Upon what grounds can we infer prospective gain from persecution of opinion?
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.
gutenberg.org
Most people can see that Nero and Diocletian accomplished nothing by their persecution of Christianity.
It would, indeed, be hardly beyond the mark to affirm that a list of the opinions condemned as wrong or dangerous would be a list of the commonplaces of our time.
The world gains nothing from a refusal to entertain the possibility that a new idea may be true.
New truth begins always in a minority of one; it must be someone’s perception before it becomes a general perception.
The heresies we may suppress today are the orthodoxies of tomorrow.
No technique of suppression has so far been discovered which does not have the effect of giving wider currency to the thing suppressed than can be attained in any other fashion.
No state can suppress the human impulse of curiosity, and there is always a special delight, a kind of psychological scarcity-value, in knowledge of the forbidden.
When the British Government prosecuted the Communists for sedition in 1925 the daily reports of the trial, the editorial discussion of its result, made the principles of Communism known to innumerable readers who would never, under other…
When the United States Customs Department suppressed Candide on the ground that it was an obscene book, they merely stimulated the perverse curiosity of thousands to whom Candide would have remained less than a name.
His conviction that society is rotten at its base is only the more ardently held, his search for alternative ways of expressing his conviction becomes only the more feverish as a result of suppression.
For no one really ceases to be a revolutionary Communist or a passionate Roman Catholic by being forbidden to be either of these.
They point to needs which are seeking satisfaction, and the society gains nothing by prohibiting their expression.
To most of us, these views will seem utterly abhorrent.
Or he may argue that eternal truth is the sole possession of the Roman Catholic Church; that men can only be persuaded to understand this by the methods of the Inquisition; that, therefore, the re-establishment of the Inquisition is in the…
A man may say that England or America will never be genuinely democratic unless equality of income is established there; that equality of income may never be established except by force; that, accordingly, the way to a genuine democracy…
For it implies not only the right to beatify the present social order, but the right, also, to condemn it with vigour and completeness.
Most people are prepared to agree with this view when it is made as a general statement; most people, also, recoil from it when its implications are made fully known.
Law must take account of the totality of experience and this can only be known to it as that experience is unfettered in its opportunity of expression.
We could not develop an adequate law of divorce if only those happily married were entitled to express an opinion upon its terms.
No state, for instance, could rightly legislate about the hours of labour if only business men were free to offer their opinion upon industrial conditions.
If it is the business of those who exercise authority in the state to satisfy the wants of those over whom they rule, it is plain that they should be informed of those wants; and, obviously, they cannot be truly informed about them unless…
The case for the view that freedom of thought and speech is a good in itself is fairly easy to make.
I shall, in particular, maintain that all restrictions upon freedom of expression upon the ground that they are seditious or blasphemous are contrary to the well-being of society.
I shall seek to show, first, that liberty of thought and association--the two things are inextricably intertwined--is good in itself, and second, that its denial is always a means to the preservation of some special and, usually, sinister…
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
