Harold J.

Laski: The Liberal Manque'

or Lost Libertarian?
by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Department of History
Stare University of New York, Albany

A generation after his death in 1950, Harold Laski, the eminent political
scientist, socialist, and British Labour Party leader, is almost forgotten
apart from an occasional monograph analyzing his political theories. Yet he
remains significant and, rather paradoxically perhaps, his ideas are impor-
tant for American libertarian thought. Laski, of course, from the time of
his World War I teaching at Harvard, while still a very young man in his
mid-twenties, retained a lifelong interest in the United States, which he con-
tinued to visit and write about. And, all his life, he never really resolved the
major tensions between his early radical individualism and pluralist theories
of sovereignty and the state, and his later socialism and Marxism. In his
many published works and extensive private correspondence with such
American friends as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Felix Frank-
furter, he developed themes which continue to inform and enlighten our
contemporary intellectual confusion.
In 1950 Max Beloff, the distinguished Oxford don, in his obituary assess-
ment of his fellow political scientist, called the modern period "The Age of
Laski." In intellectual history, Beloff believed, Laski has played a catalytic
role much like that of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century.'
Carroll Hawkins, an American scholar, though critical of both his later
conviction that classical liberalism was the creature of capitalism as well as
of the unfortunate effect of his effort to marry modern liberalism to Marx-
ism, also noted that Laski, in his early devotion to liberty, "was essentially a
philosophical anarchist." "Man who does not voluntarily take out member-
ship in that steadily increasingly powerful organization, the sovereign state,
could be grateful for such a champion as pluralist L a ~ k i . " ~
In the flurry of tributes to Laski following his death, there was general
agreement that the well-recognized shifts in his thought had paralleled the
declining hopes of liberal democracy and the accompanying worldwide rise
of collectivism and statism. Laski, however, was no mere camp follower.
Though a practical politician, he was also an intellectual, an idealist and,
perhaps most importantly, a superb teacher. Thus Thomas I. Cook, an
140 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

American political scientist, predicted that Laski's most lasting influence

would be through his students. His lectures, Cook observed, "were fraught
with a dynamic sense of social ardor. He conveyed, as few teachers convey,
the conviction that the subjects with which he dealt were the vital issues of
life itself.. . ."3 He encouraged differences of opinion that were honest and
informed and made his students feel the worth of what they were doing. His
ultimate concern with the problems of liberty versus equality and of individ-
ualism versus authority transcended in importance even his prolific political
commentary on the issues of capitalism, communism, war, and fascism. He
is furthermore not the less interesting to Americans because of his involve-
ment with the New Deal and friendship with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As a political theorist, Laski made his most original contribution in his
first books-all published by 1925 when he was still not past his early
thirties. In Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1917); Authority in the
Modern State (1919); Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham
(1920); The Foundations of Sovereignty (1921); and A Grammar of Politics
(1925), together with occasional essays and magazine pieces and his letters
to Justice Holmes in this period, he made his case for pluralism and individ-
ual liberty. Though already beginning to be troubled by some doubts about
the efficacy of classical liberalism in the postwar world, Laski provided in-
tellectual support for what was essentially a radical libertarian point of
view. This point of view, although it was only characteristic of a relatively
short span in his life, belonged to his most scholarly years, and it was also a
point of view which he never entirely abandoned.
The young Laski's first personal confrontation with the state came in war-
time Great Britain. Physical disability, rather than conscientious objection,
kept him from the military service which his older brother experienced. Al-
though he wrote Justice Holmes in the summer of 1916 that "Our British of-
fensive thrills me. . .,"he now also began to publish in American magazines
articles which decried the growing worship of the state, an attitude, he be-
lieved, that was especially endemic to Germany. Individual rebellion was
fundamental to his own philosophy, and he worried over the future of
representative government and the treatment being meted out to conscien-
tious objectors. "My problem," he wrote to Holmes, "is to take away from
the state the superior morality with which we have invested its activities and
give them back to the individual conscience.. . .That is why I like Bills of
Rights." From his American experience he doubted the universal validity of
majority rule as against the "wealth of wisdom to be gleaned from Mill on
Liberty." "I remember the thrill it gave me five years ago." he informed
Holmes, "to realise that what he said about individuality lay at the root of
the sanest political philosophy I know."'
In the Problem of Sovereignty, Laski set his pluralistic theory of the state
against an authoritarian or monistic theory that asked citizens for sacrifices
contrary to their own conscience. "How ever," he asked, "are we to get any
1980 HAROLD J. LASKI 141

worth out of historical experience if such absolutism is to be held valid?

