Historically, the road to tyranny has always lain through a denial of freedom in this realm.
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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Silence is taken for consent; and the decisions that are registered as law reflect, not the total needs of the society, but the powerful needs which have been able to make themselves felt at the source of power.
The only opinions of which account is then taken are the opinions which coincide with the will of those in authority.
Once we inhibit freedom of speech, we inhibit criticism of social institutions.
That is the essential condition of the perversion of power.
Thereby, he becomes an instrument of other peoples ends, not himself an end.
Yet a denial of his right to do these things is a denial of his happiness.
Without freedom of the mind and of association a man has no means of self-protection in our social order.
If he is driven, in this realm, to silence and inactivity, he becomes a dumb and inarticulate creature, whose personality is neglected in the making of policy.
The right to speak it, to print it, to seek in concert with others its translation into the event, is fundamental to liberty.
Obviously enough, if his experience is to count, a man must be able to state it freely.
What the citizen, quite rightly, expects from the state is to have his experience counted in the making of policy, and to have it counted as he, and he only, expresses its import.
The substitution for it of someone else’s experience, however much wider or wiser than his, is, where it is based upon constraint, a denial of freedom.
He judges it, I have urged, by its capacity to respond to the needs he infers from the experience he encounters.
The citizen seeks for happiness, and the state, for him, is an institution which exists to make his happiness possible.
It means, I have admitted, that a certain penumbra of contingent anarchy always confronts the state; but I have argued that this is entirely desirable since the secret of liberty is always, in the end, the courage to resist.
The knowledge that an invasion of liberty will always meet with resistance from men determined upon its repulsion, this, in the last analysis, is the only true safeguard that we have.
They depend for their creativeness upon the presence in any given society of a determination to make them work.
I have sought, so far, to show that, however important be the political mechanisms on which liberty depends, they will not work of themselves.
I do assert that no other great purpose is possible of achievement save in the terms of fellowship with freedom.
I do not know whether liberty is the highest objective we can serve.
To fight for the assurance that a man may do his duty as he conceives it is not only to fight for freedom, but for all the ends which the emancipation of mankind seeks to attain.
They consecrated freedom to the service of God.
When they demanded the right to worship the God they knew, in their own mind they were insisting that in one sphere, at least, of human experience, their own perception must count as ultimate.
There is immense significance in the fact that those who fought for religious liberty were the unconscious progenitors of civil liberty also.
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