Our liberty means the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.
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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The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common effort.
There was thus no reason to believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which implied the national regulation of business enterprise.
The danger in every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in institutional evolution.
Private enterprise has the sanction of prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title.
History is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete systems.
It took almost a century after the publication of the Wealth of Nations for men to realize that its axioms represented the experience of a definite time.
Smith thought of freedom in the terms most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view which remains impressive even at a century's distance.
But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age.
The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor.
It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want.
With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some special experience universalized.
To suggest that it should be then bound by principles which weaken its effective striking power, is, it is said, to ask it to fight with one hand tied behind its back.
The first objective of any society must be organized security; it is only when this has been obtained, that freedom of speech is within the pale of discussion.
I agree at once that it is entirely academic to demand freedom of speech in a time of civil war, for the simple reason that no one will pay the slightest attention to the demand; violence and freedom are, a priori, contradictory terms.
In general, revolutions fail because those who make them deny freedom to their opponents.
Losing criticism, they do not know the limits within which they can safely operate; they lose their power because they are not told when they are abusing it.
I can think of no revolutionary period in history when a government has gained by stifling the opinion of men who did not see eye to eye with it; and I suggest that the revolutionary insistence that persuasion is futile finds little…
Here I can only express the view that the resumption of order ought always to be followed forthwith by the normal principles of judicial control; and that the military authorities ought not, save where it is quite impossible for the civil…
I know of no case where the state has exercised extraordinary power outside the normal process of law, in which that authority has not been grossly abused.
It was abused in the Civil War even under a mind so humane and generous as that of Lincoln; it was emphatically and dangerously abused in the Amritsar rebellion of 1919.
Whether you study repression in Ireland or Russia, Bavaria or Hungary or India, its history is always the same.
The fact always emerges that once the operation of justice is transferred from the ordinary courts to some branch of the executive, abuses always occur.
The proper protection of the individual is deliberately neglected in the belief that a reign of terror will minimize disaffection.
If it could, there would have been no Russian Revolution; and there would be no movement for Indian self-government today.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