Every state then becomes exalted above the moral law." For, "when men
begin at the cost of suffering, to surrender their convictions with a mo-
notonous regularity they will end by surrendering them without a pang."
The state, he contended, should have to "prove itself by what it achieves,"
and submit to the test of competing groups within society. Laski admitted
that his view was in fact "an individualistic theory of the State-no
pluralistic attitude can avoid that." The American founding fathers won his
praise for their establishment of a decentralized, federal type of
government. Although he agreed to the need of some final responsibility in
any country, he concluded: "In a democracy, the surest guaranty of civic
responsiblity seems to lie in the gift of genuine functions of government no
less to the parts than to the whole." He concurred accordingly with F e l i
Frankfurter that the control of child labor might well be left to the states,
and he wrote to Holmes: "There are far too many American reformers eager
to legislate the US. into their own peculiar nostrum^."^
The attack on the state which Laski launched in the Problem of
Sovereignty he continued in Authority in the Modern State. More impor-
tant to him than the historical theories on the origins of the state was its
purpose to promote the good life. Neither a simple individualism nor a rigid
collectivism seemed to be the solution, however. Nor did liberty, which he
defined as the absence of restraint, answer the growing demand for equality.
Yet the only permanent safeguard of democratic government, he believed,
was the individual conscience and recognition that the state was a means,
not the end. "Freedom of thought, then, the modern state must regard as
absolute.. . . A state which opposes those who are antagonised by the way
in which government interprets its purposes is bound to drift slowly into
despotisrn."6
Laski saw little chance of any lasting reconciliation of the interests of
capital and labor, but he also viewed with alarm the wartime supervision of
industry by the state. "This has meant," he wrote, "an immense increase of
centralisation.. . . The most striking change in the political organisation of
the last half-century is the rapidity with which, by the sheer pressure of
events, the state has been driven to assume a positive character. We talk less
and less in the restrained terms of Benthamite individualism. The absence of
governmental interference has ceased to seem an ultimate ideal. There is
everywhere almost anxiety for the extension of governmental functions."
The familiar maxims of Lord Acton on the corruption of power in high
places, he believed, were illustrated in the degradation into bureaucracy of
the socialized democracy initiated in England by the Lloyd George budget
of 1909. "It was an epoch which began with immense promise; and, at its
close, it seemed likely to end in something but little short of disaster."'
Democracy after the war, in Laski's opinion, stood at the crossroads. In
his interpretation of history, he was still sympathetic to the classical liberal
142 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

