.

But liberty and raison d’état are mutually incompatible for the simple reason that raison d’état is a principle which seeks, a priori, to exclude rational discussion from the field.