SOURCE: "Laski Redivivus," in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1966, pp. 87-101.

[In the following essay, Peretz evaluates Laski's relevance to America in the 1960s.]

It is now more than fifteen years since Harold J. Laski died, and it is almost as if whatever favourable words have been entered for him since have been in the defensive mood, slightly apologetic and with just the faintest traces of embarrassment. Such, in fact, was the case, one should add, even before his death, especially after his unsuccessful libel action. Moreover, 'there is no element of his work', as he himself rather sardonically wrote of Marx's, 'which has not been declared obsolete'.¹ And while one would not seek for Laski the voluminous attentions one naturally claims for Marx, it is surely reasonable to withdraw glib charges of obsolescence pending the kind of serious scholarly consideration which Laski has been denied and which, if only in virtue of his pre-eminent place in radical thought and in radical movements on four continents and over two generations, he should so easily command.

At the end even his friends felt obliged to justify, by way of their own personal caveats or his extra compensating qualities, what loyalties they felt for him. This was true for Beloff and for Strachey, himself no innocent when it came to egregious enthusiasms; true also for his London School of Economics students in their memorial publication, though perhaps it made more sense for them; true as well for Kingsley Martin who records, among other regrets, that Laski's brilliance and erudition 'did not in themselves compel affection'. What was true in England may be taken as only hinting at the fate suffered by his reputation in the United States, where Laski had become a totemic anathema to the always supercilious, already triumphant, if not yet quite vital centre. Max Lerner's 'lance for Laski',² moving and generous as it was, signalled the retreat of a wide milieu that a few years earlier would have been anxious to assert it had gone to school, literally and metaphorically, willingly and by diffusion, to Laski and perhaps to him alone. He died in the same week that F. O. Matthiesen, the Harvard literary historian, jumped to his death from a Boston hotel room. The two events are a sheer coincidence, but they marked as well as any might—particularly if one recalls also the fatal seizure only days later of Léon Blum in France—the exhaustion of a hope and a temper. English socialism is, as Mr Crossman once told us, still 'bookless',³ and, in partial consequence at least of this, his own ministerial efforts notwithstanding, also largely without vision and normative principle. The political and intellectual content of the American fifties is sufficiently well understood in the English-speaking world—better than America's most enthusiastic celebrants are wont to concede—not to require much characterization here. It may well be, however, that the grievances of Laski's ghost will be redressed there, where grass-roots discontent, academic engagement, and social inventiveness appear once again to be released, where on fronts domestic and foreign what Laski taught—about pluralism and federalism and the concrete economic determinisms of state policy—will appear relevant rather than archaic. It is of only mildly symptomatic interest, I suppose, that when the New Statesman put together a fiftieth anniversary collection, it found nothing of Laski's worth reprinting though three of its long-time editor's contributions were redeemed from oblivion, including a rather insignificant piece on Buchmas and the Oxford Group⁴; on the other hand, the almost simultaneous centenary anthology from The Nation (New York),⁵ appropriately and with the regard due to one of its most distinguished associates, carried a Laski article on the history of the Labour Party, still provocative at this date.

In truth, of course, those who are most faithful to the letter of old bromides must ultimately find Laski doubly uncongenial: he was demonstrably wrong so often, and at the same time had the altogether disconcerting habit of changing his mind. If, then, it is not dogma one wants—though Laski decidedly was not without some penchant for that himself—but learning and a bit of wisdom his twenty-odd books, to say nothing of many scores of essays and tracts, are not likely to prove unrewarding. At the very minimum Laski, having at once, and over many years formulated, epitomized, and acted upon a whole constellation of values and beliefs, is a revealing chapter unto himself in the history of the era after the first world war.