tenets expounded by Locke, Adam Smith, and Mill. Locke's natural rights
were closely related to the question of freedom, and the separation of the
powers of government he accepted as "one of the great needs of the modern
State.. . ." In his treatment of Adam Smith and the foundations of econom-
ic liberalism, Laski wrote: "No poison is more subtly destructive of the
democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses
of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy." But he added that
liberty was impossible without certain minimal standards of security
achieved through collective effort. Smith's Wealth of Nations, therefore,
was the creature of its age, while the problems of freedom changed with the
times.8
By the mid-twenties, Laski's liberal hostility to the state and his skepti-
cism regarding the bases of its authority were beginning to waver. The lib-
ertarian socialist, however, was not dogmatic about the forms community
ownership might take. "All that he insists is that until they are effectively the
possession of the community, they cannot be fully administered in the inter-
est of the community.. . . Implied in all this, of course, is the insistence that
the true Socialism is a libertarian, and not an authoritarian, socialism."
Although he placed Mill's individualism within the framework of nine-
teenth-century liberalism and noted his later vague modification of private
enterprise by socialism, Laski nonetheless concluded that "the ideal of Mill
is still as noble an ideal as a man may desire: the perception that the eminent
worth of human personality is too precious to be degraded by institution^."^
A Grammar of Politics, the last of his major early scholarly books, made
clearer Laski's growing ambivalence in regard to a libertarian philosophy.
The state remained the enemy, but now he was becoming more concerned
with the problem of achieving and enforcing equality. Sovereignty was lim-
ited, and men must be true to the "realisation of what is best in themselves."
Yet rights too were limited and included duties that were not independent of
society. "We have them because we are members of the State." Because the
state was, however, only a means and not itself an end, one's duty was "to
the ideal the actual State must seek to serve." While the state "should always
be called into account when it invades rights," Laski recognized that in the
complex modern world "State invasions of private liberty may be more
subtle." There must accordingly be a free press, greater access to formal
education, and economic liberty in the sense of security and opportunity.
Though equality did not "mean identity of treatment," it did entail "first of
all the absence of special pri~ilege."'~
Laski concluded that the modern citizen was being driven to look at the
nation-state in new ways even though he optimistically predicted that state
sovereignty was in the process of disappearing in international affairs."
This concern over foreign policy, as well as his developing Marxist inter-
pretation of history, increasingly dominated the new introductory chapters
with which he prefaced subsequent editions of the Grammar of Politics. Yet
1980 HAROLD J. LASKI 143

his about-face with respect to classical liberalism was still not complete. It is
necessary therefore to look carefully at the views which he expounded in his
books, The Dangers of Obedience and Liberty in the Modern State, both of
which were published in 1930.
Liberty in the Modern State reiterated in more popular form much of the
argument Laski had already advanced in the Grammar of Politics. He con-
tinued to be bothered by the problem of reconciling freedom and security.
Thus the book, which reads as a kind of running debate, reflected its
author's intellectual confusion-although its first sentence begins straight-
forwardly with the statement: "I mean by liberty the absence of restraint
upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modern civilization,
are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness." He pointed out,
moreover, that "though it is a condition without which liberty is never ef-
fective," economic security was not liberty. Unwilling now to go all the way
with Acton's famous dictum, Laski nevertheless agreed with Acton and Mill
on the dangers of tyranny. "Power as such, when uncontrolled, is always
the natural enemy of freedom." Liberty and equality, in Laski's opinion
"are not so much antithetic as complementary," but the "absence of equality
means special privilege for some and not for others."I2
Laski believed the true theory of liberty denied the assumptions of
Hegel's idealist theory of the state. "For as 1 encounter the state, it is for me
a body of men issuing orders." The citizen can obey most of the state's com-
mands but, as in the case of military service, not those which violate his
individual conscience or religious beliefs. As a realist, Laski, in his dis-
cussion of the Bill of Rights, the value of which he continued to affirm,
nevertheless pointed out that its efficacy depended more on the determina-
tion of the people than on constitutional guarantees. In the same way, to-
gether with checks on bureaucracy, he emphasized opposition to excessive
centralization and the granting of as much power as possible to local gov-
ernment. Vital still for him in his definition of liberty, along with the need
for social power, was individual intellectual freedom and respect for reason.
"Liberty means being faithful to oneself, and it is maintained by the courage
to resist. This, and this only, gives life to the safeguards of liberty; and this
only is the clue to the preservation of genuine integrity in the individual
life.""
The Dangers of Obedience was composed mainly of pieces on education,
interspersed with comments showing Laski's continued concern for the indi-
vidual. No state, he argued, citing the examples of objection to war and
American prohibition, "can act in the face of considerable opposition from
its citizens, if the latter are deeply and conscientiously moved by the issue in
dispute." But, as in the United States, where be believed Babbitt was king,
the average man, ever fearful of originality, moved quickly to suppress it.
"We are the slaves of custom, and we have begun to hug our chains."
Medieval superstition was being replaced by the witch-hunting of the
144 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

