Political Philosophy of H. J. Laski

R. C. GUPTA, M. A. (Pol. Sc.), M. A. (Philo.), Ph. D., Pol. Sc. Dept.,

Govt. Arts and Commerce College, Indore

Right from his birth to death in 1950, Harold J. Laski was concerned mainly with the liberty and rights of the individual. As a progressive intellectual he insisted more on an experimental political philosophy based on a dynamic theory of state functions and a social psychology of the motives and desires of men than on abstract principles of politics. He always remained in search of a new faith, and came under the various influences which made him change his political ideas from time to time. At the successive stages of his career we find him as an ardent proponent of some sort of individualistic federalism, marxian socialism and democratic trade unionism. His activities as a political philosopher, teacher, party leader, public speaker and confidential adviser to public men, were so numerous that he found no time to revise his political writings and give them a consistent statement. Nevertheless, the corner-stone of his political philosophy was his faith in the individual. To establish this we must examine carefully his career.

Harold Laski, the second son of Nathan and Sarah Laski, was born in a Jewish community on June 30, 1893. This was the period when different ideologies, such as Utilitarianism, Fabian Socialism and Communism were spreading with a view to reforming the various prevalent conceptions regarding sovereignty, parliamentary democracy and economic and political liberties of the individual. Laski, the product of such a period, imbibed its spirit fully. As a young boy he spent most of his time reading books on science and liberalism. They predisposed him to oppose all orthodox opinions and dogmas regarding the social and political institutions.

It is interesting to note that the political movements which impressed young Laski in his undergraduate days, and to which he constantly referred in his early articles, were the women’s Suffrage Movement, trade union movement in France and the alliance between Ulster and a section of the Conservative Party to sabotage the Liberals’ Home Rule Legislation for Ireland. These movements of the pre-war period were rooted in a violent outburst against the spirit of Victorian Liberalism. In this period the belief in the gradual progress in the status of women and the respect for constitutional procedures were rejected by the more violent Suffragettes and the radical trade unionists. It seemed as if the orderliness and respectability of the nineteenth century had become such a strain on the feelings of a number of men that they were trying to destroy the liberal world in which they lived. It was at this period that Laski spent his formative years in school and college, and he became a rebel against such an atmosphere. He felt the need to dedicate his life to find out a new world with a view to relieving the downtrodden common man from want, ignorance and misery that were noticed as the common feature of the Victorian era. He took part in Suffragette Movement and helped the strike of chainmakers by collecting money. At this time, though he remained content with constitutional agitation, the idea of revolution was agitating his mind. He wrote a short book with the title The Chosen People (which remains unpublished), in which he told that we should welcome the ideas of Darwin and Marx in order to get rid of traditional outlook that had become outworn. Further, he maintained that social truth could only be discovered in an atmosphere of freedom.

Laski’s first book was a translation of Le’on Duguit’s book Law in the Modern State on political pluralism from French. At the same time, he was greatly influenced by the writings of the late F. W. Maitland while studying history at Oxford. Ernest Barker was mainly responsible for it. Barker, his tutor, himself being interested in the academic revolt against Hegelism, encouraged him in his study of mediaeval lawyers. Gierke, Maitland and Figgis had justified the theory of corporate personality as applied to religious and industrial organizations in society. Laski drew inspiration from them, and his earlier writings were devoted to the task of supporting the theory of corporate personality of religious bodies and guilds which were able to maintain their rights and independence against the state in the Middle Ages. He argued that trade unions should have a similar position in the modern society. But his theory of groups was different from that of Figgie, Gierke and Maitland. It was purely individualistic in essence, because he maintained it for safeguarding individual liberty. For this purpose he also made a special study of the legal system which protects the rights of associations and free speech in America.