In an even-tempered, albeit highly critical study of Laski's thought,⁶ Herbert Deane, while assiduously noting continuities, delineates five more or less distinct stages in its development, the origins of at least two corresponding to particular historical circumstances (or alleged misreadings thereof), the others presumably more independent of such influence. The first three stages may be defined as pluralist, Fabian, and Marxian, respectively; the fourth as essentially of indeterminate 'popular-front' hue; the final one, covering the last five years of Laski's life, so confuses the author that he is content merely to recount where Laski is contradicted by events and where he contradicted himself. This inability to see that Laski's twilight period was one in which he was trying to bring his thought full circle in an honest reckoning with the real disappointments of the Soviet, American, and British socialist experiences alike, is shared by almost all who have had occasion to write about him. In large measure this is a function of the general acceptance of the quasi-official cold war ideology according to which: 1) Russia almost alone had undermined the peace and all but completely destroyed whatever meagre possibilities were open to it for internal liberalization, while (2) England and the United States were well on their way to having solved, gradually but certainly, the problems of quantity which had seemed so threatening after the 1929 crash and during the fascist ascendancy.⁷ Indeed, little time passed before we were also being informed that problems of quality would likewise be resolved in short order. Laski, however, never owned to these particular simplifications; and he often quizzically noted how an intellectual generation that had become 'hooked' on ambiguity as antidote to its earlier addictions could become so oblivious to the moral difficulties of its new position. But this new position proved to be the great divide, and from that rigid perspective Laski clearly fell on the other side. In the camp to which he was relegated, Laski was, one hastens to point out, equally ill at ease, and perhaps even more unwelcome. To have been thought a heretic, a dreamer, or a failure by the great sovereign systems of our time and by their academic pastorates may be, after all, in some final judgment, no mean encomium.

The perspective of east-west, communist-anti-communist conflict has coloured our understanding of more than the late Laski; of more even than his full twenty-year adherence to Marxism. It has caused us to isolate his early work from the rest, to idealize it, even as we are already too jaded to think that he himself did little else but idealize the real potential for authentic pluralist development towards freedom. On this score, it seems to me, Bernard Crick is wrong, writing in one of those end-ofthe-decade premature obituaries-cum-exhortation for the Labour Party,⁸ in calling the posthumous publication of Laski's uncompleted The Dilemma of Our Times 'a perhaps questionable act of friendship'. For it is there, rambling and discursive as the book is, and in several of his last articles, that Laski came to grips with his successively frustrated hopes. He had at last fully learned the lesson of great expectations which Dr Johnson had confided to Boswell. Most immediately it was Labour Britain that enveloped him in despair, and, as with the 1931 National Government, his sadness expressed itself as anger fixed largely on one man. In the late forties, of course, it was Ernest Bevin who became his idée fixe, an incarnation of vulgar anti-semitism, of sterile anti-communism as creed, of bureaucratic socialism without ideals. But it was obviously more than what he considered to be Bevin's malevolence that drove him to write about the future in futile and fatalistic terms. Kingsley Martin's biography has described in detail the turnings of Laski's mind in those years when he thought his party had renounced its internationalist socialist obligations and embraced almost entirely without reserve the alliance with Washington. His now famous letter to Justice Frankfurter, 'I now know why even victory left Lincoln with a sense that the dawn is not an awakening but mostly an opportunity to wait for the evils of the next night',⁹ reflected a startling bleakness of mood. As is known, in February 1949 Laski quietly asked to have his name removed from the Labour Party National Executive's nomination lists. At times, however, he contemplated an even more precipitate course, perhaps a thunderous resignation or even, as he wrote to an American friend, to 'leave the party and fight it in every way I can . . . You can imagine what I feel after giving half my life to this party'.¹⁰ This special dismay with Labour in turn indicated a deeper and all-pervasive disillusionment, the more ironic in that he was thought by so many to have wielded power over forces on which he had essentially no impact. Moreover, for all his posturings about proximity to the seats of the mighty, bitterness was added to irony, since he wanted no credit for a situation so different from his own imaginings. A socialist victory at the polls neither achieved what Laski yearned for nor made him the satanic eminence that Churchill had disastrously fabricated for the 1945 elections.

Having chosen successive bêtes noires, Laski, by a kind of historical symmetry, succeeded in becoming one himself, and not without reason. Thus, with the especial lucidity of the progressively insane, and indicative of the perceptions of the more cautious normal, Forrestal saw in Laski and his power a threat to the survival of capitalist ideology.¹¹ This 'mild obsession' of the first American Secretary of Defence, though based on a ludicrous overestimation of Laski's real political significance, reflected a correct understanding of what his efforts were about: to undermine those received habits of thought which identify the operative patterns of the present with the principles of universal justice. While this read to Forrestal, predictably enough, as an apologia for communism, it lay at the bottom of all of Laski's writing and had emerged as its central core long before Faith, Reason and Civilization (1944) appeared to haunt the troubled nights of fearfully pursued men.

