He cannot abandon the consequences of his isolation which are, broadly speaking, that his experience is private and the will built out of that experience personal to himself.
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.
gutenberg.org
If he surrenders it to others, he surrenders his personality.
If his will is set by the will of others, he ceases to be master of himself.
I cannot believe that a man no longer master of himself is in any meaning sense free.
If we reject a view which, like that just considered, seeks to dissolve the reality of the individual into the society of which he is a part, what are we left with as the pattern within which a man seeks freedom?
A man may cut himself off from family or friends; he may refuse membership of a church or vocational body; he cannot refuse membership of the state.
Every order issued is, in a final analysis, issued by a person or persons to another person or persons.
When we say that, in such a complex of relationships as this, that a man is free, what do we mean?
We know that if his Church issues an order to him of which he disapproves, he can leave his church; so, too, with all other bodies save the state.
The latter can, if he seeks evasion of its commands, use compulsion to secure obedience to its orders.
It makes, we say, the law, and a member of the state is legally compelled to obey the law.
But he is not free merely because he obeys the law.
His freedom, in relation to the law, depends on the effect of any particular order upon his experience.
He is seeking happiness; some order seems to him a wanton invasion of that happiness.
He may be right or wrong in so thinking; the point of fact is that he has no alternative but to go by his own moral certainties.
Now freedom exists in a state where a man knows that the decisions made by the ultimate authority do not invade his personality.
The conditions of freedom are then those which assure the absence of such invasion.
The citizen who asks for freedom is entitled to the conditions which, collectively, are the guarantees that he will be able to go on the road to his happiness, as he conceives it, unhindered.
Neither conditions nor guarantees will ever be perfect; nor will they ever cover all upon which happiness depends.
The freedom it secures to me is the absence of a barrier in the way of marriage if I can win her consent.
What we need to know is, I suggest, first what those realms of conduct are, and, second, what my duty as a citizen is when I am, in any one of them, prohibited from acting as I please.
It is the problem of knowing when a man ought deliberately to make up his mind to break the law or to refuse obedience to it.
But because we have rejected this view, we have to admit that there will be occasional disobedience, at the least, and that this may be justified.
Liberty may be resolved into a system of liberties; and from this angle it may be said that it is the purpose of social organization to see to it that this system is adequately safeguarded.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