Laski thus started his career with an attack on the monistic theory of state sovereignty, as expounded by the idealists, considering it as dangerous to individual liberty. To defend individual liberty against the coercive authority of the state, he, on the one hand, tried to establish the corporate personality of groups, and, on the other, he elaborated the individualistic theory of obedience to the state. His formula of “contingent anarchy”, appearing as it does in his individualistic theory of obedience, worked as a revision of the relations between the individual and the state. He criticized traditional political thought for its concentration on state power at the expense of the political society (the people), for its over-simple assumptions about human nature and for its penchant for deductive reasoning. He remarked:

“The simple a priori premises of Hobbes or Locke, the intriguing mysticism of Rousseau’s General Will, eloquence about the initiative of men and its translation into terms of private property are no longer suited to a world that has seen its foundations in flame because to its good intentions an adequate knowledge was not joined. What we need...is the sober and scientific study of the conditions of social organizations.” ¹

Quite often Laski called for a new inductive political philosophy, centred less on political principles than on administrative functions and based on a realistic social psychology that would do more justice to the complex character of human personality and motivation than did the psychology of Aristotle or Machiavelli or Hobbes. He did not approve of the classical theory of human nature that regards it as static and fixed. On the contrary, he asserted that human nature is dynamic and evolutionary. Like Graham Wallas, he thought that the new political theory, seeking an institutional structure that would offer opportunities for the creative expression of the diverse impulses of men more adequate than those provided by the sovereign state, should be grounded in a satisfactory knowledge of the motives and desires of men. Each man must be encouraged to realize his own personality, while the state must be so organized as to give scope to the individual’s sense of spontaneity and his creative impulses, thereby fostering the emergence of a wide diversity in the desires, attitudes and values of its citizens.² Since he was primarily concerned with the preservation and promotion of individuality and spontaneity, he rejected order and unity as the final values.

As hinted above, Laski studied carefully the pluralistic and pragmatic philosophies of Figgis and Maitland and James and Dewey, and found a point of view that was extremely congenial to his own opposition to the revived state idealism, and to his conviction, which marked him as heir to the utilitarian tradition of Bentham and the Mills, that the state was to be judged in the light of its actual contributions to the well-being of its citizens. The test of validity of state action is a pragmatic and utilitarian test. That is, how far successful it is in achieving its purpose, namely, the promotion of the good life for its citizens. Viewed in this fashion, the state becomes, he thought, what Duguit called “a great public service corporation”.

Further, as he was aware of the dangers of concentration of powers in the state, he called its authority as federal. There are, he argued, various associations in society, and each of them has an important part to play in the development and enrichment of an individual’s personality. But each association has only a partial contribution to make to the individual. The state, as one of these associations, can satisfy only the partial needs of the individuals, and therefore their allegiance to the state is partial. The state cannot regulate the whole life of a man, and it must share this function with other associations. The state, in this sense, is not independent. It is rather pluralistic and federal as society is federal.

Laski thus argued in his earlier writings that the authority of the state should be federalized and mass participation in Political activity be increased. If these principles reflect his adherence to the ideals of individual and group freedom, they also constitute limitations upon the exercise of power, weapons for defending labour and its organizations against hostile action on the part of the state. There was, therefore, a fundamental ambivalence in his attitude towards the state’s final coercive power, and he conceived of the authority of the state as conditional. The state is given power to control men and their voluntary groups in order that it may satisfy their common needs; it commands obedience to its laws from them as long as they are in their interest. But gradually his belief that the individual cannot develop his personality and enjoy freedom in the presence of economic insecurity, which he had maintained somehow or other from his early childhood and which he called as the “central conviction” of his life, became stronger after the publication of Grammar of Politics (1925) owing to the changed political and economic situations in Europe.

