Harold J. Laski

Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud and glad to share.

He thus made possible not only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression.

The impulses it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was turned to ends of which he…

Wealth, in its view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men.

It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses.

With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.

Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation of history.

No one can read the history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its rightness.

They did not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable, but whether it was ethically right.

For if labor was the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as though degradation was the sole payment for its services.

That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science.

Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of his tale.

It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.

Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men.

The infallible sense of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.

But it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man.

Herein the State is purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other circumstances.

There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist system.

With Ricardo, the elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve…

The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth.

For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time.

From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us.

It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself.

Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel.

Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand.