SOURCE: "Laski's Legacy," in Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993, pp. 580-92.

[In the following excerpt, Kramnick and Sheerman recount events that occurred in the decades following Laski's death and evaluate his overall influence.]

'No one can teach politics who does not know politics at first hand,' Laski wrote in 1939, and he practised what he preached. Few people in the twentieth century have lived two such totally complete lives as scholar and politician as he did. After his death he was remembered and honoured in both worlds. The Labour Party's annual conference in 1950 approved a resolution remembering 'with gratitude and affection the outstanding service rendered to the labour movement, the cause of international solidarity and human freedom, by the late Harold Laski'. The resolution's mover spoke of his contribution over the years to the formation of socialist policy and his role 'as one of the principal architects of our victory in 1945'. To honour the memory of 'one of the greatest socialists that this movement ever knew', the party's National Executive Committee also established a 'Laski Memorial Travelling Fellowship' from funds raised by local constituency parties. In France the Socialist Party conference in May observed an unprecedented minute's silence 'in the memory of Professor Harold J. Laski'.

Freda Kirchwey wrote in the Nation that the world would miss Laski, 'really a wonderful sort of fellow'. Yes, his brilliance could be exhausting, she confessed, and it was easy to be put off by his 'showmanship' or his 'air of near-omniscience', but this kind and essentially modest man, she wrote, had a 'capacity for devotion and hope' which moved not only young students but cynical oldtimers like herself. 'He knew and loved America, explained and chastised it.' Six hundred and fifty former students and friends attended a memorial service for Laski in New York on 16 May at the New School for Social Research, presided over by its Director Emeritus, Alvin Johnson. Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter led the tributes to the man who he said had 'probably influenced political thought and political action in both East and West more than any other individual'.

The London School of Economics' student magazine, the Clare Market Review, turned its Michaelmas term 1950 issue into a memorial to Laski. Tributes were published by former students who had become colleagues—W. H. Morris-Jones, Ralph Miliband and Norman MacKenzie—and by Eleanor Roosevelt and Frankfurter. A staff collection was organized by Robson and Kingsley Smellie which purchased a sixth-century BC Greek vase for display in the LSE's Founders' Room, bearing the inscription 'In memory of Harold Laski. Given by his colleagues at the School'. Norman MacKenzie and Lord Chorley served as Secretary and Treasurer respectively of a Harold Laski Society founded jointly by the LSE and India House in 1951, with Krishna Menon as Chairman and H. N. Brailsford as President. The society hoped to raise funds for student scholarships and publications, and to establish an international student hostel. After several years, like Laski's reputation, the society faded away.

Laski's library of rare books, lovingly collected since childhood, was ultimately given as a gift to the LSE by Frida after Cohn and Frankfurter had organized an effort in America to raise funds to purchase the library from her in order to facilitate the gift. They enlisted the banker James Warburg to run the appeal and he managed to collect $5,000 of the hoped for $18,000. Some of the people solicited refused to give, thinking the money was for a gift to Frida and not for the purchase of the library. Laski's will, leaving £19,558 to Frida, had surprised many of his friends (and critics) who had not realized how much Laski augmented his LSE salary of £1,600 a year (raised to £2,040 the year he died) by royalties and speaking fees. The sum, however, also included £8,000 of LSE pension benefits and £2,500 of life insurance.

As so often happens to widows, Frida was slowly dropped from the social circles of the LSE. The ideological complexion of the Political Science Department dramatically changed when in addition to appointments of other Conservatives the Cambridge political theorist Michael Oakeshott, a leading Conservative thinker, was chosen in 1951 to replace Laski, making Frida even less inclined to have anything to do with the school. She devoted herself increasingly to Third World causes, the most important of which was War on Want, and travelled to India in the 1950s where she was Nehru's house guest. Frida frequently saw Diana and Robin and her four grandsons, who lived in Exeter, where Robin taught classics at the university. She outlived her daughter, for Diana died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three in February 1969. Frida lived alone through the 1970s while virtually blind. In these last years she enjoyed the company of her youngest grandson, Andrew Mathewson, who was studying in London, and of John Saville, the labour historian at Hull who had studied with Laski in the 1930s, and his wife Constance. Frida died in 1978, when she was ninety-three. Frankfurter had stayed in touch with Frida until his death in 1965 at the age of eighty-three, visiting whenever he was in London in the 1950s and sending birthday and Christmas and New Year greetings annually.