modern Leviathan state, an institution now worshipped uncritically by mil-

lions of its subjects. Yet, Laski was not an elitist. Thus he stressed the
danger of letting experts, indifferent to the need of convincing people, de-
cide public matters. Not generals or admirals or bureaucrats, but amateur
politicians, must govern if there was to be a "recovery of citizenship."14
The important changes in Laski's thinking which became so evident after
1930 seem to have been a result primarily of the worldwide economic de-
pression and the Labour Party's collapse in Great Britain. More than the
rise of Hitler and the deteriorating international situation, domestic eco-
nomic and political problems transformed his youthful individualist liberal-
ism and Fabian socialism into an increasingly doctrinaire Marxian philo-
sophy. But this new dogma was, in turn, temporarily modified by his British
patriotism in World War I1 and his growing intellectual and personal ties
with the United States and President Roosevelt. Apart from his continuing
extensive correspondence with Justice Holmes, the 1920's had found Laski
absorbed in his scholarship and teaching at the London School of Econom-
ics. By the 1930's, in contrast, journalistic opportunities, together with lec-
ture tours and visits to America, drew him more actively into the ferment of
politics and current affairs. As Kingsley Martin, his biographer, has written,
the difference between Laski, the Fabian of 1925, and the Marxist of 1938,
"was that between the two dates be had seen the great slump of 1929, the
constitutional device of Nationalist government in 1931, the rise of fascism
in Spain, the triumph of Hitler in Germany, and the widespread decline of
democratic institutions."" Although he was at first inclined to minimize
Hitler's significance, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party defection and
decision to head the English coalition government appalled Laski.
As the British Labour Party had grown stronger in the 1920's, labor's in-
terest was no longer antistatist. At the same time, Laski's own allegiances to
libertarian views and then to guild socialism also disappeared. In the words
of Herbert Deane, "By 1931 Laski shifts the ground of obedience away
from the moral adequacy of the state's commands as judged by the indi-
vidual and makes obligation to obey a function of the degree to which the
state secures to the individual at least a minimum of material well-being."
Thus, as he moved to Marxist socialism, Laski forgot his old diatribes
against statism, bureaucracy, nationalism, Fabianism, and paternalism. He
also became disillusioned in his original hope that the Labour Party might
engineer "revolution by consent." "I am more than ever doubtful," he wrote
t o Felix Frankfurter in 1932, "whether a Socialist society can be established
in this country within the framework of existing conditions. The dice are
too loaded. One doesn't realise the evil MacD. [onald] has done until one
gets to the Continent and hears him used as the proof that all radical action
is in the end futile and that it is folly to believe that Socialist leaders can be
trusted."16
Laski's new anxieties formed the theme for the lectures which he delivered
1980 HAROLD J. LASKI 145

in 1931 at the University of North Carolina. Published in expanded form

two years later under the title, Democracy in Crisis, the book outlined a
pessimistic view of the future. The Labour Party, even if elected in Great
Britain, could not, he predicted, take over the government, and revolution
might be the result. In nineteenth-century Europe, political democracy had
secured the liberation of the commercial middle class from domination by a
landholding aristocracy. But now capitalist democracy, in Laski's opinion,
"could not, from its very nature, bring liberty into a just relation with
equality." Nor could capitalism abandon private property as a central prin-
ciple or motive. Meanwhile socialists had to face the fact that "A democracy
must be led, and in a capitalist democracy the main weapons of leadership
are in the hands of capitalists."17
The general intellectual dilemma, which was also Laski's, he put into
broader context in The Rise of European Liberalism (1936). Unlike most
Americans, who uncritically and unhistorically identified liberalism with
positive government, Laski of course recognized liberalism's original skep-
tical, negative attitude toward social action and the way that it had favored
individual innovation as against social or political uniformity. Liberalism
thus, in his interpretation, had had the flavor of romanticism and had tend-
ed to be subjective and anarchistic. Now, however, he stressed the old anti-
thesis of liberty and equality. Though valuing certain gains it had achieved
in the past, he argued that liberalism's progress had not been shared
equally. I s
During the thirties, in much the same way, Laski also revised his old paci-
fism. The pacifists, he believed, had to confront "the necessity of mastering
imperialism or being mastered by it." They rightly insisted on the need for
disarmament and international security to prevent war, hut the answer lay
in countering imperialism by social reform and in the development of the
home market. Although socialism was no guarantee of peace, it offered the
hope of "an equal world-community" and "economic world planning.""
These new developments in his thought found interesting application in
Laski's attitude toward the American New Deal. His earlier experience in
the United States had been disillusioning despite the extraordinary intel-
lectual achievements: teaching at Harvard, his first hooks published, articles
and reviews in prestigious periodicals. Laski, however, had returned to
England in 1920 embittered by what he felt were unfair attacks on him per-
sonally for his defense of the Boston police strike. "I came hack from
America," he later wrote, "convinced that liberty has no meaning save in the
context of equality." To his friend Frankfurter, he deplored American ma-
terialism and the weaknesses, La Follette excepted, of the presidential can-
didates in 1924 and '28. Rather surprisingly Laski, like Herbert Hoover, op-
posed government spending and pump priming as a cure for the economic
depression. At the same time, he quickly came to share Frankfurter's ad-
miration for Franklin D. R o o ~ e v e l t . ~ ~
146 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

