It only pays to print the truth when the interest responsible for publication is not prejudiced thereby.
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
It would have been a different war in 1914 without propaganda; the history of political parties would have been different if the principles they announced were measured by their application to total and not to partial experience.
But all of them, I think, miss out the vital fact that truthful news is dangerous to a society the actual contours of which its presentation might seriously change.
They are right, further, I believe, in their emphasis upon the vital connexion between truthful news and liberty; nor do I doubt that some of the remedies they propose would have the valuable effect of increasing the degree of truth in the…
They are right in their analysis of the constituent factors in its making, especially in their emphasis of the difficulties we confront in making that opinion correspond to the realities it must satisfy.
A crisis comes which touches us; a decision is made which contradicts something we happen to have experienced as fundamental; we then judge our rulers by the fact of that denial, and act as we think its terms warrant.
All of us are inescapably citizens, and, at some point, therefore, the privacy in which we seek escape from our obligation as citizens, will seem unsatisfying.
Their validity as decisions is in that thought if only because its content is born of what the decisions mean to ourselves.
It is simply a body of men making decisions which, in the long run, live or die by what other men think of them.
For successful government is simply government which satisfies the largest possible area of demand.
Our business, hard as it is, is the discovery of that need in the experience which must be satisfied if successful government is to be possible.
We have to regard experience as significant in itself and seek to come to terms with it.
We cannot rule it out because it is not ours; that is the error of autocracy which insists upon the a priori rightness of its own experience.
Russian working-men have probably been often tempted to the view that their Bolshevik masters mistake Communist dogma for social truth.
Opponents of Mussolini are not moved by his plea that he thinks only of the well-being of Italy.
If attention is drawn to some need which is widely experienced, the denial that the need is real by those who have not experienced it, will not prove effective.
But such habituation is never permanent; sooner or later someone arises, like the child in the fairy-story, to point out that in fact the emperor is naked.
I do not deny that men will long postpone their protest against that absence; there are few wrongs to which men do not become habituated by experience, few, therefore, which, after the long passage of time, they will not be persuaded are…
The effort to transform a dull and corrupt autocracy into a quasi-constitutional system came, like the efforts of Louis XVI at reform, too late to affect men who had already passed beyond any possibility of compromise with the idea of…
For it is significant that in the one realm where depth of feeling was passionate--Irish home rule--events moved rapidly to the test of the sword; and the settlement made was effected by violence and not by reason.
Liberalism remained a middle-class outlook, admirable in its exposition of basic principle, but incapable of adjusting principle to a medium with which its supporters were largely unacquainted.
The assumption was unjustified; and the way lay open for the consolidation by Labour of its growing hold upon the workers.
When, after the war, the remarkable growth of the Labour Party showed how vast was the decline of the Liberal hold upon the working-classes, the Liberal leaders were driven, by the need of self-preservation, to the invention of industrial…
Built largely on the support of the Nonconformist business man, the interests it understood were essentially his interests; and to recognize the implications of trade unionism, as Keir Hardie and his colleagues did, was to invade the…
A philosophy of politics that is to work must find a full place in the state for organized workers to whom freedom in the industrial sphere is, in its fullest implications, as urgent and as imperative as freedom in the sphere of politics…
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
