Harold J. Laski

The sense of solidarity comes only when the result of joint action impinges equally on the common life.

We are in the difficulty that every step we take towards freedom is a step towards the equalization of privileges now held unequally.

Those who hold them are not anxious to abandon what they entail; sometimes they can even persuade themselves that the well-being of society depends upon a refusal to surrender them.

For them, therefore, the honest publication of facts, the making of free minds, are simply paths to disaster.

To explain to a loyal Roman Catholic that he should tell his children that there is grave reason to deny the truth of all he believes is to invite him to shatter the foundation upon which he has built his life.

To suggest to the average citizen who took part in the Great War that his school-books should abandon the legend that his particular state entered it with the whole-souled motive of serving justice would appear scandalous simply because he…

I conclude, therefore, that whatever our mechanisms and institutions, liberty can hope to emerge and to be maintained in a society where men are, broadly speaking, equally interested in its emergency and its maintenance.

I accept the insight Harrington had when he insisted that the distribution of economic power in a state will control the distribution of its political power.

I think the perception of the early socialists entirely justified when they urged that a society divided into a small number of rich, and a large number of poor persons, will be a society of exploiters and exploited.

I cannot believe that, in such an atmosphere, liberty will be a matter of serious concern to the possessors of power.

They will allow freedom in inessentials; but when the pith of freedom is attack upon their monopoly they will define it as sedition or blasphemy.

For if the form of social organization is a pyramid, men are bound to struggle towards its apex.

In a society of economic unequals, gross unequalities make conflict inherent in its foundations.

The possession of wealth means the possession of so much that makes for a happy life, beautiful physical surroundings, leisure to read and to think, safeguards against the insecurity of the morrow.

It is, I think, inevitable that those to whom these things are denied should envy those who possess them.

It is inevitable, also, that envy should be the nurse of hate and faction.

Those who are so denied struggle to attain, those who possess struggle to preserve.

Justice becomes the rule of the stronger, liberty the law which the stronger allow.

The freedom that the poor desire in a society such as this is the freedom to enjoy the things their rulers enjoy.

The penumbra of freedom, its purpose and its life, is the movement for equality.

And it is equality that is decried by those who rule.

It means parting with the exercise of power and all the pleasures that go with its exercise.

It means that their wants do not define the ends of production, their standards do not set the objects of consideration, their right to determine the equilibrium of social forces is no longer recognized.

Equality, in fact, is a denial of the philosophy of life which is bred into their bones by their way of living.

Who of us, on these terms, but would find it difficult to accept as valid experience which contradicts our experiences, a system of values which attempts the transvaluation of our own?