Although he affirmed his disbelief in heroes, it is clear that Laski liked

FDR much better than the New Deal. To the socialist Laski, the latter was
simply not radical enough in its economic program. Still, Russia apart, he
contended that nothing quite equaled the adventure on which Roosevelt had
embarked in his deliberate use of state powers. Even though he did not re-
gard such measures as the National Recovery Act as really new, he sug-
gested that Roosevelt was attempting to accomplish what the English La-
bourites had failed to achieve: a revolution by consent. Meanwhile FDR's
failure, he feared, would mean the end of political democracy in the United
States. Although, in the long view, capitalism could not make the conces-
sions necessary for the attainment of real democracy, Laski saw the emer-
gence of the positive state in America as evidence of the maturity of capi-
talism. The positive state accordingly represented a new stage in historical
development. And Laski, who had made his scholarly reputation with his
attack on the sovereign state, now argued that a forthcoming socialism,
close to the people, would be more libertarian than the state capitalism of
Roosevelt's New Deal. Although socialists, like all collectivists, could not
logically oppose a strong state, Laski, despite the essential abandonment of
his own classical-liberal, pluralist position, could in a curious way achieve a
kind of intellectual halfway house by thinking of a future libertarian social-
ism as the successor of a capitalist statism.2'
Laski continued to be critical of some of Roosevelt's political tactics, es-
pecially the plan to revamp the Supreme Court. And he admitted that the
New Deal's conservative opponents, to whom Laski was an anathema, had
intellectual support from what he now regarded as the outmoded liberalism
of the nineteenth century. As Herbert Deane noted, the radical thus found
himself in agreement with extreme conservatives in insisting that the title
"liberalism" belonged to the nineteenth-century political and economic
views of such New Deal critics as the Liberty League. But any disposition on
the part of Laski to waver in his backing of FDR was countered by his high
regard for the American President as an essential bulwark to the rise of fas-
cism in Europe. "In this grim and terrible world," he told Roosevelt early in
1939, "you cannot easily imagine what a comfort your presence in the White
House means to me. Let the dogs bark; you know that the caravan passes
on."22 Laski's book, The American Presidency, published a year later as he
rejoiced in Roosevelt's reelection to an unprecedented third term, was un-
surprisingly a historical brief for stronger, more positive executive powers.
As late as the mid-thirties, Laski's initial disposition in respect to foreign
affairs, a relic of his earlier pacifism, was still to urge disarmament and
American neutrality. In a letter to Frankfurter in October 1935, he passed
on the bedside admonition of the dying Arthur Henderson, former Labour
Foreign Minister. "Will you tell F.D.R.," he wrote Frankfurter, "that nearly
the last thing he said to me was that, the certainty that the United States
would not help any belligerent next time, was one of the few hopes of peace.
1980 HAROLD J. LASKI 147