Arnold Hauser has written of the 'psychology of exposure' as the characteristic mode and theme of modern thought. The illumination of distorted consciousness has accordingly been the chosen task of historical materialism no less than of psychoanalysis. But the adepts of one method have been in the main hostile to practitioners of the other; and Laski on this score was no exception. In his 1926 Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Economics, for example, while conceding the light that psychology might shed on politics, going even so far as to amend Rousseau's aphorism to state that 'man .. . is born everywhere in chains, and becomes free only upon the grim conditions of self-knowledge', he nevertheless insists on the final inadequacy and inutility of the approach.¹² Significantly, then, his occasional references to Nietzsche were in the nature of asides while his allusions to Freud were flippant and derogatory.¹³ This animus against the instinctivist orientation, even in its more modest formulations, revealed itself further in his pained ambivalence towards the work of the young Walter Lippman and of Lippman's mentor, Graham Wallas, whom Laski succeeded in the Chair of Political Science. Here, too, Laski is found to be on one more or less exclusive side of another great divide, though again not without dissociating himself on occasion from its dominant features. His first two books yield no substantive mention of Marx whatever, and he seemed to delight in giving regular vent to Justice Holmes' anti-Marxian spleen, from which, it should be clearly noted, he did not for a moment pause to dissent. In fact his 1922 Fabian essay on Marx, comfortably reissued in America by the meliorist League for Industrial Democracy a decade later, is a judicious but sharply critical effort, especially pointed in its remarks on economic monocausality and the theory of value.

All this notwithstanding, Laski was from the very first a socialist, which implied that he found the injustices of the world to be rooted largely in its economic relations. The state was the medium through which these relations were established and sustained. But the state also made supererogatory claims which the content of the lives of its citizens daily denied and belied. Yet legal theory and political doctrine—from Plato onwards and most relevantly in Bodin and Blackstone, in Austin and the idealists alike—had successfully justified the actual exercise of government authority by transcendental reference either to essential purpose or to the very nature of power itself, and sometimes to both. The state thus became a secular unam sanctam, in which the boundary of its sovereignty, the limits of its omnicompetence, was the expansive imagination of the legal mind. Nor had the annus mirabilis 1789 done much to change this situation, since a new and no more relenting sovereignty was in time fully to replace the old. Almost intact, and despite the rhetoric of the sovereignty of the individual, that theory of the state survived which omitted the shadow that fell between willing right and doing right, to say nothing of virtually ignoring the deeper question of knowing what is right in the first place. With juristic equality secured, the traditional argument about the use of power would seem to have been exhausted and all legitimate demands on the state met, or at least orderly and open and neutral processes developed whereby they could be met.

This congeries of ideas was the 'given' which Laski confronted in his earliest writings. His decision, however, was not to meet these notions on their own highly circumscribed terms, in which discussion would become more and more abstract and Jesuitical—or Talmudic—but to see what actually happened in the real world. That intellectual proclivity Laski shared with his aging friend Holmes. Now the Justice knew, for example, that his eminent predecessor John Marshall was wrong in asserting that 'courts are the mere instruments of law and can will nothing'. In realizing that the opposite was the case, moreover, he found himself embarked on a career that made him a forerunner of the sociological school. But Holmes was not as free from the ancient absolutes as he thought, and in consequence there was a tension between his judicial austerity and liberal constructionist views of the constitution on the one hand, and his experimental-social policy orientation on the other. This kind of ambiguity never puzzled Laski because he recognized that all political ideas have uses and that most of them, particularly when they are under fire from below, become the haven of motives that cannot allow the scrutiny of daylight.

