In any community, fortunately for ourselves, power is always upon the defensive; and when men are vigilant to expose its encroachments it is urgent to seek their good 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
Those who are trained to that vigilance become the conscious guardians of liberty.
He comes to have a sense of frustration when decisions are made arbitrarily, and without an attempt to build them from the consent of those affected.
He learns to dislike orders which are issued without regard being paid to his will.
He gains the expectation of being consulted, the sense that he must form an opinion on public affairs.
He comes to see that his needs will be met only as he contributes his instructed judgment to the experience out of which decisions are compounded.
He realizes that the state exists for his ends and not for its own.
It makes him feel that he is more than the mete recipient of orders.
The process of being consulted gives him a sense of being significant in the state.
Maximum satisfaction, in other words, is a function of maximum consultation; and the greater the degree in which the citizen shares in making the rules under which he lives, the more likely is his allegiance to those rules to be free and…
To achieve that end, it is in the long run vital to take account of the wills of those who will be affected by the decision.
The purpose for which authority is exercised is the maximum satisfaction of desire.
We should admit that there must be uniform regulations for marriage and divorce, but that individuals only could make up their minds when, within the regulations, either to marry or divorce.
We should agree that crime is a matter for the state, and sin a matter for the churches.
We should fairly universally say that foreign policy and defence, fiscal technique and commercial regulation were naturally within the sphere of the central, and playing fields, were within the sphere of the local, authority.
But the greater the degree in which we can realize it, the better for the community to which we belong.
I mean that, in general, rules imposed upon a society from above for its benefit are less effective to the end that they seek than rules which have grown naturally from below.
It is the thesis that, in terms of historic experience, good government is always, in the end, both less valuable and less efficient than self-government.
I hazard the generalization that the more widespread the distribution of power in the state, the more decentralized its character, the more likely men are to be zealous for freedom.
Can it, further, be shown that such a temper in the citizen is likely, as it grows, to confer benefit upon the community as a whole?
Is there, that is, a way in which the average citizen of the modern state can be persuaded that it is in his interest to be vigilant against those who would invade his rights?
I have argued that resistance to the encroachments of power is essential to freedom because it is the habit of power continuously, if it can, to enlarge the boundaries of its authority.
It is why, also, it becomes necessary in each age to restate the case for freedom, if it is to be maintained.
That is the meaning of the famous maxim that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
They come from our social heritage, and are part of a process the value of which we must relearn continuously if we are to preserve it.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
