[In the following excerpt, Morgenthau takes a critical look at Laski's shift from liberalism to socialism.]

The decline of the political philosophy of liberalism is due to the defects of its general philosophy, which contemporary developments have brought to the fore. What liberalism had to say about the nature of man, society, and politics is at odds with what we have experienced. More specifically, it has been unable to reconcile its original libertarian assumptions and postulates with its latter-day philosophy of the administrative and welfare state. Professor Laski, the most brilliant, erudite, and prolific exponent of the last stage of liberalism, exemplifies the philosophic insufficiency and political confusion of liberal thought. He also exemplifies the intellectual corruption that follows inevitably from an attempt to square the disparate elements of liberalism with each other and with the experiences of the age.

Liberty in the Modern State makes these points in ways quite unintended and unsuspected by its author. The book was first published in 1930; it was republished with a long, new introduction in 1937, then republished again in 1949. The Introduction to this last edition was obviously completed in 1947 and incorporates substantial parts of that of 1937. Shockingly great is the distance between the Introduction and the main body of the book, which is a substantially unchanged reprint of the edition of 1930. That distance concerns philosophy and scholarship, quality of argument and of language, and, above all, intellectual responsibility. In the decline of a once great and exceptionally gifted mind, it demonstrates the initial weakness of the political philosophy of liberalism, the recent decomposition of that philosophy, and the reasons for the decline of liberty itself.

The only substantial deviations from the preceding editions occur in the Introduction, and philosophically they are less significant than the lack of change in the body of the book. The Introduction to the edition of 1937 started with a discussion of the crisis of capitalist democracy and of its inherent tendencies toward fascism, followed by a sympathetic and optimistic dissertation on the Soviet Union. This dissertation has been substantially retained in the 1949 edition, with only a few significant changes, to one of which we shall return. The other part has been replaced by a new discussion of the ills of capitalist democracy, arriving at the dual conclusion that "private ownership of the means of production is no longer compatible with democratic institutions" (p. 17) and that "the principle of national sovereignty has exhausted its usefulness" (p. 18).

When the body of this book first appeared in 1930 it was received with deserved praise. The nobility of its moral concern for the individual, the cogency of its argument, the sweep of its erudition are indeed impressive. Its strength, no less than its weakness, is in large measure that of John Stuart Mill, and this is high praise indeed. There is, it is true, already in the Laski of 1930 a certain sentimental verbosity and fuzziness in concepts which are happily absent in Mill. Yet the philosophic position of Laski is that of classic liberalism. Professors Hayek and Mises can hardly have found fault with it. In his own words, this is

the essence of [the] argument. I have taken the view that liberty means that there is no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. There is no liberty without freedom of speech. There is no liberty if special privilege restricts the franchise to a portion of the community. There is no liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds for the control. For, as I have argued, since each man's experience is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance. . . .

But no man, of course, stands alone. He lives with others and in others. His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behavior upon all of us lest conflict destroy peace. That imposition, broadly speaking, is essential to liberty, since it makes for peace; and peace is the condition of continuity of liberty [p. 129].

The philosophic weakness of this position is to be found in the weakness of its five basic concepts: liberty, the individual, the individual good, the common good, the identification of the absolute and relative good.

The problem of liberty in relation to the state concerns, in the words of John Stuart Mill, "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Its perennial theme is "the struggle between Liberty and Authority." A concept of liberty as broad and indefinite as that used by Laski carries within itself the possibility of conclusions destructive of the very antithesis which gives rise to the problem of liberty. This problem is intelligible only under the assumption that man ought to be free from political authority in certain respects and subject to it in others. The assumptions of totalitarianism, destroying the rights of the individual in the face of political authority, and the assumptions of anarchism, denying the claims of political authority, make it altogether impossible to speak of liberty in the political sense. It has often been noticed that a consistent liberalism leads to anarchism. Laski recognizes that connection, too, and approves of it.

