But no one, I think, can examine the course of history and say that the experience of any state indicates a permanent embodiment of the highest good we know in the purpose of the state.
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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The state is a complex of rulers and subjects territorially organized and seeking, by the conference of power upon those rulers, effective co-ordination of social activities.
Governing principles emerge; but they emerge through the wills of individual minds.
There are no governing principles in social life deliberately emerging from the interplay of its myriad constituent parts.
To speak of the “mind of society”, seems to me merely a metaphorical way of describing a course of action which is made valid by translation into fact.
For, first of all, I see no reason to suppose that social life is ultimately the product of a single and rational mind organizing its activities in terms of a logical process.
It is a logical inference therefrom that I should reject also the doctrine that all state-action is, at bottom, the exercise of the real will of society.
I reject, therefore, the idea of a real will, and, still more, the idea that there is a common will in society.
The ultimate isolation of the individual personality is the basis from which any adequate theory of politics must start.
We remain ourselves even when we join with others to attain some common object of desire.
Our pooling of experiences to make a common purpose somewhere is in no case other than fragmentary.
Each of us desires the good as he sees it; and each of us sees a good derived from an individual and separate experience into which no other person can fully enter.
Both, doubtless, will the good; but the point is that each wills the good as he sees it, and each would regard the fulfilment of the other’s ideal of good as a definite destruction of his own.
A member of the Praesidium of the Third International, whose will aims supremely at the overthrow of capitalism, is not somehow at one with the will of the President of the British Federation of Industries to whom all the purposes of the…
I see no meaning, for instance, in the statement that the antithetic purposes of Jesuits and Freemasons are somehow transcended in a higher purpose which resumes them both; that is to say that a Jesuit or a Freemason is most truly himself…
And we must remember that in every society the objects of wills cannot, in some mystic fashion, be fused into a higher unity somehow compounded of them all.
But the unity these make is not in the will but in the fusion of separate wills to the attainment of a common purpose.
Experience suggests common objects of desire, but each will that wills these common objects is a different will in every sense not purely metaphorical.
The ultimate and inescapable fact in politics is the final variety of human wills.
This attempt, in a word, at the extraction of a partial self from the whole of my being as alone truly myself not only denies that my experience is real, but, also, makes me merely an instrument to the purpose of others.
Each, while it is, is real, and each, as real, must give way only in terms of a judgment I make, not of one made for me by some other will, if I am to remain a purposive human being serving myself as an end.
All of them go to the formation of my view of the universe; all of them are my expression of my striving to fulfil my personality.
My true self is not a selected system of rational purposes identical with those sought by every member of society.
A true theory of liberty, I urge, is built upon a denial of each of the assumptions of idealism.
His true self is the self that is isolated from his fellows and contributes the fruit of isolated meditation to the common good, which, collectively, they seek to bring into being.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
