Harold J. Laski

We desire freedom, that is to say, in order that we may be ourselves at our best.

The right object of our wills, the thing which, did we know all the facts, we would truly desire, this is clearly that for which we would seek freedom.

This will, moreover, is the same in each member of society; for, at bottom, the real will is a common will which finds its highest embodiment in the state.

For it represents, in its will, what each of us would seek to be if the temporary, the immediate and the irrational, were stripped from the objects we desire.

Its object is what alone we should aim at were we free to will only our permanent good.

It is, so to say, the long and permanent end that, in the ultimate analysis, we come individually to will after private experience of wrong direction and erroneous desire.

The more intimately, therefore, we make our will one with that of the state, the more completely are we free.

The nature of the social bond makes service to its demands the very essence of freedom.

The more fully I discover its purposes the more fully, also, there is revealed to me their identity with that at which, in the long view, I aim.

So that when I obey it, I am, in fact, obeying myself; in a real sense its commands are my own.

Its view is built upon the innumerable intelligences from the interplay of which social organization derives its ultimate form; obviously such a view is superior in its wisdom to the result my own petty knowledge can attain.

My true liberty is, therefore, a kind of permanent tutelage to the state, a sacrifice of my limited purpose to its larger end upon the ground that, as this larger end is realized, so I, too, am given realization.

I may, in fact, be most fully free when I am most suffused with the sense of compulsion.

It seems to me to imply not only a paralysis of the will, but a denial of that uniqueness of individuality, that sense that each of us is ultimately different from our fellows, that is the ultimate fact of human experience.

But I may encounter some one order, a demand, for instance, for military service, a compulsion to abandon my religious faith, which seems to me in direct contradiction to the whole scheme of values I have found in life.

How I can be the more free by subordinating my judgment of right to one which directly changes that judgment to its opposite, I cannot understand.

If the individual is not to find the source of his decisions in the contact between the outer world and himself, in the experience, that is, which is the one unique thing that separates him from the rest of society, he ceases to have…

For the individual is real to himself not by reason of the contacts he shares with others, but because he reaches those contacts through a channel which he alone can know.

His true self is the self that is isolated from his fellows and contributes the fruit of isolated meditation to the common good, which, collectively, they seek to bring into being.

A true theory of liberty, I urge, is built upon a denial of each of the assumptions of idealism.

My true self is not a selected system of rational purposes identical with those sought by every member of society.

All of them go to the formation of my view of the universe; all of them are my expression of my striving to fulfil my personality.

Each, while it is, is real, and each, as real, must give way only in terms of a judgment I make, not of one made for me by some other will, if I am to remain a purposive human being serving myself as an end.

This attempt, in a word, at the extraction of a partial self from the whole of my being as alone truly myself not only denies that my experience is real, but, also, makes me merely an instrument to the purpose of others.

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