Harold J. Laski

The more fully, therefore, I serve it, the more fully do I express myself.

I am not independent of, or isolated in, that order, but one with it and of it.

When I say that I am seeking to realize myself, I mean in fact that I am seeking to be one with the order of which I am a part.

What is termed the idealist theory of the state is broadly the argument that individual freedom means obedience to the law of the society to which I belong.

We strive to do our duty to England for the sake of Englishmen; a duty to England separate from them, and in which they did not share, is surely inconceivable.

I do not understand how England, for instance, can have an end or purpose different from, or opposed to, the end or purpose of its citizens.

The need to give way to others, to accept, that is, restraint upon our right to unfettered activity is inherent in the nature of things.

Our liberty has to be realized in a welter of competing and co-operating interests which only achieve rational co-ordination by something not unlike a miracle.

It is, I think, true to say that an individual abstracted from society and regarded as entitled to freedom outside its environment is devoid of meaning.

Where our interests conflict with the obviously greater interest of the society, we ourselves must give way.

We are free, it is said, not for ourselves but for the society which gives us meaning.

It is because the State enforces our rights as obligations upon others that we have the opportunity to enjoy them.

For the rights of each of us depend upon the protective rampart of social organization.

The liberty of each citizen is born of, and must be subordinated to, the liberty of that greater whole from which his whole meaning is derived.

It has a life and a reality, needs and purposes, which are not exhausted by the sum of the needs and purposes of its individual members.

A nation-state like America or England is not merely a body of Englishmen or Americans, but something beyond them.

It is often argued that a theory of liberty which starts from the effort of the individual to attain happiness must break down because it fails to remember that society also has rights, and that these are necessarily superior to those of…

He may not win his objective, but, at least, he cannot claim that society has so weighted the scale against him as to assure his defeat.

He knows that in his effort to attain happiness no barriers impede him differently from their incidence upon others.

The idea of equality, in a word, is such an organization of opportunity that no man’s personality suffers frustration to the private benefit of others.

In the view I am taking, no child could be deprived of education that another might receive it; but in a choice of men say for a post in the Treasury, one might be preferred to another on the ground of ability or character or training.

For equality, so regarded, seems, in the first place, to mean the organization of opportunities; and, in the second place, it means that no man’s opportunities are sacrificed, except on terms of social principle, to the claims of another.

Equality, so regarded, seems to me inescapably connected with freedom.

It means the recognition of urgent need in all--food, for instance, and clothing, and shelter--before there is special recognition of non-urgent claims in any.

It is an attempt to give each man as similar a chance as possible to utilize what powers he may possess.