He repeated that three times."But the news from Germany, Laski observed,
"gets worse all the time-new streams of refugees." Although thoroughly
alarmed now by Hitler's consolidation of power and the triumph of fascism
in Spain, Laski, unlike such American friends as Frankfurter and Archibald
MacLeish, was not ready to lay the blame on the isolationism and pacifism
of the intellectuals and college youth-MacLeish's "irresponsibles." The fu-
ture for democratic government was grim, but no nation wanted war and no
class wanted revolution. Both, however, sought ends that were difficult to
achieve peacefully. Intellectuals could no longer afford the luxury of impar-
tiality in the coming world struggle, but MacLeish, Laski believed, was
wrong to pillory the younger generation for its finding that there was a dis-
crepancy between official pronouncements and the reality of facts."
In the spring of 1939, on the eve of the war, Laski was in America lec-
turing and traveling across the country. Much frightened at the prospect of
another imperialistic world conflict, he urged Roosevelt to use his influence
to "press the British government to hasten the completion of an Anglo-
Soviet arrangement." Back home by the end of the summer, he wrote FDR
that England was determined about the war, but, he added: "I do hope you
will be able to keep America out." The United States should be in a position
to offer a mediation consistent with international decency. "And it is more
than ever vital to go on full steam ahead with the New Deal."24
In his wartime correspondence with the American President, Laski as-
sumed that his own radical interest in democratic reforms was also Roose-
velt's major concern. While the latter found Laski a convenient unofficial
bridge to the British Labour leaders, he, in turn, wanted Roosevelt to push
the Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill toward the left. Roosevelt, he
told Frankfurter, "is that rare thing, an aristocrat who understands demo-
cratic aspirations. Such a lot of the future turns on his power to commu-
nicate that understanding to Winston." Although each found the other use-
ful, it is unlikely that either was deceived in their correspondence. Laski
deeply admired both Churchill and FDR as war leaders, but after 1943,
foreseeing victory, he returned to his prewar Marxist attacks on capitalism
and the so-called negative freedoms of dem~cracy.~'
In the remaining few years of his life, following World War 11,
Laski was indeed the liberal mangut? with scarcely a trace of the old liber-
tarian individualism. State control of a planned economy was inevitable,
while American capitalism would lead to a massive postwar depression.
"Plan or Perish," he told an American audience. "There is no middle way.
Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned
economy mean peace. We must plan our civilization or we must perish."
Laski's criticism of the United States, which culminated in his attack on
American business and politics in his massive book, The American Democ-
racy, published in 1948, was coupled with a defense of the Soviet Union.
Thus he apologized for Stalin's dictatorship, the lack of civil liberties in the
148 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

Soviet Union, and Russian conduct in the Cold War. While Russia admit-
tedly did not enjoy political democracy, Laski wrote that a Russian citizen
would say: "Western exponents of 'classical' democracy ought sometimes to
bear in mind that its institutions have application only in 'classical condi-
tion~.'''~~
Although an increasingly doctrinaire socialist in the latter half of his life,
taski was not shrill or strident in his Marxism, and he continued to reject
violent revolution. Ever the urbane, civilized English scholar in his manner,
he remained an intellectual as well as a politician. Concern over equality
and dislike of privilege were at the bottom of his abandonment of pluralism
and classical liberalism. But he always retained a certain nostalgic libertar-
ianism in his moral defense of the individual conscience against the dictates
of the state. In his American Democracy, for example, he observed that
Americans still accepted the old Puritan idea that a person could be made
good by legislation. "And once there is a law which touches a theme from
which men desire to escape, it is obvious that they will pay for their libera-
ti~n."~'
It was clear, however, that Laski no longer adhered to his original defini-
tion of liberty as the absence of restraint. In thus yielding the antistatist
views on which he had built his scholarly reputation, he was unwilling to
admit that collectivism would forge new constraints by its planned regula-
tion of the economic system, constraints that would be impossible to recon-
cile with his old hope of eliminating the absolute sovereignty of the state.28
In the best classical sense therefore, Laski's lost liberalism was indeed a
tragedy for libertarian thought.

