They must be persuaded by reason that one vision of desire is better than another vision, the experience commended to them must persuade and not enforce, if they are to accept its implications with a sense of contentment.
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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Men are not willing to yield the insight of their experience to other men’s insight merely because they are commanded to do so.
Every novelty will seem a challenge to that confinement; and it will always accrete about itself the wills of those who are excluded from a share in its benefits.
If power is held by a few, happiness will be confined to a few also.
Toleration is therefore not merely desirable in itself, but also politically wise, because no other atmosphere of activity offers the assurance of peaceful adjustment.
Curiosity, discovery, invention, all of these jeopardize by their nature the foundations of any society to which their results are denied admission.
The standards they formulate are nothing so much as methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new order in which different demands would secure…
The chief danger which always confronts a society is the desire of those who possess power to prohibit ideas and conduct which may disturb them in their possession.
Every study of freedom is a plea for toleration; and every plea for toleration is a vindication of the rights of reason.
But the surrender of national sovereignty is the surrender of aggressive power; and the nation can move on its way the more freely since it knows that it no longer lives in the shadow of international injustice.
It is consent always in the knowledge that refusal to agree will make no serious difference to the result that occurs.
Indeed it may reasonably be argued that with the disappearance of national sovereignty, the factor of consent is likely to be far more effective, far more genuinely related to the realities of the world; than it is at the present time.
Consent has its full place in the international sphere; and it is a safeguard of national right as creative here, as elsewhere.
But, also, most states are wise enough to realize that victories of this kind are empty victories, that solutions imposed by force have consequences invariably too grave to be satisfactory in their application.
International life in this realm is much more likely to be a régime of example and influence than one of legislative compulsion simply because the penalties of national dissent would strain too gravely the structure of the authority which…
Indeed it is rather likely to fail to embark upon experiments and decisions it ought to make from an excessively delicate sense of what some particular nation may feel.
I can even see that oppression might be felt where, in the building of an international civil service, there was a sense that there is discrimination against the members of any particular nation, or that in composing the committees of its…
I can see that a nation might feel an international authority to be oppressive if it sought, say, by an immigration policy seriously to alter the mores of a national life; it should not impose Japanese immigration on California any more…
France would be not the less France if the gold policy of her bank were set by an international authority, if she gave up her zeal for a conscript army, if she built her frontiers upon the impalpable solidity of friendship rather than the…
We can leave to England, for instance, her full cultural independence, her characteristic internal institutions, her special contacts with the Dominions she has begotten; to sacrifice the predominance of her navy, her right, by its means…
I believe, accordingly, that we can retain all that is essential to the freedom of national life, and yet fully admit the implications of the international community.
Even Russia, in some sort the antipodes of Geneva, has appeared there at Disarmament Conferences; and even granted the rigour of the premises upon which her life is built, she cannot remain unrelated to the structure of a world-order.
The Pact, by itself, is an empty declaration; but its logic, like that of the Covenant, is likely to take it much further in the direction of international government than its authors intended it should go.
I do not believe it is exaggeration to suggest that the underlying motive of the Kellogg Pact was compensation by America for her abstention from the Geneva Covenant.
I want to draw therefrom the inference that national sovereignty and the international community confront one another as incompatibles.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
