Harold J. Laski

Experience suggests common objects of desire, but each will that wills these common objects is a different will in every sense not purely metaphorical.

But the unity these make is not in the will but in the fusion of separate wills to the attainment of a common purpose.

And we must remember that in every society the objects of wills cannot, in some mystic fashion, be fused into a higher unity somehow compounded of them all.

I see no meaning, for instance, in the statement that the antithetic purposes of Jesuits and Freemasons are somehow transcended in a higher purpose which resumes them both; that is to say that a Jesuit or a Freemason is most truly himself…

A member of the Praesidium of the Third International, whose will aims supremely at the overthrow of capitalism, is not somehow at one with the will of the President of the British Federation of Industries to whom all the purposes of the…

Both, doubtless, will the good; but the point is that each wills the good as he sees it, and each would regard the fulfilment of the other’s ideal of good as a definite destruction of his own.

Each of us desires the good as he sees it; and each of us sees a good derived from an individual and separate experience into which no other person can fully enter.

Our pooling of experiences to make a common purpose somewhere is in no case other than fragmentary.

We remain ourselves even when we join with others to attain some common object of desire.

The ultimate isolation of the individual personality is the basis from which any adequate theory of politics must start.

I reject, therefore, the idea of a real will, and, still more, the idea that there is a common will in society.

It is a logical inference therefrom that I should reject also the doctrine that all state-action is, at bottom, the exercise of the real will of society.

For, first of all, I see no reason to suppose that social life is ultimately the product of a single and rational mind organizing its activities in terms of a logical process.

To speak of the “mind of society”, seems to me merely a metaphorical way of describing a course of action which is made valid by translation into fact.

There are no governing principles in social life deliberately emerging from the interplay of its myriad constituent parts.

Governing principles emerge; but they emerge through the wills of individual minds.

The state is a complex of rulers and subjects territorially organized and seeking, by the conference of power upon those rulers, effective co-ordination of social activities.

But no one, I think, can examine the course of history and say that the experience of any state indicates a permanent embodiment of the highest good we know in the purpose of the state.

Yet what they see as good may not be so recognizable to us, and may well provoke in us the sense that life would not be worth living if their view was to prevail.

The unity of the state, in a word, is not inherently there.

It is made by civic acceptance of what its rulers propose.

It is not necessarily good because it is accepted; it is not necessarily right because it is proposed.

I cannot believe that a theory fits the facts of history which assumes that this policy is going to be right, whatever it is; and that freedom will be found only in acceptance of it.

I do not believe that the Huguenot of 1685 was made the more free by accepting, against his conscience, the Revocation; nor do I believe that Luther would have been more free had he accepted the decrees of Rome and abandoned his protest.

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