The conception of the individual as a unique personality with experiences and judgments all his own may be valid in some systems of art, religion, or psychology, but it certainly is the very negation of political experience. However right the author may be in his strictures against the excesses of the idealistic theory of the state, political authority is founded upon a consensus of all or at least of the majority, that is, upon shared moral and political convictions which are the very negation of that uniqueness and privacy upon which Laski dwells. Such consensus may be the product of a common religion, a secular tradition, the national mores or it may be instilled in the reluctant citizens with fire and sword. Without it there can be no state and no government; for without it there can be no political authority accepted at least by the majority as legitimate, nor that voluntary obedience which the author so rightly stresses. Here again, the conclusion from the premise is anarchy.

Laski conceives of the individual good, which freedom must promote, as happiness, and of happiness as the satisfaction of individual desires. We are here not concerned with the question of whether such a conception of happiness is psychologically valid. Even if it were, it would still have to be admitted that it is a distinctive characteristic of civil society, as it is of individual morality, to approve of certain desires as good and to reject others as bad. As a philosophic conception, happiness has meaning only within the context of a system of selective values which define what happiness is in the first place. In the absence of such a system, happiness will be defined by the accident of implicit valuations, that is, by the preferences of the author or of the group for which he pretends to speak.

Laski is, of course, not oblivious of the inevitability of conflict arising from the incompatibility of unique personalities and their valuations and desires, and he recognizes the consequent need for a mediating force. He finds that force in reason. However, reason in the abstract has nothing to say about the solution of social conflicts. It is only in the concrete, in a specific philosophic and social context, that reason can tell us which interests must be protected and which sacrificed. In other words, no rational solution of a social conflict, in theory or in practice, can dispense with a political philosophy which has developed a concept of the common good, or with an appraisal of the power of the social forces identified with the two sides of the conflict. Yet Laski's conception of the common good is identical with the sum total of the individual desires mediated by reason. That argument begs the question and leaves the problem where we encountered it.

These weaknesses of Laski's philosophic position are intimately connected with the last of the weaknesses that we have proposed to discuss. Political philosophy, to be fruitful, must make the Aristotelian distinction between what is ideally good and what is good under the circumstances. It is one thing to provide an ideal solution for the conflict between liberty and authority, a solution which might well be tantamount to anarchism. It is quite another thing to consider the problem of liberty in the context of what is attainable under the conditions of British society in 1930 or of American society in 1950. To confound both approaches, as Laski does, may lead, if the author is consistent, to the condemnation of all actually possible solutions in view of the unattainable ideal. If the author is inconsistent but is quite naturally moved by strong personal preferences, as Laski is, he will measure some political systems by the ideal, others by the attainable, and thus obtain the political conclusions that he prefers to obtain.

These defects, let us repeat it, are the defects of the intellectual tradition to which Laski belongs. The faults of the Introduction of 1937 and 1947 are all his own. To point all of them out and analyze them would require a book. Let us limit ourselves to four representative ones: one conceptual, one philosophic, and two factual.

On the very first page of the Introduction the conceptual foundation for any rational discussion of the problem of liberty disintegrates with the statement that "the future of liberty depends upon the realization of those four freedoms upon which President Roosevelt laid such eloquent emphasis. . . ." It is fanciful to suggest that the determination of "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual" depends upon the realization of such vague and unattainable ideals as freedom from fear and freedom from want. Given this conceptual starting point, no demonstration is needed to show that these ideals, whatever they may mean, are not, and are not likely to be, realized and that, hence, liberty does not exist and is not likely to exist. There is nothing left for us to do but to bewail this sad state of affairs with sentimental rhetoric and to comment on it with the shopworn clichés of progressive journalism.

To turn to an example of philosophic analysis, it is obvious that the phenomenon of fascism has a profound bearing upon the problem of liberty in our time. What, then, is the purpose of fascism in this respect? "The purpose of fascism is to prevent the relations of production from coming into a natural harmony with the forces of production; for that prevention, and increasingly, the method of coercion is inescapable" (p. 30). Can anything be simpler, or more absurd? One must, then, I suppose, assume that the wave of pseudo-religious fanaticism with its worship of violence for its own sake, which swept through Germany long before the industrialists as a class, together with virtually all other social groups, jumped on the bandwagon of naziism, was just an ideological super-structure whirling in the air until it settled down upon its material foundations, discovered as a dialectic afterthought. To call this kind of reasoning by cliché Marxism would be an insult to the memory of Marx and Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. Call it "Pravdaism" or "Browderism," if you wish.

