An extreme way of putting this view would be to say that law is made by the individual’s acceptance of it, that the essence of the law-making process, is the consent of interested minds.
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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It lives not by its power to command but by its power to convince.
And conviction is born of consent for the simple reason that the real field of social action is in the individual mind.
That is the stark fact which conditions the loyalty any authority seeks to secure.
At some point, it cannot be imposed but must be won from us.
And the greater the degree in which it springs from that persuasion, the greater, also, is the success of authority in imposing its solutions.
No power can ever hope for successful permanence, no power, either, is entitled to it, which does not make its way, in vital matters, through the channels of consent.
It is a multiverse embodying an ultimate variety of experiences, never identical, and always differently interpreted.
There is enough similarity of view to enable us, if we have patience and goodwill, to make enough of unity to achieve order and peace.
It does not entitle us to affirm that one man’s experience can be taken as the representation of another’s.
It does not justify the inference that I shall find what I most truly desire in the desire of another.
I am not a part of some great symphony in which I realize myself only as an incident in the motif of the whole.
I am unique, I am separate, I am myself; out of these qualities I must build my own principles of action.
These are mine only, and cannot be made for me, at least creatively, by others.
For their authority as principles comes from the fact that I recognize them as mine.
Into them, as principles, I pour my personality, and life, for me, derives its meaning from their unique texture.
To accept the forcible imposition of other principles upon me, which I do not recognize as the expression of my experience, is to make of me who might be free, a slave.
I become an instrument of alien purposes, devoted to an end which denies my self-hood.
Law, therefore, as coercion is always an invasion of personality, an abridgement of the moral stature of those whom it invades.
To be true to its purpose, it must reduce the imperative element to a minimum if it is to release creativeness and not destroy it.
The individual, therefore, is entitled to act upon the judgment of his conscience in public affairs.
He is entitled to assume that he will not find the rules of the conduct he ought to pursue objectified in any institution or set of institutions.
It is perverse, it is foolish, the little knowledge it has is small alongside the worth of the social tradition.
But perverse, foolish, ignorant, it is the only guide we have.
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
