Harold J. Laski

He judges it, I have urged, by its capacity to respond to the needs he infers from the experience he encounters.

The substitution for it of someone else’s experience, however much wider or wiser than his, is, where it is based upon constraint, a denial of freedom.

What the citizen, quite rightly, expects from the state is to have his experience counted in the making of policy, and to have it counted as he, and he only, expresses its import.

Obviously enough, if his experience is to count, a man must be able to state it freely.

The right to speak it, to print it, to seek in concert with others its translation into the event, is fundamental to liberty.

If he is driven, in this realm, to silence and inactivity, he becomes a dumb and inarticulate creature, whose personality is neglected in the making of policy.

Without freedom of the mind and of association a man has no means of self-protection in our social order.

Yet a denial of his right to do these things is a denial of his happiness.

Thereby, he becomes an instrument of other peoples ends, not himself an end.

That is the essential condition of the perversion of power.

Once we inhibit freedom of speech, we inhibit criticism of social institutions.

The only opinions of which account is then taken are the opinions which coincide with the will of those in authority.

Silence is taken for consent; and the decisions that are registered as law reflect, not the total needs of the society, but the powerful needs which have been able to make themselves felt at the source of power.

Historically, the road to tyranny has always lain through a denial of freedom in this realm.

I shall seek to show, first, that liberty of thought and association--the two things are inextricably intertwined--is good in itself, and second, that its denial is always a means to the preservation of some special and, usually, sinister…

I shall, in particular, maintain that all restrictions upon freedom of expression upon the ground that they are seditious or blasphemous are contrary to the well-being of society.

If it is the business of those who exercise authority in the state to satisfy the wants of those over whom they rule, it is plain that they should be informed of those wants; and, obviously, they cannot be truly informed about them unless…

No state, for instance, could rightly legislate about the hours of labour if only business men were free to offer their opinion upon industrial conditions.

We could not develop an adequate law of divorce if only those happily married were entitled to express an opinion upon its terms.

Law must take account of the totality of experience and this can only be known to it as that experience is unfettered in its opportunity of expression.

Most people are prepared to agree with this view when it is made as a general statement; most people, also, recoil from it when its implications are made fully known.

For it implies not only the right to beatify the present social order, but the right, also, to condemn it with vigour and completeness.

A man may say that England or America will never be genuinely democratic unless equality of income is established there; that equality of income may never be established except by force; that, accordingly, the way to a genuine democracy…

Or he may argue that eternal truth is the sole possession of the Roman Catholic Church; that men can only be persuaded to understand this by the methods of the Inquisition; that, therefore, the re-establishment of the Inquisition is in the…

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