NOTES
I. Max BeloE, ',The Age of Laski," Formightly, n. s. 167, (June 1950): 378-84.
2. Carroll Hawkins, "Harold J. Laski: A Preliminary Analysis," Poliricol Science Quarrerly
65 (September 1950): 376-92.
3. T.I. Cook, "In Memoriam," American Politico1 Science Review 44 (September 1950):
738-41.
4. Harold J. Laski, "The Personality of the State," Nolion 101 (July 22, 1915): 115-17; "The
Apothesis of the State," New Republic 7 (July 22, 1916): 302-304, "A Philosophy Embat-
tled," Dial 62 (February 8, 1917): 96-98; Laski to Oliver Wendell Holmes, August I,
September 13 and 16, December 16, 1916; January 2, 1917, Holmes-Loski Leflers: The
Correspondence of Mr. Juslice Holmes and Horold 3. Loski, 19/6-1935. ed. Mark De
Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). 1: LO, 19, 23,
42-43, 50: Laski to Felix Frankfurter, May 3, 1917, General Correspondence, Box 74,
Frankfurter Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
5. Laski, Srudiesin 1hePmblem of Sovereignty (orig. pub. 1917; New Yark: Howard Fertig,
1%8), pp. 21-24, 277-83; Laski to Halmes, March 14, 1925, HolmesLnski Letters, I:
720-21.
6. Laski, Aulhorily in the Modern Slore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), pp. 37,
54-58.
7. Ibid., pp. 87, 94, 98, 107-10. See also Laski, The Foundotiom of Sovereignly ond Other
Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), pp. ix, 100-101.
1980 HAROLD J. LASKI 149

8. Laski, "Democracy at the Crossroads," YaleReview, n. s. 9 (July 1920): 788-803; Polilical

Thought in Englandfrom Locke lo Bentham (orig. pub. 1920; London: Oxford University
Press, 1961). pp. 43, 45, 198ff.
9. Laski, Socialism ond Freedom (192% quoted in George ~a'tlin,The Slory ofthe Politico1
Philosophers (New York: Tudor, 1947). p. 660; Laski, "Introduction," Autobiography of
John Sluarr Mill (London: Oxford University Press, 1924). p. xviii.
10. Laski, A Grammar ofPolirics (4th ed., orig. pub. 1925; London: Allen & Unwin, 1938).
pp. 88. 96, 98. 145-48. 152ff.
11. Ibid.. o. 666.
12. ~ a s G , ' ~ i b e r riny the Modern Stale (New York & London: Harper, 1930), pp. 1, 4, 6-7.
13. Ibid., pp. IS, 17-18, 51, 55, 64, 77, 81.
14. Laski, The Dangers of Obedience & Other Essays (New York & London: Harper, 1930).
pp. 2-18, 59.
15. Kingsley Martin, Horold Laski (1893-1950): A Biographical Memoir (New York: Viking,
1953), p. 69.
16. Herbert A. Deane, The Politlcd Idem of Horold J. Loski (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1955). pp. 82-86, 104, 106; Laski to Frankfurter, April 17, 1932, General Cor-
respondence, Box 74, Frankfurter Papers.
17. Laski, Democracy in Crisis (orig. pub. 1933; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1935). pp. 49, 65, 76.
18. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism: An Esmy in lnlerpretalion (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1936). pp. 15-19. See also Laski, "The Outlook for Civil Liberties," in Bertrand
Russell el al., Dore We Look Ahead? (New Yark: Macmillan, 1938). pp. 161ff.; Laski.
The Decline ofLiberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). pp. 17, 2lff.
19. Laski, "The Economic Foundations of Peace," in Leonard Woalf, ed., The Inlelligenr
Man's Way to Prevent War (London: Gollancz, 1934). pp. 521-24, 537.
20. Laski, "Harold J. Laski,"in CliftonFadiman, ed., IBelieve: ThePersonulPhilosophiesof
Certain Eminent Men and Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). pp. 141ff.;
Laski to Frankfurter, July 24, 1923; July 30, 1924; August 18, 1928; October 29, 1932;
August 13, 1933; August 8, 1934, General Correspondence, Box 74, Frankfurter Papers;
Laski, "The American Political System," Harper's Magazine 157 (June 1928): 20-28;
Laski, "The Roosevelt Experiment." Allantic Monlhly I53 (February 1934): 143-53;
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Polilics of Upheavol (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1960).
pp. 171-73.
21. Laski, "What Is Vital in Democracy?," Survey Graphic 24 (April 1935): 205; The Srote in
Theory ondPraclice (New York: Viking, 1935), pp. 110-11; "The Public Papers and Ad-
dresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt," Universily of Chicago Law Review 6 (December 1938):
29; "The Obsolescence of Federalism," New Republic 98 (May 3, 1939): 367-69. See also
Roger Soltau, "Professor Laski and Political Science," Political Quarlerly 21
(July-September 1950): 301-10.
22. Laski to Frankfurter. December 28. 1935: Aueust 3. 1937. General Corres~ondence.Box
to'^.^.
~~~~ ~ ~~
.~
74. Frankfurter pan&:~.Laski to ~ i s ~se h a n d.~~
~~~ .Ian&
r , . 1937: iaski
, 11.. 1936: Februar;8.
Romerelt, March 12. 1939. Pres~denl'sPcrsonal Flle ;hrrcaflcr c w d & PPk7
3014. Ro~scvrltPapers. kranklin D. Roore\clt library, H)& Park. Neu Yurk; Amos
Pmchol. "Rooscvcl~-LashScheme." Srr~bnerZCvmm~ntvlorIll (Ortoher 1941): 62-68:
Deane, Politico1 Ideas oflaski, p. 253.
23. Laski to Frankfurter, October 18, 1935, and Frankfurter to Roosevelt, October 31, 1935,
quoted in Max Freedman, Roosevell and Fmnkfurter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). p.
292: Laski to Roosevelt. November 5. 1935. PPF 3014. Roosevelt Paoers: Laski to
Frankfurter, September 1.4, 1939, and Frankfurter to ~ a s k iJune, 20, 1940; General Cor-
respondence, Box 74, Frankfurter Papers. Laski essays and articles: "The Prospects of
Democratic Government," Bulletin of the College of William ond Mary 33 (April 1939):
3-12; "The Challenge of Our Times," American Scholar 8 (Autumn 1939): 387-99, "The
Duty of the Intellectual Now," Horper'sMogozine 180 (December 1939): 70-79; "Letter to
MacLeish," New Republic 103 (September 2, 1940): 295-300.
24. Laski to Roosevelt, April 17, Searember 4, 1939, PPF 3014, Roosevelt Papers. See also
Martin, Harold Laski, pp. 131-32.
150 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Spring

