Men do not, I believe, resent an environment when they feel that they share adequately in its making and in the end for which it is made.
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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We seek economic freedom for the satisfaction brought by making an end of the frustration to our personality an irrational subordination implies.
We seek political freedom for the ends that, in the political world, we deem good.
We seek religious freedom for the truth our religion embodies.
For its search is not to realize itself for its own sake, but for what, as it is realized, it is able to bring.
Freedom, therefore, in an unequal society has no easy task as it seeks realization.
The truth of the facts which might make a just solution is distorted for a similar end.
The power of numbers is sacrificed to the interest of a few.
Now it is, I think, unquestionable that in an unequal society, the effort of ordinary men to attain the condition we call happiness is hampered at every turn.
It is the victim of a process of valuation the purpose of which is to prevent, so far as possible, an alteration of the status quo; and, mutatis mutandis, this is true of all claims which seek alteration in a significant degree.
The opinion represented by the miners is not objectively valued.
The whole machinery of news-making is directed to the confirmation of that impression; and the chance that the miners’ claim will be considered equally is destroyed by the weight which unequal economic power attaches to the case against…
The most subtle, perhaps, is the denial of adequate educational facilities; for what, in fact, that does is to prevent me from knowing how to formulate my claim effectively, and unattention is the price I have to pay for my ineffectiveness.
To admit that I ought to have that freedom is to deny that the inequality upon which society rests is valid.
Every attempt at such expression is an attempt at the equalization of social conditions; it is an attempt to make myself count, an insistence on my claim, an assertion of my right to be treated as equal in that claim with other persons.
Those who lament the ignorance of public opinion too often forget that in an unequal society it is necessary to repress the expression of individuality.
Such an equation is serious, and may well be fatal, to any who think of social peace as a thing really worth while to preserve.
Our difficulty is that they will be taken to constitute it when it is to the interest of government to do so.
It is extraordinarily dangerous, for example, to assume that English public opinion disapproved the General Strike because Mayfair was indignant, the Morning Post hysterical, and Sir John Simon coldly hostile; for Mayfair and the Morning…
Every one of these attitudes is a blunder; especially is it a blunder, for which we pay heavily, in matters of social importance.
We emphasize opinion which satisfies those in power, we discount opinion which runs counter to it; above all we take it for granted that silence and consent are one and the same thing.
Yet that is the underlying assumption of much of our social life.
Nothing is more dangerous in the taking of decisions than to assume that because people are silent, they have nothing to say.
And that prejudice, in its basic implications, is incompatible with liberty.
My point has been that in an unequal society that prejudice is inevitable.
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