There was a great economic crisis in Europe, which he ascribed to the inefficient capitalist system. He felt that even the British and American democracies were unable to tackle their economic problems of this period. As opposed to the failure of economic policies in capitalist democracies, the Soviet Union had made great economic progress and had directed its efforts towards the equalization of wealth and the establishment of economic security for all the citizens. The comparison of the British and the American systems with that of the Soviet Union convinced him that the demecratization of state power was not the real solution of the problem, and that individual liberty was merely a function of economic equality. Consequently, his faith in some sort of humanistic socialism, mainly rooted in his sense of social justice, which he had maintained from his young age, became stronger. He himself had admitted: “I have, I suppose, been a socialist in some degree ever since the last years of my school days.” ³ He also had recorded the influence exerted upon him while he was a schoolboy in Manchester by a “great schoolmaster who made us feel the sickness of an acquisitive society”, by the books he had read, especially those of the Webbs, and by a speech in which Keir Hardie had described the labour struggles of the Scottish miners. He became sick of the old economic structure of society and gradually started looking towards marxism for an answer. While accepting Marx’s economic interpretation of politics and living under his strong influence, he called his early pluralism a half-way house to the real solution of the problem. For him “the pluralist attitude to the state and law was a stage on the road to an acceptance of the Marxian attitude to them”. ⁴ His argument was that as the state was an “executive instrument” of the economically dominant group in society, it was necessary to destroy first of all the class-structure of society before limiting the powers of the state. In a classless society, he thought, the purpose and the function of the state would automatically change. With this also changed his definition of individual liberty as found in the first edition of Grammar of Politics (1925). He asserted that liberty was not so much a positive thing as it was a negative condition. As such, strong state action was essential both to protect the individual liberty and to change the old economic structure of society.

Although Laski approved of the necessity of a strong state (during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism) with a view to bringing about a new economic structure and, at the same time, regulating the federal life of society, he was never in favour of the method which Russia had applied in replacing her old economic system by a new marxist system. He also did not welcome the dictatorship in Soviet Russia and the marxian identification of state with society. His fundamental belief was in the freedom of the mind, and he regarded society as federal in character. He always insisted upon the democratization of the state power. The groups, he said, must enjoy the necessary freedom in their own sphere of action, and they should participate in the process of administration. Without this the state would become coercive, and the liberty of the individual would remain in danger. He firmly argued that the benefits of civil liberties could not be sacrificed for the sake of a strong state for creating a new socialist state. He paid a glowing tribute to Britain for its democratic way of life in the following words:

“Nowhere have I found in greater degree either the qualities which make private life lovely or in public relations the instinctive embodiment of the anxiety forfair play...When all is said against this people that can be said, British leadership seems to me to have been a beneficent thing in the history of civilization.” ⁵

While accepting the power of the state as a stage to bring classless society, he did not dismiss the fears of bureaucracy and ignore the need for safeguards. He said “unless we recognise that decentralization is the secret of freedom, government becomes ‘they’ instead ‘we’; and that sense of aloofness is fatal to the fulfilment of personality. Do let us ceaselessly remember that planned democracy is planning for the individual citizen, and not against him.” ⁶

Holding the purpose of society superior to that of the state, he still insisted upon the need of participation of voluntary groups in the process of administration. The state should give to the groups their due place in the inquiries and negotiations that precede any final decision of the government. Representatives of voluntary associations should sit with and advise government officials on political and economic questions of common interest. There should be a network of advisory committees and industrial councils to guide the government at all levels, and the rule-making powers should be more and more devolved upon territorial and functional assemblies in order to check the concentration of powers in the hands of the government. Such a mass participation in the democratization of state power, he regarded as highly essential to safeguard the individual and group freedom against the coercive authority of the state. His argument was that the atmosphere we required, if we wanted to attain happiness for the multitude, was one in which we were to gain everything by common experience and not by force and compulsion. In a dictatorship the leaders insist upon an artificial unity, and, as such, there remains no scope for diversities in social life. The chief danger to society, according to him, is from the desire of those who possess power, because they develop, in the long run, the habit of keeping society static for their personal gains. But society, he argued, is not static; it is dynamic and diverse. And the path to happiness is not a single one. Men are not willing to yield the insight of their experience to other men’s insight, merely because they are commanded to do so. They love freedom and try to maintain it by all means because it is necessary for the development of their life. Laski remarked that “liberty 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.” ⁷

