For by that service he becomes a free man, and his freedom is a condition of other men’s freedom.
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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But we can so act, also, knowing that there is a sense in which no man who serves his conscience ever fails.
We have to act by the dictates of our conscience knowing, as Washington knew, as the early Christians recognized, that the penalties of failure are terrible.
Power is not conferred upon men for the sake of power, but to enable them to achieve ends which win happiness for each of us.
If it is objected that this is a doctrine of contingent anarchy, that it admits the right of men to rebellion, my answer is that the accusation is true.
This, and this only, gives life to the safeguards of liberty; and this only is the clue to the preservation of genuine integrity in the individual life.
Liberty means being faithful to oneself, and it is maintained by the courage to resist.
When that moment comes, whatever its declared purpose, the good it will seek will be its own good and not that of those involved in its operations.
If it meets always with obedience, sooner or later it will assume its own infallibility.
It is to be remembered that even a decision to acquiesce is a decision, that what shapes the substance of authority is what it encounters.
Those who are silent in the presence of injustice are in fact part-authors of it.
Those who accept commands they know to be wrong, make it easier for wrong commands to be accepted.
All this may be true, and yet it seems to me to leave the individual no option but to follow conscience as the guide to civic action.
We should remember that civilization is, at best, a fragile thing, and that to embark upon a challenge to order is to threaten what little security it has.
Perverse, foolish, ignorant, it is at least ours; and our freedom comes from acting upon its demands.
But perverse, foolish, ignorant, it is the only guide we have.
It is perverse, it is foolish, the little knowledge it has is small alongside the worth of the social tradition.
He is entitled to assume that he will not find the rules of the conduct he ought to pursue objectified in any institution or set of institutions.
The individual, therefore, is entitled to act upon the judgment of his conscience in public affairs.
To be true to its purpose, it must reduce the imperative element to a minimum if it is to release creativeness and not destroy it.
Law, therefore, as coercion is always an invasion of personality, an abridgement of the moral stature of those whom it invades.
I become an instrument of alien purposes, devoted to an end which denies my self-hood.
To accept the forcible imposition of other principles upon me, which I do not recognize as the expression of my experience, is to make of me who might be free, a slave.
Into them, as principles, I pour my personality, and life, for me, derives its meaning from their unique texture.
For their authority as principles comes from the fact that I recognize them as mine.
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