I do not thereby mean to assume that a man will be the happier the more completely restraints are absent from the society to which he belongs.
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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Some of them are essential to happiness, but that does not make them for a moment less emphatically limitations.
Our business is to secure such a balance between the liberty we need and the authority that is essential as to leave the average man with the clear sense that he has elbow-room for the continuous expression of his personality.
Nor must we confound liberty with certain other goods without which it has no meaning.
Yet if he is deprived of security in employment he becomes the prey of a mental and physical servitude incompatible with the very essence of liberty.
Nevertheless, economic security is not liberty though it is a condition without which liberty is never effective.
Once and for all, let us agree that property alone does not make a man free.
But those who know the normal life of the poor, its perpetual fear of the morrow, its haunting sense of impending disaster, its fitful search for beauty which perpetually eludes, will realize well enough that, without economic security…
Men may well be free and yet remain unable to realize the purposes of freedom.
There can, under these conditions, be no freedom that is worth while unless the mind is trained to use its freedom.
The right of the modern man to education became fundamental to his freedom once the mastery of Nature by science transformed the sources of power.
Deprive a man of knowledge, and the road to ever greater knowledge, and you will make him, inevitably, the slave of those more fortunate than himself.
In our world he cannot employ his freedom so as to give him assurance of happiness.
It is a sacrifice of some liberty to a greater freedom when the compulsion ceases.
Everyone knows the danger to freedom which exists in any community where there is either special privilege on the one hand or what is termed the tyranny of the majority on the other.
Power as such, when uncontrolled, is always the natural enemy of freedom.
It prevents the exercise of those capacities which are released for activity by the absence of restraint.
Wherever it is possessed in excess, it tilts the balance of social action in favour of its possessors.
A franchise limited to the owners of property means legislation in the interests of that class.
The exclusion of a race or creed from a share in citizenship is, invariably, their exclusion also from the benefits of social action.
In any state, therefore, where liberty is to move to its appointed end, it is important that there should be equality.
Men might be broadly equal under a despotism, and yet unfree.
But it is, I think, historically true that in the absence of certain equalities no freedom can ever hope for realization.
For the mere creation of a special tribunal persuades the ordinary man that there is an a priori case against the accused, that the burden of proof lies upon him rather than upon the government.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
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