'The hands and feet' (to use Hegel's metaphor) of theories of the state, Laski believed, were the protection and maintenance of privilege and of the exclusive control of sovereignty. The dimensions of these went beyond economic matters and, following Figgis and Barker, Laski focused on dissident religious challenges to the long arm of temporal power. But surely his interest in the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and the rights of the Scottish Presbytery in the Disruption of 1843, as well as of the Catholic Church against both Gladstone and Bismarck, was a concern à clef, much as his elevation of Lamennais' stubborn conscience towards Rome was intended to evoke sympathy for the contingency of disobedience under different circumstances and towards different ends. The fuller contours of his scheme to persuade us that the sovereign state was discredited and the world plural were economic in character; and he assessed the inadequate performance of the state in terms of a socialized Benthamite calculus in which a growing and ever more self-consciously cohesive part of the population felt itself taken insufficiently into account in the distribution of society's multiple bounties.

There is, we might say, an escalation in the intensity of complaint in the early Laski. Thus, writing in 1917, he asserts, 'A state may in theory exist to secure the highest life for its members. But when we come to the analysis of the hard facts it becomes painfully apparent that the good actually maintained is that of a certain section, not the community as a whole'.¹⁴ A year later he reports, 'We were simply forced to the realization that majority rule could not be the last word on our problems. So long as political power was divorced from economic power the jury of the nation was in reality packed'. Or 'the state ... is in reality the reflection of what a dominant group or class in a community believes to be political good ... for the most part defined in economic terms'.¹⁵ He would soon be creating the theoretical scaffolding for a new philosophy of the state directed towards a new purpose. The present 'instruments with which we work ... do not suit a temper in which the development of initiative in the humble man is the main effort of the time ... [This] is in a direction which challenges the legal rights established by prescription in the name of an equality for which our institutions are unsuited'.¹⁶

The essence of this analysis of the crisis in political thought and institutions survived all of the changes in Laski's thinking, though when, as Crane Brinton once wrote, he was less 'under the influence of Acton and Maitland than of Marx and Lenin', a certain stridency entered into his indictment of liberalism. In any event, these shifts manifested themselves on the programmatic level. But even some of the major premises of the analysis are not much strained by the mechanics that were to resolve the problems be posed. For while much of his appeal in argument was to natural rights and personal ethics, his individualism was neither anomic nor atomic in character. Moreover the doctrines of corporate personality and social solidarity emerged early as the crucial categories of group polyarchism. At the same time the pluralist state was still a normative proposition, though the struggles of government with church and union suggested its impending fulfilment. Indeed, the sovereignty which he viewed as incompatible with the evidence of its own obsolescence was never something he dismissed as sheer res ficta et picta; he knew full well its operative coercive strengths.

The retreat from pluralist government was admitted, it appears, more in sorrow than in desire. It was in keeping with the original perception of the centrality of economic power and the expanding sense that only a direct assault on its political expressions would relax the grip of capital on the valve giving access to Locke's commodious life. What Laski was in effect conceding was that even the accelerating drift towards pluralism could be deflected by the very forces that had so long possessed sovereignty as their own. Nor was the increasing harshness of his response to this situation altogether at variance with the guidelines reluctantly set by liberalism to meet demands that it extend its promise from the political to the social and economic spheres. If vested economic privilege fed on the deprivations of the many, if it sustained itself at the cost of the democratic principle, it would have to be the object of social surgery. Much can be made of the fact mat when Laski turned from diagnosis to prognosis, he too had to seek the shelter of something akin to sovereignty. But his critics are left in that peculiarly uncomfortable position of arguing that Laski's emphasis on the primacy of economic matters in politics reflected a materialist malaise, while they themselves, to protect their own economic interests, would tolerate almost anything in preference to a candid recognition of that primacy. He was fond of quoting Machiavelli to the effect that men would sooner forgive the murder of their relatives than the theft of their property; and he found little in the postwar world to disprove this view. It should not be thought, however, that he was untroubled by the fate of his pluralist values in socialist circumstances: embattled as he was, Laski did not have the unfurrowed brow George Sand is said to have credited to Herbert Spencer. On the contrary, he pondered these quandaries till the end of his life and resisted the temptation, now the fashion in political sociology, to describe those systems as pluralist which make concessions to the bottom and important decisions at the top. Presumably if one lowers the stakes, it is easier to win.