In place, of state dictatorship, Laski elaborated the idea of some sort of commonwealth of economic groups and trade unions, working side by side with the government. He pleaded that it was only with their consent and their collective effort that any economic and political change in society could be brought about. Thus he was in favour of a conscious change in which the masses participate actively and consciously. He was so enamoured of individual freedom and the democratic way of life that, in spite of his acceptance of the necessity of a strong state, he completely dismissed the idea of an all-inclusive state. He argued for a limited state authority with a view to maintaining individual liberty. He did not want that its authority should ever degenerate into dictatorship as it had happened in the Soviet Union. As he was conscious of society and its federal structure, he constantly regarded authority as federal and believed that the state necessarily worked in society as one of its agencies. It is society which always determines what should be the purpose and functions of the state from time to time. Thus the state, according to him, is merely a means to attain social justice, and it should work as an instrument of realizing the multitudinous aims of society.

From the above analysis of Laski’s career it can be stated that he was mainly concerned with the understanding of the problems of individual liberty in relation to the complexities of society and the restraining character of state authority. He did not discuss the claims of individual liberty, the nature of society and the character of state authority, separately, from an academic viewpoint. On the contrary, as a political philosopher, he viewed them as the most urgent, practical and interconnected problems of the modern age. He sought to reconcile their claims within the framework of actual experiences rather than abstract principles.

Laski reflected the spirit of the period in which he lived. The time in which he was born and lived was the period of revolution and reform. The liberalism of the Victorian Age was crumbling down, and the various theories like pluralism, Fabian socialism and communism were becoming more and more popular. Under the influence of these theories, the claims of the people were put forward with a view to raising their standard of living, and there was a general demand to modify the existing political institutions in order to bring an overall change in their economic and political status in society. The change in the position of the working class and women was urgently needed. For that it was urgent, firstly, to change the economic order of society, and, secondly, to review the classical theory of state monism. Laski studied the problems of his time and tried to find out a solution to them. He was not an arm-chair thinker, but, on the contrary, he was out and out a practical man. He was always ready to admit his mistakes and revise his political ideas in view of the changed political and economic conditions, and, as such, he was not at all dogmatic in his attitude towards any political, or economic or social question. He remained sincere, throughout his career, to the cause of individual freedom and human progress, and discussed the authority of the state in the perspective of the various demands of the federal society. Thus his theory of the state was a dynamic theory of state functions.

Laski was a political scientist who was deeply interested in public affairs. He influenced the practical politics of England of his time, and was admitted as the real leader of the Labour Party. With the help of his great knowledge and intellectual power he guided the great political leaders like Attlee, Morrison and Bevin. Even the Beveridge Plan, introduced in the time of the conservative Prime Minister Mr. Churchill in 1943 in order to bring reforms in the fields of insurance, health, child welfare, relief in old age and working conditions of labourers, seemed to carry its reformative spirit indirectly from Laski’s proposals for a radical reconstruction of the economic and political order.

Laski himself had admitted that a number of fundamental principles should be recognised immediately, even if they could not completely be applied for the time being. Certain sectors of economy must be placed under public ownership; the educational and public health systems must be radically reformed and extended; a great housing programme must be started; there must be provision for relief in old age; and the state should control imports and exports.⁸ Though Beveridge Plan in the war period cannot be regarded to have been based on these principles of Laski, his indirect influence in its shaping is decisive. As a matter of fact, he was not satisfied with such meagre reforms as he wrote:

“These proposals do not assume the establishment of a socialist state at the end of the war…..Their purpose is different, though a related one.” ⁹

These proposals only constitute, according to him, a beginning of the necessary movement to a free socialist state.

