How can it guarantee to me such an environment to my activity that I do not suffer frustration in my search for happiness?
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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While there are certain constitutional forms which are, as I think, essential to freedom, their mere presence as forms will not, of themselves, suffice to make men free.
I shall seek, further, to draw the conclusion that, whatever the forms of social organization, liberty is essentially an expression of an impalpable atmosphere among men.
We are not free, that is, unless we can form our plan of conduct to suit our own character without social penalties.
Freedom is in an important degree a matter of law; but in a degree not less important it is a matter, also, of the mores of the society outside the sphere within which law can operate.
You will observe that I am still, from the angle of political organization, thinking of liberty as a safeguard of the individual against those who rule him.
Whoever exerts power in a community is tempted to the abuse of power.
Even in a democracy, we must have ways and means of protecting the minority against a majority which seeks to invade its freedom.
Mankind has suffered much from the assumption that, once the people had become master in its own house, there was no limit to its power.
You have only to remember the history of racial minorities like the negroes, of religious or national minorities like Jews and Czechs, to realize that democracy, of itself, is no guarantee of freedom.
This raises the larger question of whether freedom in the modern state can ever be satisfactorily secured by internal sanctions, and whether, in fact, it is ever durably possible save in the terms of a strong and stable international…
No Englishman would think himself free if his domestic life were defined for him by another state; and no German but has had a bitter sense of unfreedom during the foreign occupation of the Rhineland.
Everyone who considers the relation of liberty to the institutions of a state will, I think, find it difficult to resist the conclusion that without democracy there cannot be liberty.
A reaction against democratic ideals is the fashion, and the dictatorships which proliferate over half Europe are earnest in maintaining their obsolescence.
It involves a frame of government in which, first, men are given the chance of making the government under which they live, in which, also, the laws that government promulgates are binding equally upon all.
I do not think the average man can be made happy merely by living in a democracy: I do not see how he can avoid a sense of continuous frustration unless he does.
For if he does not share in making the government, if he cannot, where his fellows so choose, be himself made one of the rulers of the state, he is excluded from that which secures him the certainty that his experience counts.
To read the history of England before the enfranchisement of the wage-earner is to realize that however small is the value of the franchise it still assures the attention of government to grievance.
The right, therefore, to the franchise is essential to liberty; and a citizen excluded from it is unfree.
Unfree for the simple reason that the rulers of the state will not regard his will as entitled to consideration in the making of policy.
They will do things for him, but not those things he himself regards as urgent; as Parliament a hundred years ago met the grim problem of urban want by building more churches to the glory of the Lord.
Whatever is to be said against the democratic form of state, it seems to me unquestionable that it has forced the needs of humble men on the attention of government in a way impossible under any other form.
To be free a people must be able to choose its rulers at stated intervals simply because there is no other way in which their wants, as they experience those wants, will receive attention.
If it is so, it ceases to give attention to the purposes for which it is conferred and thinks only of the well-being of those who can exercise it.
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