Nineteen thirty-one was Laski's trauma, and in truth he never quite got over it. The scene is being revised, MacDonald's backbone has been refurbished, and he has even had some revenge on his tormentors. Mr A. J. P. Taylor, for example, has given his verdict on the episode. Laski, he tells us, 'worked up the legend that the constitution had been manipulated against Labour during the crisis of 1931 and drew from this the conclusion that socialism could not be introduced with the existing machinery of parliamentary government'.¹⁷ Now that is not exactly what Laski concluded; but if Sir Patrick Hastings could persuade a special jury that it was, presumably there is no reason why an author of a volume in the Oxford History of England could not persuade himself of the same. If, however, one is old-fashioned enough to respect fine distinctions, one should point out that Laski's writings on democratic institutions were conditional. He did not foreclose options. Nor was it with relish that he contemplated the joint impact of the economic crisis and the rising tides of fascism and socialism.

Yet, granting that there was something apocalyptic in the thrust of Laski's argument at the time, it is not at all certain that his loss of confidence in capitalist democracy was unjustified. His speculative hypotheses on the relationship of socialism to traditional political forms in England have not been adequately or even minimally tested. The war, after all, as Professor Titmuss has shown, intruded on to the partisan arena to create by force of circumstances a nascent neo-socialism and ease the pains of what might come after. Despite this, as no one would deny, socialism has never really been attempted, and not only because Labour failed in socialist will. What reasons there might have been for a failure of socialist nerve in 1945 Laski had adumbrated in the thirties, and these were made only the more impelling by the war-exhaustion of the economy and by the international situation. Is it not possible that the entrenched reaction of extra-parliamentary bodies which Laski above all feared never developed because no complete and systematic assault on the profit system was undertaken that would have occasioned it?

'All philosophies of history', a wise historian has written, 'are revelations of true history'. There is no reason why Laski's should be exempt from this rule. But the point here is not only that he reflected reality and thus in turn may even have helped to shape it, as well as its later refractions. More significantly, he gave us an extended historical Baedeker to the vicissitudes and prospects of democratic government. And while the particular events of August and September 1931 assumed for him in the ensuing years greater proportions than from a distance and after so much now seems warranted, the crisis he was then describing in such detail had already been tentatively sketched in The Grammar of Politics (1925). During the spring before the establishment of the National Government, in informal talks at Yale and lectures at the University of North Carolina, Laski argued that the success of parliamentary democracy derived from two principal causes.

The period of its consolidation was one of continuous and remarkable economic expansion; it became associated, accordingly, in men's minds with outstanding material progress. The standard of life increased for every class; and most of the important questions which were debated—the franchise, education, public health, the regulation of women's and children's labour, the place of churches in the state—admitted of a fairly simple solution. More important, perhaps, was the fact that the two main parties in Parliament were agreed about the fundamentals of political action. After the triumph of free trade, there was hardly a measure carried to the statute book by one government which could not equally have been put there by its rivals.¹⁸

These prerequisites, Laski argued, had now vanished, and there was no lack of corroboration in events of the strain on parliamentarism and liberal theory which he saw as the consequence. Rather than being indifferent to the fate of parliamentary institutions, he was anxious—because he perceived value and wisdom in the forms—lest they founder together with the limited social purposes for which they had originally been fashioned.

It is from this perspective that we may understand, for example, his antagonism to MacDonald's National Government or even his mixed response to the coalition under Churchill. For, as he wrote in his summing up on constitutional government,

Mr Ramsay MacDonald's conception of the ideal Parliament as a Council of State in which the Opposition co-operates with the government for the common good—seems to me to come near to opening the door to the one-party state; and the nearer we approach, even by consent, to that condition, the more likely we are to destroy the essential virtues of Parliamentary democracy, which rests above all upon the full freedom of constitutional opposition.¹⁹

Though it may be that his fixation on MacDonald led him into hyperbole, what really weighed on Laski were the practical political implications of the crisis. True, in an otherwise perfunctory business letter to O. G. Villard, he could not resist at least one jab at the 'defects of essential character in MacDonald'. But, writing to the same correspondent some months later, while he still thinks MacDonald's singular achievement to have been blocking 'a peaceful transition to socialism in this country', it is his fear that 'the Tories are demanding a stronger second chamber as insurance against socialism'²⁰ which reactivates his old distrust of traditional institutions and their hostility to radical change. It is for developments such as this and for allowing the king to compromise his formal neutrality, let alone undermine the party system, that Laski heaps ignominy on Labour's former leader. 'It is not, I think, unreasonable to term Mr Ramsay MacDonald's emergence as Prime Minister of the National Government a Palace Revolution.'²¹

