Something of what it might effect, if planned in a wholesale way, the experiments of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad have amply demonstrated.
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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There might be developed in this way a body of industrial legislation and jurisprudence growing naturally out of the experience of those who participate in the operation of the industry, and imposed with a real sense of freedom because it…
Thus, while Georgia might refuse to pass a child-labour law, a particular industry in Georgia might refuse to allow its members to engage child labour in field or factory.
I should give to this Parliament a power of delegated legislation which would enable it to frame rules of conduct binding upon all the members of the industry.
It does not seem to me inconceivable that we should create a Parliament for the mining industry, in which capital, management, labour and the consumer, should each have their due representation, and to which should be confided the…
We ought to learn to think of industries like cotton and coal as entities not less real than Lancashire or New York, as capable, therefore, of being organized for the purpose of government.
Bodies like the legal and medical professions are much better able to direct their own internal life than to have it directed for them by the state.
On matters like ecclesiastical government, dogma, ceremonial, interference by the state is almost invariably disastrous in its results.
Everyone acquainted with the history of churches realizes the necessity of leaving them free to develop their own internal life.
Successful legislation is almost always legislation for which the minds of men are anxious; the channels of assent to it can rarely be dug too deep.
And even the impatient reformer ought sometimes to think whether, say, forcing a child-labour law on Georgia by federal amendment will lead to a genuine and whole-hearted application of its terms; whether, in fact, it will not persuade to…
Thereby we gain not only the knowledge which comes from varied social experiment, but the freedom born of citizenship trained in the widest degree to think for itself and to solve its own problems.
The German system, of laying down what a local authority may not do, and leaving it free to experiment outside that realm of prohibition, seems to me superior both in principle and result to its Anglo-American antithesis.
I believe, therefore, that, with all its difficulties and dangers, the area of local government should be as little circumscribed as possible.
Centralized government in local matters may be more efficient than a decentralized system; but that superior efficiency will never, as Mill long ago pointed out, compensate for an inferior interest in the result.
For administration from without always lacks the vitalizing ability to be responsive to local opinion; it misses shades and expressions of thought and want which are urgent to successful government.
They find that the power to satisfy them of themselves gives to them a quality of vigour far greater in the happiness it produces than would be the case if satisfaction were always provided by, or controlled from, without.
The inhabitants of any given area have a consciousness of common purposes, a sense of the needs of their neighbourhood, which only they can fully know.
All of our problems are not central problems; and to leave to the central government the decision of questions which affect only a portion of the community is to destroy in that portion the sense of responsibility and the habit of…
If the decisions to be made are to embody the needs of those affected by them, the latter must have major responsibility for their making.
There will never be liberty in any state where there is an excessive concentration of power at the centre.
Its value both as a check upon bureaucracy, and as a means of making decision genuinely representative in character, becomes the more clear the wider our experience of its functioning.
For the notion that, when the citizen has chosen his representatives for Parliament or his local authority, he can sit back in the comfortable knowledge that his wants are known, his interests safeguarded, has not one jot of evidence to…
To accustom the average man to regard himself as a person who must be consulted is, in the long run, to assure him, through consultation, of satisfaction.
Those active-minded enough to fight for their rights will, doubtless, be always in a minority; but they prick the indifferent multitude into thought and they thus act as the gadflies of liberty.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
