These are mine only, and cannot be made for me, at least creatively, by others.
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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I am unique, I am separate, I am myself; out of these qualities I must build my own principles of action.
I am not a part of some great symphony in which I realize myself only as an incident in the motif of the whole.
It does not justify the inference that I shall find what I most truly desire in the desire of another.
It does not entitle us to affirm that one man’s experience can be taken as the representation of another’s.
There is enough similarity of view to enable us, if we have patience and goodwill, to make enough of unity to achieve order and peace.
It is a multiverse embodying an ultimate variety of experiences, never identical, and always differently interpreted.
No power can ever hope for successful permanence, no power, either, is entitled to it, which does not make its way, in vital matters, through the channels of consent.
And the greater the degree in which it springs from that persuasion, the greater, also, is the success of authority in imposing its solutions.
At some point, it cannot be imposed but must be won from us.
That is the stark fact which conditions the loyalty any authority seeks to secure.
And conviction is born of consent for the simple reason that the real field of social action is in the individual mind.
It lives not by its power to command but by its power to convince.
An extreme way of putting this view would be to say that law is made by the individual’s acceptance of it, that the essence of the law-making process, is the consent of interested minds.
To accept the control would be to become unfree.
And it is in doubt because, by contradicting the experience of those whom it seeks to control, it seems to them a frustration of their personality.
When that relation cannot be made, the authority of law is always in doubt.
Legal right is so made as the individual recipient of a command invests it with right; he gives it his sanction by relating it successfully to his own experience.
Law is not merely a command; it is also an appeal.
They illustrate the inescapable truth that law must make its way to acceptance through the channel of consenting minds.
Every generation contains examples of men who, in the context of ultimate experience, deliberately decide that an anarchy in which they seek to maintain some principle is preferable to an order in which that principle must be surrendered.
Their notion of what is fundamental may be wrong, or unwise, or limited; but it is their notion, and they do not feel free unless they can act by their own moral certainties.
For men, in fact, will not obey law which goes counter to what they regard as fundamental.
And the reason is the simple but vital one that creative energy is liberated only in the atmosphere of freedom.
They show clearly, I venture to suggest, that an authority born of consent is always definitely superior to an authority born of coercion.
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