The right of the modern man to education became fundamental to his freedom once the mastery of Nature by science transformed the sources of power.
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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There can, under these conditions, be no freedom that is worth while unless the mind is trained to use its freedom.
Men may well be free and yet remain unable to realize the purposes of freedom.
But those who know the normal life of the poor, its perpetual fear of the morrow, its haunting sense of impending disaster, its fitful search for beauty which perpetually eludes, will realize well enough that, without economic security…
Once and for all, let us agree that property alone does not make a man free.
Nevertheless, economic security is not liberty though it is a condition without which liberty is never effective.
Yet if he is deprived of security in employment he becomes the prey of a mental and physical servitude incompatible with the very essence of liberty.
Nor must we confound liberty with certain other goods without which it has no meaning.
Our business is to secure such a balance between the liberty we need and the authority that is essential as to leave the average man with the clear sense that he has elbow-room for the continuous expression of his personality.
Some of them are essential to happiness, but that does not make them for a moment less emphatically limitations.
I do not thereby mean to assume that a man will be the happier the more completely restraints are absent from the society to which he belongs.
That is why Pericles insisted that the secret of liberty is courage.
Liberty always demands a limitation of political authority, and it is never attained unless the rulers of a state can, where necessary, be called to account.
They are always tempted to impose their canon of good upon others, and, in the end, they assume that the good of the community depends upon the continuance of their power.
For the one assured result of historical investigation is the lesson that uncontrolled power is invariably poisonous to those who possess it.
My thesis involves the view that if in any state there is a body of men who possess unlimited political power, those over whom they rule can never be free.
But I am arguing that any rule which demands from me something I would not otherwise give is a diminution of my freedom.
They are unfree whenever the rules to which they have to conform compel them to conduct which they dislike and resent.
They are free when the rules under which they live leave them without a sense of frustration in realms they deem significant.
They do not, as Hegel insisted, find their liberty in obedience to the law.
Men cannot, as Rousseau claimed, be forced into freedom.
It implies power to expand, the choice by the individual of his own way of life without imposed prohibitions from without.
I am arguing, first, that liberty is essentially an absence of restraint.
I seek to inquire into the terms upon which it is attainable in the Western world, and, more especially, to find those rules of conduct to which political authority must conform if its subjects are, in a genuine sense, to be free.
I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness.
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