But let us consider simple matters, matters of fact. On pages 20-21 we read: ". . . and it is still more true of the great corporations today than it was when General Negrier wrote of them nearly forty years ago that 'les sociétés financières estiment que les gouvernements ont le devoir de faire la guerre pour assurer leurs bénéfices' ['the corporations believe that it is the governments' duty to make war so that they may be assured of their profits']." The general, whoever he was, may plead ignorance, for he could not have been acquainted with the empirical studies of Robbins, Schumpeter, Staley, Sulzbach, Viner, and Winslow, which have exploded the Marxist myth of the warmongering capitalists. But what excuses does Laski have?

Laski finds little actual liberty in the Soviet Union but great promise for the future. On page 43 of the edition of 1937 he said: "In the classic sense of absolute liberalism freedom does not exist in the Soviet Union." This is, of course, true of the Soviet Union as of all other political systems past or present, and, hence, the statement is trivial. On page 27 of the edition of 1949 that passage reads as follows: "In the classic sense the Four Freedoms do not exist in the Soviet Union." The truth is that, while we can speak of classic liberalism in contrast to other types, there is no such thing as freedom from want or freedom from fear in the classic or in any other sense. There is freedom from want and freedom from fear, or there is not. Laski must have known that the Four Freedoms are not realized in the Soviet Union; yet his political preferences did not allow him to admit it. Thus he suggested that, while the Four Freedoms in the classic sense do not exist in the Soviet Union, they might well exist in some other sense.

How was such a descent from the comparative heights of 1930 possible? The answer to this question will shed light upon the decline of liberalism as theory and practice of government.

The rise of bolshevism and fascism in the Western world denied the very assumptions upon which the philosophy of nineteenth-century liberalism had been founded. The society of rational individuals, either developing their unique personalities and satisfying their desires in harmony or settling conflicts among them by the appeal to reason, revealed itself as a mirage engendered by the fleeting conditions of a unique historic constellation. Under different historic conditions, such as those of the interwar years, large segments of Western society showed none of the rational qualities of the liberal prototype. Instead, they sought a new consensus either in revealed religion or in the political religions of totalitarianism. In the face of this phenomenon, for the advent of which their political philosophy did not prepare them, the liberals either continue to reassert the laissez-faire principles of 1850 and thus, by standing still while society moves, become the spokesmen for the tories of the 1950's; or they embrace, sometimes without knowing it, one or the other of the totalitarian creeds. Laski, who cannot be a Fascist and can no longer be a liberal in the "classic" sense in which he was one in 1930, becomes a Marxist who tries to interpret the reality of Russian bolshevism in terms of the liberal philosophy. He tries to do for bolshevism what in the thirties so many of his countrymen tried to do for fascism, that is, to prove that totalitarianism is really a kind of advanced liberalism, disfigured by some blemishes of which time will take care.

Yet the Laski of 1930 at least intimated the impossibility of such a task. He showed then that absolute power, far from tending to limit and reform itself, has the innate tendency to increase its hold upon the individual and to become more oppressive as voluntary obedience wanes. He could have added, if his philosophy had not obscured the realities of politics, that this is particularly true of an absolute power which identifies its monopoly of power with a monopoly of truth, whose monopoly of the most effective weapons of warfare makes popular revolution impossible, and whose totalitarian control no private activity can escape. Here lies the real threat to liberty in our time. The Laski of 1930 could see at least part of that truth, the Laski of 1947 cannot. In this respect, it may be said, Professor Laski differs somewhat from the Bourbons of the Restoration. They are said to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing. Comparing the Laski of 1947 with the Laski of 1930 one cannot help concluding, with genuine sorrow, that he has learned little and forgotten a great deal.