Coke's monarch as 'dignified hieroglyphic' was for Laski at once a constitutional principle and a safeguard against the crown's always latent tendency to obstruct the democratic will; and if that implied that the king would have had to sign his own death warrant provided it was voted by the Commons, this was the meaning and price of 1688. He had long argued for the clarification of the boundaries of monarchical power, most notably on the issue of the right of dissolution, and he viewed as inadmissible the emergence of new royal prerogatives relating to the fate of governments Essentially his argument was a formal one, but he thought it wise to illuminate by elementary sociological data the origins and real biases of men of power. Here, it should be said, Laski's seminal study of British cabinets from Addington to Baldwin is, as Guttsman's useful book points out, the very first of the genre.²²

Thus, committed as he was to the institutions of democracy, of choice and opposition, and wary as he was of 'democracies of the general will', he nevertheless believed that 'no political system has the privilege of immortality'.²³ When American federalism seemed to him to flaunt the will of the demos and to apotheosize the irrationality of political rule he did not hesitate to call it obsolescent; and, pausing for a moment over obstacles to the enforcement of civil rights and civil liberties, or over issues Laski scarcely imagined, such as the administration of conscription, who can dismiss his concern as a crochet? Or is the fetishism of structure more appropriate to theory than the mediation between ends and means?

The American frame of reference elucidates just how undogmatic Laski was. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was not designed to create the new society that Laski hoped for. But where he saw a liberal creatively seeking to transcend the limitations of liberalism he there, after great initial scepticism, saw merit. He was not beyond asking, in accusing tones, in his famous debate with Don K. Price on the parliamentary and presidential systems, why

a progressive Democrat, like President Roosevelt, was led to acquiesce in policies which could have no other result than the overthrow of the nascent Spanish democracy in the interest of that Franco whose status as a puppet of Hitler and Mussolini was clear even when the President helped to pave his way to Madrid . . .²⁴

And in Laski's bold ideas, forced now into a wholly experimental cast, Roosevelt, it appears, was much interested. There are on deposit at Hyde Park several not very characteristic notes in F. D. R.'s hand instructing some member of his staff to set up meetings for him with Laski.²⁵ This was a relationship which Laski obviously treasured and he did not compromise it, as he had others, by indiscretion or embroidery.²⁶

Laski told the Americans where he thought they were going wrong. And he did the same to the Russians. Even in those rather embarrassing writings over which the epic of Stalingrad so awesomely presides, he would not let up. Felix Frankfurter used to say that what the later Laski was all about was 'Marxism plus habeas corpus'. But habeas corpus was shorthand for all the demands which Laski would extract from any society, including the Soviet, before he thought it fulfilled the rudimentary requirements of providing the good life for its citizens. All the same he did not adopt a consistent anti-communist posture which he thought, in the contemporary configurations of politics, would almost invariably be manipulated towards inhumane and counter-historical ends. Where he did not believe this was the cost, as within the ranks of the Labour Party, he argued that

for socialists of democratic outlook, the unity demanded by the Communist Party is incompatible with the major purposes for which the Labour Party was brought into being. It would be foolish indeed if . . . the Labour Party . . . should substitute for its own philosophy an outlook which is built upon distrust of the common people and denial of their right to experiment with the institutions of freedom.²⁷

Nor is this an anomaly. Laski was not afflicted by that sin of pride which so often makes Westerners think that coincidence with their own institutions and ideals is the criterion of justice and utility by which to judge the rest of the world.