Frankfurter wrote to Frida in January 1952 with a special plea that she let him first look at the letters Laski had written to Roosevelt, which were in the Presidential Library at Hyde Park, before she gave permission to Kingsley Martin to use any of them in a biography of Laski. The mood of American politics, with its 'distortion, misrepresentation and plain lying' with regard to FDR and the New Deal, might lead, he feared, to the selective use of Harold's letters in the current 'passionate and poisonous atmosphere'. He may also have been worrying about himself and what use red-baiting zealots like Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin might make of references to him in the correspondence; in any case, Frida allowed him to screen the letters first, lest any 'real mischief be created by their publication.

His years on the Supreme Court had not dulled Frankfurter's political instincts: Senator McCarthy would, indeed, hit upon Laski in his anti-communist crusade. After Edward R. Murrow's landmark attack on McCarthy and McCarthyism on the CBS television programme See It Now in March 1954, the network granted the Senator twenty-five minutes of the programme a month later. McCarthy recited a series of charges against Murrow, which culminated with the question 'and to whom did Harold Laski, admittedly the greatest communist propagandist of our time, dedicate his book Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time? Murrow had prepared a rebuttal, and when he got to the Laski dedication he said, 'Laski was a friend of mine. He is a socialist. I am not.'

The McCarthy incident came on the heels of a flurry of renewed interest in Laski. A manuscript, nearly complete at his death, which was a revision of his 1944 Faith, Reason and Civilization, was edited by R. S. Clark and published in 1952 as The Dilemma of Our Times: An Historical Essay. Like a voice from the grave it attacked the 'follies', 'stupidity' and 'insecurity and confusion' of our times and parcelled out equal blame to the United States and Soviet Russia. May 1952 saw a Laski memorial meeting held at Conway Hall in London chaired by Lord Chorley, where Ralph Miliband talked of Laski's fondness for students and a London bookseller reminisced about Laski's visits to his shop. James Griffiths, a Labour MP, recalled evenings that Laski spent 'teaching' miners in south Wales, and Kingsley Martin and H. N.

Brailsford spoke lovingly of their friend 'who asked nothing for himself and sought only to serve humanity'. Several days later the new headquarters of the West Fulham Labour Party was opened in a converted warehouse and named 'Harold Laski House', with Frida unveiling the commemorative plaque. In 1953 Kingsley Martin's biography and Harvard University Press's two-volume Holmes-Laski Letters were published.

And then nothing. The historian Kenneth Morgan wrote in 1987 that 'Laski's name and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse'. It happened quickly, for in 1956 the leading revisionist in Labour Party circles, Anthony Crosland, could already refer in The Future of Socialism to Laski's ideas as sounding 'like an echo from another world'. But there were a few occasions when Laski might be mentioned in the decades after his death. Not infrequently he was miscited as Marghanita Laski's father, or whenever Labour-left types made too much noise Attlee's famous put-down, 'a period of silence on your behalf, might be resurrected from the party's or the press's historical memory. There were also, alas, the inevitable references to Laski the myth-maker, the romancer and storyteller in the parade of memoirs and biographies of the inter-war 'Great and Good'.

Not that these charges were always correct. In 1978 Margaret Cole offered as 'proof that Laski was prone to flaunt being 'in closer touch with more distinguished persons than was really the case' the examples of Churchill early in his career, and of Stanley Baldwin. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Laski could utterly distort the truth. In October 1947, for example, Laski wrote to Frankfurter that Attlee had called him into his office and asked him to serve as his deputy in the office of Lord Privy Seal with a seat in the House of Lords. Laski told Frankfurter that the Prime Minister was shocked when he turned it down. Morrison tells a far different story, one with Laski informing him that if Attlee were to offer him a peerage he would gladly accept it. Respecting Laski's abilities and achievements, Morrison then urged the idea on Attlee, who turned it down. 'Attlee could be a small man,' Morrison noted in his autobiography. Laski was a consummate embroiderer and romancer. Part of his generosity and warmth found outlet in his love to flatter and drop compliments, telling this one that 'Holmes said of you' or that one that 'the Prime Minister spoke so highly of you', and, of course, people like Justice Stone loved to hear it. Most of the time, however, his exaggerations and myths were harmless, often made privately, like the fantasy about the offer of a peerage in his letter to Frankfurter. Still, it bothered people because it demeaned a man professionally committed to the quest for truth and it violated the code of the English gentlemen which privileges the reticent understatement over the exaggeration or boast. His mythmaking sometimes merged with the perception of Laski's 'Jewishness'. A crucial part of the description of Laski as 'Jewish' was his calling attention to himself by his exuberance, his forwardness and his exaggeration of self—all traits 'alien' to the British elite.

