There is no liberty without freedom of speech.
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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In these pages, I have taken the view that liberty means that there is no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness.
But I could not, for myself, serve principles which claimed to be just if their result was to make the temple of freedom a prison for the impulses of men.
Its enemies, we must remember, never admit that they are concerned to attack it; they always base their defence of their purpose upon other grounds.
We ought rather to be critical of every proposal that asks for a surrender of liberty.
We ought not to accept the easy gospel that liberty must prove that it is not license.
No opportunity should be offered for the exercise of power unless by its application men are released from trammels of which it is the necessary price of purchase.
No conduct should be inhibited unless it can be definitely shown that its practice in a reasonable way can have no other result than to stunt the development of personality.
It is important that each should have to prove its undeniable social necessity before it is admitted within the fabric of the law.
Tyranny flows easily from the accumulation of petty restrictions.
I do sincerely plead that, especially in a democratic society, these are grave dangers to freedom, against which we cannot too stringently be upon our guard.
To me, at least, they commit the ultimate blasphemy since they seek to fashion man in their own image.
Since the friends of liberty too often sleep, their unceasing vigilance not seldom meets with its reward.
They are often ignorant, usually dangerous, and invariably active.
They are the kind of people who drove Byron and Shelley into exile, and they remain unable to see upon whom that exile reflects.
These would be, if they could, modern Inquisitors, without tolerance and without pity, thinking no means unjustified if only their end can be attained.
It is easy to understand why the grim excesses of Puritanism produced the luxuriant license of the Restoration.
It is not for nothing that from the time of Calvin not a single work of ultimate literary significance was produced by a resident of Geneva.
Certainly no great art and no literature great in anything save indignation can be produced where they have sway.
It is difficult to overestimate the price we pay for their successes.
They are utterly unable to see that people who live differently think differently and that in so various a civilization as ours absolute standards in these matters are out of place.
They lack altogether a respect for the dignity of human personality.
I know nothing more incompatible with the climate of mental freedom than the inference of such people.
They have an unlimited sense of a divinely appointed mission, and the whole of their life is set in its perspective.
No one, I suppose, can seriously doubt that men like Mr Comstock regard themselves as the saviours of society.
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