Harold J. Laski

Clearly, from that angle, the things we are taught, the mental habits of those who teach us, are of quite primary urgency.

The psychologists are unanimous in telling us how important for our future are the impressions we gather in our early years.

The Englishman who has to form an opinion about a miners’ strike is not likely to be “free” in any sense to which meaning can be attached if the facts which he encounters have been specially doctored in order to make it as certain as…

We have, in short, the difficulty that the control of news by special interests may make prisoners of men who believe themselves to be free.

Men may actually go out to die for purposes in which they profoundly believe, though the cause which, as they judge, embodies those purposes has not, in fact, the remotest connexion with it.

If there is prepared for me “evidence” which has been distilled through the filter of a special interest the distortion may become so complete as to make a rational judgment impossible.

I bring already to its interpretation a mass of preconceptions which tend to distort it.

Things like the incident of the Maine, the Pekin Massacre which never occurred, the Zenoviev letter, make an enormous difference to what Mr Lippmann has happily termed my “stereotype” of the environment about which I have to make up my…

Somewhere, sometime, I have to halt and say, “This man’s report, or this paper’s account, is a thing I can trust.

Obviously, it is of primary importance that the things we take on trust should correspond with the reality on which alone a right judgment can be made.

The first urgency is assurance that the facts upon which I base my action are valid.

If, for instance, I am to oppose the State in a matter like military service, I ought not to do so until I have rigorously examined the facts upon which I build my principles.

It is a decision made after evidence has been collected and weighed, distortion allowed for, prejudice discounted.

It is a conclusion arrived at after an attempt to penetrate behind the superficial appearance to what is truth-seeming.

For if my argument be valid that a man’s citizenship is the contribution of his instructed judgment to the public good, and that right action, for him, is action upon the basis of that judgment, clearly, the factor of instruction is of…

I propose to inquire, in other words, into that weird complex of prejudice, judgment, interest, which we call public opinion and to seek the terms of its adequate relationship to liberty.

I sought earlier to show that this maximization can only take place when the substance of law is continuously woven from the fabric of a wide consent.

We can only say that some principles, by being imposed, are bound up with the very heart of freedom.

The prohibitions, therefore, that are imposed are an attempt to extract from the experience of society certain principles of action by which, in their own interest, men ought to be bound.

That imposition, broadly speaking, is essential to liberty since it makes for peace; and peace is the condition of continuity of liberty.

His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behaviour upon all of us lest conflict destroy peace.

Unfreedom means to him a denial of his experience, a refusal on the part of organized society to satisfy what he cannot help taking to be the lesson of his life.

For, as I have argued, since each man’s experience is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance himself; he can never be free save as he is able to act upon his own private sense of that interpretation.

There is no liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds for the control.

There is no liberty if special privilege restricts the franchise to a portion of the community.