Who of us but would not feel that a freedom which seeks radical alteration of the contours of existence is perverse and dangerous and worthy only to be suppressed?
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 new power which seeks its place in the sun is inevitably suspected by the old with whom it claims equal rights.
The equality will be denied, and, with it, the freedom to claim equality.
Inevitably, also, the right to freedom will be maintained, and the two powers will, sooner or later, mass their forces for battle.
I know no instance in history in which men in possession of power have voluntarily abdicated its privileges.
They say that reason and justice prevail; but they mean their reason and their justice.
They are prepared to coerce in the hope of success, and they are prepared to die fighting rather than to surrender.
It is the result of such a way of life that the ideal of freedom is inapplicable to matters upon which there is urgent difference of opinion between the rulers and their subjects.
It is impossible for reason to prevail if men are prepared to fight about the consequences of its victory.
Any society, in fact, the fruits of whose economic operations are unequally distributed will be compelled to deny freedom as the law of its being; and the same will be true of any society in process of forcible transition from one way of…
Cromwellian England, Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, each of these, of set purpose, made an end of the pretence that freedom was a justifiable object of desire.
In each, it was proposed to maintain some particular form of social organization at any cost; to inquire into the cost might result in doubt of the value of the effort; and the value of that freedom which releases reason was therefore…
In England, or France, or Germany, there is no freedom where the fundamentals of the society are called into question, if their rulers think that this may cause danger to those questions.
The government may decide that William Godwin is innocuous; but it will not hesitate to convict Tom Paine--in truth far less drastic--of high treason.
If freedom seeks to alter fundamentals, freedom must go; and freedom can hardly help but concentrate on fundamentals in a society distinguished by economic inequality.
We announce that we are open to conviction in matters of social arrangement.
For the chance that reason will prevail in an unequal society is necessarily small.
It is always at a disadvantage compared with interest, for, to the latter, especially in property matters, passion is harnessed, and in the presence of passion people become blind to truth.
They see what they want to see, and they select as truth that which serves the purpose they desire to see prevail.
The real problem was one of proportions; but the protagonists altered the proportions that the material might the better serve their cause.
You will remember that Luther and Calvin were always prepared to abide by the plain words of Scripture; but each was careful, at critical points, to insist that his own interpretation alone possessed validity.
In that atmosphere, a solution which strikes opposing controversialists as just is not, at least easily, to be found.
This, I suggest, is the kind of environment any plea for freedom must meet in the modern state.
Discussion of inessentials can be ample and luxurious; discussion of essentials will always, where it touches the heart of existing social arrangements, meet at least with difficulty and probably with attack.
In wartime, any plea for reasonableness is at a discount; and it was at a discount in England during the general strike when the government sought at once for the conditions of a belligerent atmosphere.
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