Harold J. Laski

I do not think the average man can be made happy merely by living in a democracy: I do not see how he can avoid a sense of continuous frustration unless he does.

It involves a frame of government in which, first, men are given the chance of making the government under which they live, in which, also, the laws that government promulgates are binding equally upon all.

A reaction against democratic ideals is the fashion, and the dictatorships which proliferate over half Europe are earnest in maintaining their obsolescence.

Everyone who considers the relation of liberty to the institutions of a state will, I think, find it difficult to resist the conclusion that without democracy there cannot be liberty.

No Englishman would think himself free if his domestic life were defined for him by another state; and no German but has had a bitter sense of unfreedom during the foreign occupation of the Rhineland.

This raises the larger question of whether freedom in the modern state can ever be satisfactorily secured by internal sanctions, and whether, in fact, it is ever durably possible save in the terms of a strong and stable international…

You have only to remember the history of racial minorities like the negroes, of religious or national minorities like Jews and Czechs, to realize that democracy, of itself, is no guarantee of freedom.

Mankind has suffered much from the assumption that, once the people had become master in its own house, there was no limit to its power.

Even in a democracy, we must have ways and means of protecting the minority against a majority which seeks to invade its freedom.

Whoever exerts power in a community is tempted to the abuse of power.

You will observe that I am still, from the angle of political organization, thinking of liberty as a safeguard of the individual against those who rule him.

Freedom is in an important degree a matter of law; but in a degree not less important it is a matter, also, of the mores of the society outside the sphere within which law can operate.

We are not free, that is, unless we can form our plan of conduct to suit our own character without social penalties.

I shall seek, further, to draw the conclusion that, whatever the forms of social organization, liberty is essentially an expression of an impalpable atmosphere among men.

While there are certain constitutional forms which are, as I think, essential to freedom, their mere presence as forms will not, of themselves, suffice to make men free.

How can it guarantee to me such an environment to my activity that I do not suffer frustration in my search for happiness?

How can the state, which charges itself with the function of supreme co-ordination, properly fulfil this task?

Liberty may be resolved into a system of liberties; and from this angle it may be said that it is the purpose of social organization to see to it that this system is adequately safeguarded.

But because we have rejected this view, we have to admit that there will be occasional disobedience, at the least, and that this may be justified.

It is the problem of knowing when a man ought deliberately to make up his mind to break the law or to refuse obedience to it.

What we need to know is, I suggest, first what those realms of conduct are, and, second, what my duty as a citizen is when I am, in any one of them, prohibited from acting as I please.

There are realms of conduct within which, to be free, I must be permitted to act as I please; to be denied self-expression there, is to be denied freedom.

The freedom it secures to me is the absence of a barrier in the way of marriage if I can win her consent.

Neither conditions nor guarantees will ever be perfect; nor will they ever cover all upon which happiness depends.

The citizen who asks for freedom is entitled to the conditions which, collectively, are the guarantees that he will be able to go on the road to his happiness, as he conceives it, unhindered.