Why Laski persisted in his myth-making is another matter. There hovered about Laski a quality of almost perpetual youth, reinforced by his diminutive size. As Kingsley Martin put it, he acted like a schoolboy always showing off, always wanting to be noticed. It is striking how references to Laski as being childlike or boyish, or as a naughty 'schoolboy' or 'enfant terrible', recur in characterizations of him from people as diverse as Martin, John Strachey, Lionel Robbins, Isaiah Berlin, Lord Soper, Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Muggeridge. As Francis Williams, labour journalist and personal assistant to Attlee put it, Laski 'looked all his life like a precocious Jewish schoolboy', which, of course, he had been. Like a schoolboy he sought to be, as Frida put it, 'centre stage'. Like a child he sought the approval of those with power while angrily resenting their privileges. Like a child he also lived and spoke spontaneously, for the moment. Quite surprisingly for someone so profoundly aware of the inexorable influence of time and historical development, Laski, as Rebecca West noted, wanted to rush every citadel today and hurry every transformation tomorrow. Like a child he saw words as the agent of instant change. A book could convert a ruling class, a speech could break institutions and a newspaper article topple leaders. But like a child, he had, as Rebecca West also noted, 'a heart of gold' and he could be so warm and lovable that Lord McGregor and many others could say 'he was the nicest human being I have ever met'. Frida was perhaps right when she characterized Laski as 'halfman, half-child all his life'.

Laski was admired by those who knew him more as a warm and generous person than as a scholar. They saw a man of engaging charm and electric personality whom they liked to be with even as he told stories they disbelieved or espoused views they opposed. There were some, to be sure, who thought Laski petty and vindictive. Vera Brittain, for example, was convinced that Laski kept her husband, George Catlin, from a position at the LSE from fear of his rivalry. Few people disliked Laski as much as the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. She saw 'something evil' behind Laski's smile and her creation, the villainous Ellsworth Toohey, was a 'larger-scale' Laski, 'who was a cheap little snide collectivist'. For the most part, however, people liked Laski, but Laski the person, not Laski the writer and scholar. No surprise, then, that few of his books have endured, with perhaps only The Rise of European Liberalism found on college syllabuses today. He wrote too much in general and far too much journalism in particular for the academy to take him that seriously. His journalism sparkled, but Laski's scholarly writings were often unimpressive and poorly written. He loved the recondite word and the learned allusion. The speed with which he turned out books and his disinclination to revise first drafts made his prose repetitive or tortured. Most of his books were not that original and one seldom encounters enduring Laski insights. There is one obvious exception, however; his early writings on the pluralist challenge to state sovereignty were original and they remain seminal studies in political philosophy. With the renewed interest generated in pluralism by recent developments in Eastern Europe, these brilliant early works may once again provoke and inform as they did the progressives in the New Republic crowd. Still, Bernard Crick, the distinguished scholar, editor and biographer who studied with Laski in his last years was probably right that Laski's 'greatness was as a teacher and preacher, not as a political philosopher'.

One hefty chunk of Laski's writings has quite surprisingly endured to this day. His correspondence with Holmes is still not only pored over by the seemingly never-ending legions of Holmes fans, but the published Holmes-Laski Letters has become one of the twentieth century's legendary epistolary collections. Only in 1988, interestingly enough, did it become clear how close these letters came to being destroyed. The editor of the 1963 paperback edition of the Holmes-Laski Letters. Alger Hiss, the law clerk to Holmes in 1930 and student and friend of Justice Frankfurter, who after the controversial 'Hiss Trials' in the late 1940s had been imprisoned in the early 1950s, revealed in his autobiography that year that when he was asked to abridge Mark De Wolfe Howe's 1953 Harvard University Press collection of the letters he discovered, while looking through the originals, that several requests in Holmes's letters for Laski to destroy the correspondence had been deleted. Also omitted were Laski's insistence that re-reading Holmes's letters gave him great pleasure and his promise to order that they be destroyed at his (Laski's) death. Hiss, like Howe, deleted discussion of destroying the letters from his edition of the published letters, for fear that Frida Laski, still alive, might be plagued by those critical of her husband's failure to keep his promise to Holmes. Since Frida was dead in 1988 Hiss told the whole story, noting appropriately that Laski's failure to keep his promise had worked 'to the immense benefit of posterity'.