Neither anomalous nor antediluvian! In fact, from the perspective of the sixties, Laski appears to be quite modern—and this is not intended as a denigration. The wide stirrings among the young, in America no less than in Europe, of anti-anti-communism, to the lament of intellectuals for whom anti-communism has been their stockin-trade and habit for a generation, is reminiscent of radical currents among the intelligentsia between the wars. But these new radicals are not like Bourbons with their notorious learning difficulties. They are ideologically indentured to no centre of power, and if they idealize or romanticize at all it is the dispossessed who engage their unabashed affections. Their philosophy is still a pastiche but it evokes the best of Laski. They talk of countercommunities, and are, in Mississippi and at Aldermaston, perhaps the first since Laski in the twenties seriously to question the traditional doctrine of political obligation. They are already beginning to see that merely because a law prohibits a march or a strike, it cannot prevent it, and they are drawing corollaries which Laski himself once drew. If they were to read Laski now they would also find that his perceptions about the tenuous social peace in the western democracies are akin to their own. He too had given warning that a war of the hungry, in revolt and weary of their suffering, would break out and challenge both the ideology and strength of the sated nations. And if they cared to find a point of common understanding with those who had mobilized the power of colour and of misery they would discover that Laski animated the intellectuals of the underdeveloped world as almost no one else has done. They could read in his pages a sober faulting of aestheticism and solipsistic personalism which would strike a chord in their own rebellion against the ennui of their most immediate memories. A Harvard student, just returned from what is portentously called a 'freedom summer' in the south, burst out, after a long disquisition by his teacher on the guarantees of liberty under the division and separation of powers, that 'the constitution is a lie'. In anger and overstatement, not quite lucidly, what he was saying is that a vast gap exists between 'the state in theory and practice'.

NOTES

¹ Harold J. Laski, Marx and Today (London, 1943), p. 3.

² See Max Lerner in New York Post, 27 March 1950, 30 March 1953, reprinted in Lerner, The Unfinished Country (New York, 1959), pp. 506-9.

³ R. H. S. Crossman, The Charm of Politics (London, 1958), p. 139.

⁴ Edward Hyams, ed., New Statesmanship (London, 1963).

⁵ Henry M. Christman, ed., One Hundred Years of The Nation (New York, 1965), pp. 279-86.

⁶ Herbert Deane, The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski (New York, 1955).

⁷ Many reviews of The American Democracy (1948) shrugged the book off as dated and irrelevant. The civil rights struggle and the fledgling war on poverty of more recent years show, however, just how time-bound such evaluations were.

⁸ Bernard Crick, 'Socialist Literature in the 1950's, The Political Quarterly (London), July-September 1960, p. 361.

⁹ Cited in Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski (New York, 1953), p. 241.

¹⁰ Laski to Max Lerner, 16 August 1948. The Lerner Collection, Yale College Library.

¹¹ See Arnold A. Rogow, James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics and Policy (New York, 1963), pp. 145-8, and Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951), p. 80.

¹² Laski, The Danger of Being a Gentleman (London, 1939), pp. 35-7.

¹³ See Mark de Wolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Laski Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 120, 1206.

¹⁴ Laski, Studies on the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, 1917), p. 11.

¹⁵ Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, 1918), pp. 113, 81.

¹⁶ Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty (New Haven, 1921), p. 29.

¹⁷ A. J. P. Taylor, English History: 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 348. The most extensive criticism of Laski on this score is in Reginald Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis (London, 1958), pp. 361-5, 393-407.

¹⁸ The Weil Lectures at the University of North Carolina were reprinted as Laski, Democracy in Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1935); see p. 33.

¹⁹ Laski, Reflections on the Constitution (Manchester, 1951), p. 71.

²⁰ Laski to O. G. Villard, 1 December 1931, 12 March 1932. The Houghton Library, Harvard University.

²¹ Laski, Parliamentary Government in England (New York, 1938), p. 340 See also Laski, The Crisis and the Constitution: 1931 and After (London, 1932), pp. 31-6.

²² Laski. 'The Personnel of the British Cabinet, 1801-1924', Studies in Law and Politics (London, 1932), pp. 181-201; W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1963), p. 16n.

²³ Laski, 'The Obsolescence of Federalism', The New Republic, 3 May 1939, p. 369.

²⁴ Laski, 'The Parliamentary and Presidential Systems', Public Administration Review, Autumn 1944, pp. 347-59.

²⁵ This is on the authority of Professor Paul Freund of the Harvard Law School. See also James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), p. 204.

²⁶ See, on this, the very sensitive New Yorker review by Edmund Wilson of the Holmes-Laski letters, reprinted in Wilson, The Bit Between My Terms (New York, 1965).

²⁷ Laski, The Secret Battalion (London, 1946), p. 30.