It shall not deny access to the Courts to men of whose opinions society in general disapproves.
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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It shall not exclude men from the legal profession because they are black or Wesleyans or freemasons.
It is therefore an argument that society shall not construct barriers against those claims which weigh more heavily upon some than upon others.
It is an insistence that there is no difference inherent in nature between the claims of men to happiness.
But equality does not mean identity of treatment.
To treat men so different as Newton and Byron, Cromwell and Rousseau, in a precisely similar way is patently absurd.
The more equality there is in a State, the more use, in general, we can make of our freedom.
Certainly the history of the abolition of special privilege has been, also, the history of the expansion of what in our inheritance was open to the common man.
And it follows that the more equal are the social rights of citizens, the more likely they are to be able to utilize their freedom in realms worthy of exploration.
We need not argue that our happiness depends upon the possession of political power; we can argue that exclusion from it is likely to mean exclusion from that which largely determines the contours of happiness.
Men like Harrington and Madison and Marx all insisted, and with truth, that whatever the forms of state, political power will, in fact, belong to the owners of economic power.
The absence of equality means special privilege for some and not for others, a special privilege which is not, so to say, in nature but in a deliberate contrivance of the social environment.
The acute mind of Aristotle long ago saw that the craving for equality is one of the most profound roots of revolution.
But it is, I think, historically true that in the absence of certain equalities no freedom can ever hope for realization.
Men might be broadly equal under a despotism, and yet unfree.
In any state, therefore, where liberty is to move to its appointed end, it is important that there should be equality.
The exclusion of a race or creed from a share in citizenship is, invariably, their exclusion also from the benefits of social action.
A franchise limited to the owners of property means legislation in the interests of that class.
Wherever it is possessed in excess, it tilts the balance of social action in favour of its possessors.
It prevents the exercise of those capacities which are released for activity by the absence of restraint.
Power as such, when uncontrolled, is always the natural enemy of freedom.
Everyone knows the danger to freedom which exists in any community where there is either special privilege on the one hand or what is termed the tyranny of the majority on the other.
It is a sacrifice of some liberty to a greater freedom when the compulsion ceases.
In our world he cannot employ his freedom so as to give him assurance of happiness.
Deprive a man of knowledge, and the road to ever greater knowledge, and you will make him, inevitably, the slave of those more fortunate than himself.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