Nothing eclipsed Laski's reputation as a teacher, 'one of the greatest teachers of our time' as Frankfurter noted, and the later success of countless scholars he trained, politicians he inspired and statesmen like Sharett, Menon, and Trudeau whom he sent to public service has kept him alive. In describing Laski's legendary rapport with students, Frida observed that he kept 'not only an open door and an open house, but an open heart'. In the Laski memorial issue of the Clare Market Review one student noted that 'he loved us instead of merely tolerating us'. His students loved Laski, because they saw a man who viewed the world as they did, full of hope and expectation. Laski, the perpetual 'half-man, half-child', also saw a part of himself in his students. As Ralph Miliband has written, Laski

loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager, enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave new world in which he so passionately believed.

In the darkest days of the war in 1943, and only recently recovered from the depths of his own personal despair, Laski wrote to Ben Huebsch that 'if Diana's and your boys get the chance they will give mercy, justice and magnanimity the place in the cosmos that is their due'. Building Jerusalem would be the achievement of youth, not of the legacy of tried elders, which may be the reason Laski so persistently urged age ceilings on Labour candidates and Members of Parliament.

As a political teacher Laski had none of the clout of Dalton whose legion of disciples, 'Dalton's poodles', went on to dominate the Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Laski had his hand in discovering Denis Healey, George Brown and especially James Callaghan, but none were in any sense his ideological disciples. One measure of his impact, however, is that among the Labour MPs elected in the landslide of 1945 sixty-seven had once studied with him as either university students, trade unionists in worker education courses or officers in war-time courses. His political legacy did live on in the Labour left, the Bevanite and the Bennite left. Bevan always spoke warmly of his Tribune colleague Laski. One memorable example was at the 1950 party conference where he and others took offence at the platform eulogies, which they saw as emphasizing principally Laski's warmth and friendliness and giving too little place to his ideas. Bevan devoted his talk at a Tribune dinner held the next day to a defence of ideas and intellectuals in the labour movement, insisting 'that it was the writings of Laski and the unorthodox political education of the Left Book Club which prepared the way for the 1945 victory'. Three years later Bevan paid Laski the supreme compliment: 'Mr Churchill has been described as the most articulate Englishman of his day,' Bevan wrote in the Daily Herald, 'but personally I would give the prize to Harold Laski.' In his Arguments for Socialism (1979) and Arguments for Democracy (1981), Tony Benn not only praised Laski for insisting that the Marxist heritage was a crucial part of the Labour Party's outlook, but he offered a Laski-like analysis of the British Constitution in pointing to the power of extra-parliamentary non-elected elites.

Nye Bevan's convictions notwithstanding, others saw Laski's excursion into politics as a cautionary tale to prove that intellectuals should remain in their ivory towers. From different political perspectives Trevor-Roper and Margaret Cole both argued that no one with real power who made public policy ever listened to Laski, though they agreed that even in 'the tedious utterances of his middle age' he helped to shape a climate of opinion that ultimately influenced policy. The Manchester Guardian Weekly in 1953 noted that while everybody liked Laski the man and the academic, 'most of those who liked him best would shake their heads over his political judgement'. He lacked, the paper argued, the temperament for the 'ideal backroom boy. He had too much zeal and he thought too emotionally.' The laconic Attlee put it even more bluntly in 1960:

People who talk too much soon find themselves up against it. Harold Laski, for instance. A brilliant chap but he talked too much. A wonderful teacher. You must be able to talk to teach and we need all the teachers we can get but he had no political judgement.

What Attlee meant on one level was that even among intellectuals there were vast variations in attention paid to practical details. While Laski was writing position papers for the party on the problems created by the historical evolution of an economy of contraction out of an economy of abundance, Dalton and his disciples, Gaitskell and Durbin, were writing about marginal price analysis in a nationalized industry. Laski's lack of political judgement, it could be argued, operated even on the level of his meta-speculation, in his inability to recognize, for example, that his preoccupation in the 1930s with how the Establishment, which would resist the revolutionary transformation sought electorally by Labour, assumed that the Labour Party sought such a fundamental change. It was difficult to have it both ways, predicting, a good deal of the time, ruling-class repression of triumphant socialist militancy and lamenting, some of the time, the absence of that very militancy. All of these confusions came back to haunt him at his trial, even though, ironically, he had by then basically realized what kind of a party Labour really was and grudgingly thrown in his lot with it.

Opinions vary widely on a final evaluation of Laski's socialism. For A. L. Rowse, his ideas were nothing more those of a superficial political journalist. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, saw Laski's socialism produced by a world of political fantasy 'for which the inward expression was faith and the outward expression rhetoric' and where facts neither interrupted the rhetoric nor disturbed the faith. Richard Crossman, who rose from the Labour left to be Leader of the House of Commons in Harold Wilson's government, came in the late 1960s to regard Laski's ideas as 'bogus, phoney and sentimental' and Laski himself as 'hopeless at influencing British politics'. Brailsford, on the other hand, applauded Laski for being able to reconcile Marx and Engels of the nineteenth century with the seventeenth and eighteenth-century liberal defenders of individual rights and free discussion. He was, Brailsford suggested, as did the obituary notice in the Paris Monde, the exemplar for the inter-war generation of this necessary marriage of 'Marxism of the mind' and 'liberalism of the heart'. Kenneth Morgan praised Laski for bringing to insular British socialism a refreshing international perspective grounded in French and German scholarship and American friends and experience. Others like Lord Soper and Isaiah Berlin faulted Laski for replacing the inspirational and ethical thrust of British socialism with a continental Marxism, too ideological and too materialistic. On the other hand, the dean of socialist historians, A. J. P. Taylor, never averse to finding fault, had only unabashed praise for Laski's socialist achievements. He wrote in 1953 that

there are few men of whom one can truthfully say the world would have been a different place without them. Harold Laski was one of those few. His was the most important influence in remaking English social democracy and giving it its present form . . . If today in this country there is still no communist movement of any size, if all socialists can still be at home in the Labour Party, we owe it more to Harold Laski than to any other single man.

On one aspect of Laski's legacy there is, however, little debate: his profound impact on India and the Third World. Even as he belittled Laski's ideas and his influence in Britain, Crossman conceded that Laski's ideology influenced 'half the leaders of the colonial revolution' and, unlike Senator Moynihan, Crossman saw this making them 'not passionately anti-British and pro-communist but liberalistic and pro-British'. John Kenneth Galbraith, former American ambassador to India, contended that 'the center of Nehru's thinking was Laski' and 'India the country most influenced by Laski's ideas'. Nehru, who used to say that he was 'the last Englishman to rule India', saw Laski as the voice of Fabian socialism with its vision of a central role for the state in a managed and planned economy. Nehru remained close to Frida until his death in 1964, having in 1956 agreed to her request to write a short preface to an Indian reprinting of Laski's Grammar of Politics. A Harold Laski Institute of Political Science, established in the city of Ahmedabad in 1954 by G. V. Mavalankar, the first Speaker of the Indian Parliament, whose son had studied at the LSE with Laski, still exists. So widespread was Laski's reputation in India because of his work for independence and his influence on the political elite through Nehru, Menon and the legions of LSE students in the government and the civil service that it was often said that 'there was a vacant chair at every Cabinet meeting in India, reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski'.

Like most important, even revered, historical figures, Laski was riven by contradiction and ambivalence. He was convinced that the power of reason and the human capacity for good-will would lead people to reach compromises and do justice to views they disagreed with. Yet he was also convinced that people were moved independently of their own conscious wills by historical and economic forces, which prevented mutual understanding, tolerance and empathy. He was a collectivist and an individualist, a Marx and a Voltaire. He was fiercely egalitarian yet an intellectual prone to elitism and cultural snobbery. He loved America and fiercely criticized it. He saw Soviet Russia as the harbinger of a new civilization and its crimes broke his heart. He was selfless and generous to a fault and an indefatigable self-promoter. He was an erudite scholar and a mass circulation publicizer. He detested the status quo yet he wanted to dine with those who presided over and benefited from it. He cultivated the posture of the alienated intellectual outsider, thundering at a social order historically doomed, while working the system as a consummate behind-the-scenes insider who influenced everyday events through connections and friendships. He was a cosmopolitan rationalist and a cultural, ultimately Zionist, Jew. The most popular lecture which this state-socialist gave annually at the LSE was on Martin Luther's 'Hier Stehe Ich. Ich Kann Nicht Anders,' in which he literally preached that each and every student must, like Luther, follow her or his individual conscience.

