Harold J. Laski

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

True liberty is thus so far from being an absence of restraint that it is essentially subordination to a system of rational purposes which receive their highest expression in the activity of the state.

To be one with that activity may well then be regarded as the highest freedom a citizen can know.

In the whole history of political philosophy there is nothing more subtle than the skill with which the idealist school has turned the flank of the classic antithesis between liberty and authority.

From the Greeks to Rousseau it was always conceived that a man’s freedom is born of a limitation upon what his rulers may exact from him; since Rousseau, and, more particularly, since Hegel, it has been urged that conformity to a code, and…

Liberty, it argues, is not a mere negative thing like absence of restraint.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.