The conditions of freedom are then those which assure the absence of such invasion.
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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Now freedom exists in a state where a man knows that the decisions made by the ultimate authority do not invade his personality.
He may be right or wrong in so thinking; the point of fact is that he has no alternative but to go by his own moral certainties.
He is seeking happiness; some order seems to him a wanton invasion of that happiness.
His freedom, in relation to the law, depends on the effect of any particular order upon his experience.
But he is not free merely because he obeys the law.
It makes, we say, the law, and a member of the state is legally compelled to obey the law.
The latter can, if he seeks evasion of its commands, use compulsion to secure obedience to its orders.
We know that if his Church issues an order to him of which he disapproves, he can leave his church; so, too, with all other bodies save the state.
When we say that, in such a complex of relationships as this, that a man is free, what do we mean?
Every order issued is, in a final analysis, issued by a person or persons to another person or persons.
A man may cut himself off from family or friends; he may refuse membership of a church or vocational body; he cannot refuse membership of the state.
If we reject a view which, like that just considered, seeks to dissolve the reality of the individual into the society of which he is a part, what are we left with as the pattern within which a man seeks freedom?
I cannot believe that a man no longer master of himself is in any meaning sense free.
If his will is set by the will of others, he ceases to be master of himself.
If he surrenders it to others, he surrenders his personality.
He cannot abandon the consequences of his isolation which are, broadly speaking, that his experience is private and the will built out of that experience personal to himself.
His separateness, his isolation, are indefeasible; indeed, they are so ultimate that they are the basis out of which his civic obligations are builded.
Man is a one among many obstinately refusing reduction to unity.
I do not believe that the Huguenot of 1685 was made the more free by accepting, against his conscience, the Revocation; nor do I believe that Luther would have been more free had he accepted the decrees of Rome and abandoned his protest.
I cannot believe that a theory fits the facts of history which assumes that this policy is going to be right, whatever it is; and that freedom will be found only in acceptance of it.
It is not necessarily good because it is accepted; it is not necessarily right because it is proposed.
It is made by civic acceptance of what its rulers propose.
The unity of the state, in a word, is not inherently there.
Yet what they see as good may not be so recognizable to us, and may well provoke in us the sense that life would not be worth living if their view was to prevail.
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