Harold J. Laski

That men can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced.

The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation.

The poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable.

Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it.

The iron law of wages, the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can better…

In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains.

No poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy.

Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort.

Where each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to be splendid.

A population each element of which was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of greatness.

For even when the psychological inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory in the light of the experience it summarizes.

Once it is admitted that the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final canon of politics is bound to be a moral one.

No mere conflict of private interests, however pure in motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest between the members of the State.

Liberty, in the sense of a positive and equal opportunity for self-realization, is impossible save upon the basis of the acceptance of certain minimal standards which can get accepted only through collective effort.

Smith did not see that in the processes of politics what gets accepted is not the will that is at every moment a part of the state-purpose, but the will of those who in fact operate the machinery of government.

In the half-century after he wrote the men who dominated political life were, with the best intentions, moved by motives at most points unrelated to the national well-being.

Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a community where it was realized that below certain standards of subsistence the very concept of humanity is impossible.

Modern achievement implies a training in the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our own day to the vast majority of men.

In the absence of legislation, it is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament will be adapted to the needs of property.

That shrinkage of the purpose of the State will mean for most not merely hardship but degradation of all that makes life worthy.

Yet it will be a civilization of slaves rather than of men.

The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was zealous demands a different institutional expression from that which he gave it.

We must not assume an a priori justification for the forces of the past.

The customs of men may represent the thwarting of the impulses of the many at the expense of the few not less easily than they may embody a general desire; and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as natural whatever may happen to have…

A man may find self-realization not less in working for the common good than in the limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement.