An economic system defends itself in just the same way: the devotees of Marxism in its extreme form have never doubted their right to impose their outlook upon the recalcitrant, even at the cost of blood.
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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In a constitutional state like America the suppression of liberty is called the inhibition of license; in a dictatorship like Moscow it is termed resistance to the admission of incorrect “bourgeois” notions.
Always the effort is to insist upon an artificial unity the maintenance of which is necessary to the desires of those who hold power.
Suppression, doubtless, eases the way of authority, for scepticism is always painful, and to arrive at a conclusion after careful testing of evidence always involves the possibility that authority may have to admit that its conclusions are…
Yet it may still be maintained with some confidence that the only adequate answer to a principle which claims social recognition is the rational proof that it is untrue.
Civilization is strewn with the wrecks of systems which men at one time held for true; systems, also, in the name of which liberty was denied and pain needlessly inflicted.
A scrutiny of history, moreover, makes it plain that the right to liberty will always be challenged where its consequence is the equalization of some privilege which is not generally shared by men.
The more consciously, therefore, we can seek that equalization as a desirable object of social effort, the more likely we are to make attacks upon liberty more rare, the evil results of such attack less frequent.
No man’s love of justice is strong enough to survive the right to inflict punishment in the name of the creed he professes; and the simplest way to retain his sense of justice is to take away the interest which persuades him of the duty to…
Scepticism, it may be, is a dissolvent of enthusiasm; but enthusiasm has always been the enemy of freedom.
The atmosphere we require, if we are to attain happiness for the multitude, is one in which we have everything to gain by the statement of experience and nothing to lose by the investigation of its convictions.
That atmosphere is the condition of liberty and its quality is light rather than heat.
For light permits of argument, and we cannot argue with men who are in a passion.
Nothing is so likely to engender passion as the perception that they are called to sacrifice a privilege.
The way, therefore, of freedom is to arrange the pattern of social institutions so that there are no privileges to sacrifice.
This kind of plea for liberty is built, after all, upon the simple consideration that the world is likely to be the more happy if it refuses to build its institutions upon injustice.
And institutions are necessarily unjust if the impression they continually produce in the majority is a feeling of envy and hatred for the results they impose.
There is something wrong in a system which, like ours, maintains itself not by the respect and affection it evokes, but by the sanctions to which it can appeal.
What is wrong in them is their erection upon the basis of passion and their insistence that reason shall serve what that passion is seeking to protect.
So long as that is true of our society, we shall continue to deny the validity of all principles which attack the existing disposition of social forces.
Those principles may often be wrong; yet sometimes, at least, they represent the certainties of the future.
It is always a hazardous enterprise to suppress belief which claims to be rooted in the experience of men.
For no outlook which has behind it the support of considerable numbers will ever silently acquiesce in its reduction to impotence.
It will fight for its right to be heard whatever the price of the conflict.
It has been claimed that truth can be established by reason alone; that departure from the way of reason as a method of securing conviction is an indication always of a desire to protect injustice.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
