Attack an interest, in a word, and you arouse passion; arouse passion, especially where property is concerned, and the technique of raison d’état will sooner or later be invoked.
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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But liberty and raison d’état are mutually incompatible for the simple reason that raison d’état is a principle which seeks, a priori, to exclude rational discussion from the field.
It seeks neither truth nor justice, but surrender.
It is a technique, I think, which almost always comes into play when dangerous opinion is challenged by the state.
I can even see that oppression might be felt where, in the building of an international civil service, there was a sense that there is discrimination against the members of any particular nation, or that in composing the committees of its…
Indeed it is rather likely to fail to embark upon experiments and decisions it ought to make from an excessively delicate sense of what some particular nation may feel.
International life in this realm is much more likely to be a régime of example and influence than one of legislative compulsion simply because the penalties of national dissent would strain too gravely the structure of the authority which…
But, also, most states are wise enough to realize that victories of this kind are empty victories, that solutions imposed by force have consequences invariably too grave to be satisfactory in their application.
Consent has its full place in the international sphere; and it is a safeguard of national right as creative here, as elsewhere.
Indeed it may reasonably be argued that with the disappearance of national sovereignty, the factor of consent is likely to be far more effective, far more genuinely related to the realities of the world; than it is at the present time.
It is consent always in the knowledge that refusal to agree will make no serious difference to the result that occurs.
But the surrender of national sovereignty is the surrender of aggressive power; and the nation can move on its way the more freely since it knows that it no longer lives in the shadow of international injustice.
Every study of freedom is a plea for toleration; and every plea for toleration is a vindication of the rights of reason.
The chief danger which always confronts a society is the desire of those who possess power to prohibit ideas and conduct which may disturb them in their possession.
The standards they formulate are nothing so much as methods of maintaining an order with which they are satisfied; and those they repress or resent, are equally methods of establishing a new order in which different demands would secure…
Curiosity, discovery, invention, all of these jeopardize by their nature the foundations of any society to which their results are denied admission.
Toleration is therefore not merely desirable in itself, but also politically wise, because no other atmosphere of activity offers the assurance of peaceful adjustment.
Every novelty will seem a challenge to that confinement; and it will always accrete about itself the wills of those who are excluded from a share in its benefits.
Men are not willing to yield the insight of their experience to other men’s insight merely because they are commanded to do so.
They must be persuaded by reason that one vision of desire is better than another vision, the experience commended to them must persuade and not enforce, if they are to accept its implications with a sense of contentment.
Men enjoy the exercise of power; no passion has a deeper hold upon human impulse.
The willingness to admit the prospect of difference, the courage to see that one’s private truth is never commensurate with the whole truth, these are the rarest of human qualities.
That is why the friends of liberty are always a minority in every society.
That is why, also, the maintenance of liberty is a thing that has to be fought for afresh every day, lest an inert acceptance of some particular imposition make the field of action accessible to a general tyranny.
For it is impossible to confine the area in which freedom may be permitted to some special and defined part of conduct.
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