25. Laski to Frankfurter, November 4, 1940, July 2, 1941; March 31, August 16, 1942, Gen-
eral Correspondence, Boxes 74, 75, Frankfurter Papers; Laski to Roosevelt, August 26,
November 6, 1940; February 18, 1941; December 27, 1942; December 5, 1944, PPF3014,
Roosevelt Papers; Deane, Political Ideas of Loski, pp. 227-28. See also Laski, Refections
on the Revolurion of Our Time (New York: Viking, 1943), posrim: M.M. Kampleman,
"Harold J. Laski: A Current Analysis," Journal of Polilics 10 (February 1948): 131-54.
26. Laski essays and articles: "Choosing the Planners," in G.D. H. Cole elal., Plan forBritain
(London: Routledge, 1943). pp. 101-27; "The American Myth and the Peace,"Nafion 158
(February 12, 1944): 180-84; "Plan or Perish," Nation 161 (December 15, 1945): 650-52;
"The American Political Scene," Nation 163 (November 23, 1946): 582-84; "My lmpres-
sions of Stalin," New Republic 115 (October 14, 1946): 478-79; "Civil Liberties in the
Soviet Union," New Republic 115 (October 21, 1946): 507-508; "Why Does Russia Act
That Way?," Notion 164 (March 1, 1947): 239-42; "What Democracy Means in Russia,"
New Republic 165 (October 28, 1946): 551-52: "Getting On With Russia," Nafion 166
(January 10, 1948): 34-37; "Reason and Russia," New Republic 119 (December 6, 1948):
22-24. See also Laski to Frankfurter, May 29, 1947, General Correspondence, Box 75,
Frankfurter Papers.
27. Laski, The American Democracy: A Commentary and an Inlerprefarion (New York:
Viking, 1948), p. 160.
28. Deane, Political Ideas of Laski, pp. 47, 253-54.