They are afraid of concession, because they see in it an admission of the weakness of their case.
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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They magnify scepticism into sedition and they accuse even their friends who doubt the virtue of severity of betraying the allegiance which is their due.
They cannot see that men will not accept the state as the appointed conscience of the nation unless they conceive themselves to possess a full share of its benefits.
They minimize the sufferings of others, because they do not have experience of them, and they magnify their own virtues that they may gain confidence in themselves.
They distort history, and call it patriotism; they repress the expression of grievance and call it the maintenance of law and order.
In such a society, the governors appear to their subjects as dwellers in another world; and communication between them lacks the vivifying quality of fellowship.
For the truth of one party is never sufficiently the truth of another for the members to talk a common language.
Every vehemence becomes a threat; and by a kind of mad logic every threat is taken as an act of treason.
Even its generosity will be resented because it has not known how to be just.
I only argue that the irrefutable and inherent logic of a society where the gain of living is not proportioned to its toil is one of which violence is the inevitable end.
We have never any choice in history except to follow reason wholly or, ultimately, to expect disaster; and as we approach that ultimate, the temper of the society will be what I have described.
For the rule of reason in a community means that a special interest must always give way before the principles it discovers.
And the rule of reason is the only kind of rule which can afford the luxury of freedom.
That is, I think, because an admission that the claims of reason are paramount makes possible the emergence of a spirit of compromise.
The basis of the society being just, men are not prepared for conflict over detail; but when the basis itself is unacceptable, conflict over detail is magnified into a fight over principle.
In such a temper, men are always discussing with their backs on the edge of a precipice.
Social discussion becomes Carlyle’s ultimate question of “Can I kill thee or canst thou kill me?” Every utterance is necessarily a challenge; and suppressed because so taken; every association is a conspiracy and attacked because so…
The only way to avoid so poisonous an atmosphere is to be prepared to surrender what you cannot prove it is reasonable to hold.
But, human nature being what it is, men do not easily surrender what they have the power to retain; and they will pay the price of conflict if they think they can win.
They do not remember that the price of conflict is the destruction of freedom and that with its loss there go the qualities which make for the humanity of men.
The economic motive apart, no principle has been more fruitful of war than the demand for national freedom.
As an Englishman, I can feel in my bones the sense of what English nationality implies; I feel intimately, for instance, the things that enable me to claim Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Dickens as typically English, without being able to…
Every factor to which nationality has been traced, race, language, common political allegiance, is an excessive simplicity which betrays scientific exactitude.
It is true that nationality is born of a common historic tradition, of achievement and suffering mutually shared; it is true, also, that language and race, and even a common political allegiance, have played their part in its formation.
But the fact remains that nationality is a psychological phenomenon rather than a juridical principle.
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