Further, he not only guided the governmental policies of England, but he also inspired the statesmen in other countries to take up the work of social reforms after the Second World War. The conception of social welfare, which the Indian leaders at present keep in view to reshape India’s economy and politics, is similar to Laski’s idea of social justice and the fundamental reforms mentioned above. Thus we can very well find his influence in the practical field as it is found in the field of thinking.

Laski remained the intellectual leader of a great number of people in England and exerted his influence, directly or indirectly, in shaping the various policies of the country. If he did not stick to one political faith in his life, it was due to his over-conscientiousness which made him hesitant about every political theory of the state. But whereas other 18th and 19th century thinkers failed in adjusting the claims of the individual to those of the state, he succeeded with his factual and realistic approach to the problem. Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham and J. S. Mill were utterly practical, and they relied too much upon the selfish nature of the individual. These thinkers commonly shared the view that, as self-interest is the motive force in society, the state should interfere with commerce and industry as little as possible. Although they differed from one another on several points, their conclusion that liberty is the essence of restraint was practically the same. Such a conclusion regarding human nature was prompted by their defective knowledge of human psychology. Hence, their defence of the selfish nature of man and the freedom of opinion is not adequate to remove all our doubts. As they missed the academic and conceptual aspects of the problem, they failed in reconciling individual liberty to state authority. On the other hand, Green, Bradley and Bosanquet were university professors and their approach was too academic. As academicians, they idealized the state and accepted, to all intents and purposes, the majesty and might of the ‘government. Even Green was no exception to it. He too insisted that the state was the only source of actual rights. By freedom he understood an identification of oneself with the Divine Spirit. And since he agreed that the Divine Spirit found its highest expression in the state, it is obvious how close was his approach to the Hegelian thesis that true liberty is realized in the state, to which Bosanquet and Bradley were wholeheartedly committed. Their conclusion regarding the realization of liberty by the individual was completely vague and not understandable. They, were not conversant with the practical nature of the problem, and, as such, they visualized things from a distance. Consequently, they also failed in finding out an adequate solution of the problem. Laski had an advantage over both sets of thinkers. He was both an academician and a practical statesman. He looked to the problem at close quarters and could succeed in presenting a well-argued thesis on individual liberty. He followed a middle-path in opposition to the empty individualism of Adam Smith, Ricardi, Bentham and Mill and the pseudo-Hegelianism of Oxford idealists like Green, Bradley and Bosanquet.

As such, Laski’s undogmatic approach and his loyalty to the cause of human progress made him popular both among the common people and among the intellectuals. They were attracted towards him because he spoke to them about the questions that were uppermost in their minds regarding the economic and political problems of their age. He told them not to be dogmatic in their outlook and judge things on the basis of their usefulness in social life. The age we live in is an age of reason and criticism. It is an age in which we question and examine everything before we accept it. We cannot approve of things because they were found valuable in the past. He, therefore, warned them that it would be a sheer mistake to stick to one conclusion dogmatically. In his own life he was always found ready to admit the mistakes of his conclusions and revise them with a new vision. As a political analyst, he evaluated political institutions and political problems in relation to the life of the people and attached importance to them in view of their purpose and functions in society.

¹ “Democracy at the Crossroads”, Yale Review, n. s. IX (July, 1920), pp. 802-03.
² Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty by Laski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), pp. 24-25.
³ “Harold J. Laski”, in Clifton Fadiman, ed., I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (N. Y. 1939) p. 139.
⁴ The Crisis in the Theory of the State in Vol. II of Law (1937), p. xii.
⁵ “Democracy in war Time” in G. D. H. Cole et al; Victory or Vested Interest? (1942), p. 40.
⁶ “Choosing the Planners”, in G. D. H. Cole et al; Plan for Britain (1943), pp. 123-34.
⁷ Liberty in the Modern State by Laski (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1948), p. 211.
⁸ Reflection on the Revolution of Our Time by Laski (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1943) pp. 349-51.
⁹ Ibid. p. 352.