Those who have fought for the right to think freely in theology or the natural sciences are not less certainly the ancestors of political freedom.
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
Without Bruno and Galileo there would have been neither Rousseau nor Voltaire.
Liberty, therefore, cannot help being a courage to resist the demands of power at some point that is deemed decisive; and, because of this, liberty, also, is an inescapable doctrine of contingent anarchy.
It is always a threat to those who operate the engines of authority that prohibition of experience will be denied.
It is always an assertion that he who has learned from life some lesson he takes to be truth will seek to live that lesson unless he can be persuaded of its falsehood.
Punishment may persuade some to abandon the effort; and others may be driven by its imposition to conceal their impulse to act upon the view they take.
But persecution, however thoroughgoing, will never, over any long period, be able to suppress significant truth.
If the principles that are urged by a few correspond to some widespread experience those who recognize the expression of their experience will inevitably reaffirm it.
It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims.
The only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies.
To deny novelty or grievance a right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation of the truth they contain.
We grant toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another.
We grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics, to deny it in economic matters.
Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned.
Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship.
Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order.
The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief…
The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned.
He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.
When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes.
Effectively to do this, in a real world, it must inconvenience the public; that awkward giant has no sense of its obligations until it is made uncomfortable.
When it is aroused, if, for instance, trains do not run, or coal is not mined, the public begins to have interest in the position, to call for action.
Without some alternative which attempts to secure attention for a just result--I know of no such alternative--the infliction of hardship on the community seems to me the sole way, even if an unfortunate way, to the end the trade unions…
To limit the right to strike is a form of industrial servitude.
It means, ultimately, that the worker must labour on the employer’s terms lest the public be inconvenienced.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