Laski was at bottom a mass preacher and public teacher, one of the most widely read and listened-to public intellectuals of this century. He was more interested in teaching people about and ushering in socialism than in his scholarly or political reputation. That reputation has been shaped in large measure by scholars who are by disposition sceptical of political engagement, the focus on the present and future and the blatant political use of the past in an effort to reach the masses. Laski enthusiastically embraced the mission of the ideological popularizer, writing constantly and gearing it for a wide audience. Like most public intellectuals he addressed all levels of the public. He spoke to the few thousands of professional intellectuals who with their exceptional ability and narrow, concentrated interests read specialized books. He also reached out to the few hundreds of thousands who read weeklies like the New Statesman or the Nation and who listened to sophisticated radio talks, and, finally, he addressed the millions who read the national daily press.

All of Laski's writings, even the most serious scholarship, were informed by political and ideological purpose and was a response to the vicissitudes of contemporary politics. It is not surprising, then, that his reputation has foundered, for the makers of reputations privilege the search and discovery of enduring and transcendent truths. Laski, on the other hand, was a man of the moment who, never quite abandoning the philosophical pragmatism of his earliest writings, assumed the contingent nature of truth and its dependence on the tendencies, constraints and potentials of a particular context. That is why teaching was so central to his life and why the role of teacher and public intellectual helped to resolve the paradox of him as both an elitist and a popularizer. He taught people how to analyse the world of their moment, not how to perceive timeless reality, but to grasp and to act on that moment in order to usher in socialism. He trained leaders in his classroom to be the builders of a new Jerusalem and he prepared the masses with his writings and preaching for the revolutionary redemption of 'the dark Satanic mills' through the ballot-box.

His most faithful followers were in fact from the enlarged inter-war literate professional class, the broadened base of people with intellectual interests and pretensions who, for example, joined the Left Book Club and who, unlike high-table academics, took him very seriously as a thinker and as a seer. As the depression and fascism sent many of these people to the left, his was the most articulate and liveliest voice for socialism they encountered. Bevan was probably right in suggesting that in 1945 it was these very people who were crucial in bringing Labour to power.

And they encountered the voice everywhere, which is the key to Laski's phenomenal influence in his lifetime. As a publicist, a popularizer and a public intellectual, he made his mark not only by his intelligence and his wit but by his incredible energy which made it virtually impossible for his public to go a week without reading or hearing him. No wonder, then, that with his death his reputation declined so rapidly. He was no longer there to interpret and analyse the moment in the weeklies and on the radio, no longer there to respond to each new event with his insistent urging of socialism, true socialism. The price the engaged public intellectual pays is, quite literally, out of sight, out of mind.

Some time after his death Laski's friend Lance Beales confronted the unusual silence.

It may be claimed, soberly, that he did a giant's work. None of us who worked with him can ever forget him. He had a hundred faults—the flamboyant phrase, the over-good stories (and the good ones, too), the self-deception—but what do these things matter? Great teacher and great friend, he lived his full life as selflessly as may be, as generously and as bravely as the best have done. In many countries, in high places and low, in the East and in the West, there are people who are in debt to him—in debt for increased power of mental striving, in debt most of all for the realism of his vision of possible socialism. His work bears fruit in India as in England, in China as in the United States. It is given to few to stir men's thinking as Laski had done, and to bend that thinking to active purpose.

Frida, who had so significantly shaped the mind and the politics of Laski the young prodigy, summarized Laski's life in her characteristically matter-of-fact way in a letter to Alfred Cohn in April 1950. She described how suddenly the end had come and added, 'He lived a full life and we were divinely happy for thirty-nine years and we had a lifetime of adventure and interest and he left his mark.'