A society might be formed, for instance, to discuss and propagate the principles of Tolstoyan anarchy; I do not think any government has legitimate ground for interference with it.
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.
gutenberg.org
The time for that interference comes only when, outside the specific categories of peaceful persuasion, men have moved to action which cannot logically be interpreted as other than a determination to overthrow the social order.
I agree, for instance, that a society of Communists which began to teach its members military drill could legitimately be regarded as a direct threat to peace.
So, also, when a political party, the Ulster Volunteers, for instance, or their opponents, the Nationalists, begin to purchase munitions of war, interference by government is justified.
But I cannot see that a government is entitled to prevent a society of Communists from preaching their doctrines either by speech or by publication of the printed word.
It is, I think, essential that, as with the English law of treason, the government should be compelled to prove the commission of some overt act which directly tends to imminent rebellion in a court of law, and to bring two witnesses at…
It ought not to be sufficient for a government to say that since a particular party has beliefs which include the right to violence and has elsewhere practised violence, that its suppression is legitimate.
We do not think that announcement would have justified the British Government in imprisoning Mr Ghandi before the end of 1929 in order that he might be prevented from accomplishing his threat at a later time.
Or, once more, Mr Arthur Ponsonby’s organization of men pledged to refuse military service in the event of Great Britain going again to war ought not to be suppressed because, if Great Britain did go to war, some hundred thousand…
In the light of the evidence, we can rest assured that, unless we compel proof, in an ordinary court of law, that overt acts have been committed, such attacks will be made.
One has only to remember the Treason Trials of 1794, where there was not a scintilla of evidence against any one of the accused, or the follies enacted by governments during the Great War, to see that this is the case.
The logic, indeed, of habitual government suppression seems to be that abnormal opinion is always dangerous because, if it is acted upon, the supremacy of the law will be endangered.
If the Communist Party in England sought to initiate a rebellion, there would be a threat to the supremacy of the law.
But no one of common sense believes today in a Communist menace in England, least of all, perhaps, the Communists themselves.
There is a clear case for insisting that persons, even if they be passionate Christian Scientists, who are suffering from an infectious disease like small-pox, shall be isolated until they are cured; for anyone who goes about with…
I believe, first, that it is socially most important to leave the individual as uninhibited as possible in forming his own way of life, granted, of course, that he is adult and mature.
To shelter him at every point from experience which, if carried to excess, may harm him is not only impossible, but also dangerous.
It makes him pass his life under the aegis of a system of fear-sanctions which, for the most part, he will be quite unable to sublimate, and the result will be that sense of continuous frustration which is fatal to freedom.
I must, in general, learn my own limitations by experimentation with myself.
I cannot pass my life adjusting my conduct to standards and habits which represent the experiments of other people.
To insist that their rule of life is to be mine is, normally, to destroy my personality.
It is to compel me to live at the behest of others even where I can discover no ground for the behest.
Most people would agree that a statute compelling an atheist to go to church was utterly foolish.
His presence there does him no good because his mood is inevitably one of gnawing indignation at being compelled to participate in ceremonies that have no meaning for him.
He loses, that is, the habit of truth, on the one hand, or the capacity to give and take which makes for decent citizenship, on the other.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
