Harold J. Laski

For the individual is real to himself not by reason of the contacts he shares with others, but because he reaches those contacts through a channel which he alone can know.

If the individual is not to find the source of his decisions in the contact between the outer world and himself, in the experience, that is, which is the one unique thing that separates him from the rest of society, he ceases to have…

How I can be the more free by subordinating my judgment of right to one which directly changes that judgment to its opposite, I cannot understand.

But I may encounter some one order, a demand, for instance, for military service, a compulsion to abandon my religious faith, which seems to me in direct contradiction to the whole scheme of values I have found in life.

It seems to me to imply not only a paralysis of the will, but a denial of that uniqueness of individuality, that sense that each of us is ultimately different from our fellows, that is the ultimate fact of human experience.

I may, in fact, be most fully free when I am most suffused with the sense of compulsion.

My true liberty is, therefore, a kind of permanent tutelage to the state, a sacrifice of my limited purpose to its larger end upon the ground that, as this larger end is realized, so I, too, am given realization.

Its view is built upon the innumerable intelligences from the interplay of which social organization derives its ultimate form; obviously such a view is superior in its wisdom to the result my own petty knowledge can attain.

So that when I obey it, I am, in fact, obeying myself; in a real sense its commands are my own.

The more fully I discover its purposes the more fully, also, there is revealed to me their identity with that at which, in the long view, I aim.

When I obey the state, I obey the best part of myself.

The nature of the social bond makes service to its demands the very essence of freedom.

The more intimately, therefore, we make our will one with that of the state, the more completely are we free.

It is, so to say, the long and permanent end that, in the ultimate analysis, we come individually to will after private experience of wrong direction and erroneous desire.

Its object is what alone we should aim at were we free to will only our permanent good.

For it represents, in its will, what each of us would seek to be if the temporary, the immediate and the irrational, were stripped from the objects we desire.

This will, moreover, is the same in each member of society; for, at bottom, the real will is a common will which finds its highest embodiment in the state.

The right object of our wills, the thing which, did we know all the facts, we would truly desire, this is clearly that for which we would seek freedom.

We desire freedom, that is to say, in order that we may be ourselves at our best.

It is rather a positive self-determination of the will which, in each of us, seeks the fulfilment of rational purpose as this lies behind, and gives unified meaning to, the diversified chaos of purposes in each of us.

Liberty, it argues, is not a mere negative thing like absence of restraint.

From the Greeks to Rousseau it was always conceived that a man’s freedom is born of a limitation upon what his rulers may exact from him; since Rousseau, and, more particularly, since Hegel, it has been urged that conformity to a code, and…

In the whole history of political philosophy there is nothing more subtle than the skill with which the idealist school has turned the flank of the classic antithesis between liberty and authority.

To be one with that activity may well then be regarded as the highest freedom a citizen can know.

True liberty is thus so far from being an absence of restraint that it is essentially subordination to a system of rational purposes which receive their highest expression in the activity of the state.