SOURCE: "Laski and British Socialism," in History of Political Thought, Vol. II, No. 3, Winter, 1981, pp. 573-91.

[In the following essay, Greenleaf examines the development of Laski's socialist ideas.]

I

It is just over a quarter of a century now since Harold Laski died. His writings have since received a certain amount of attention, most of it critical, some of it downright pejorative. I confess that for a long while I shared this deprecatory attitude; but lately I have begun to wonder whether it is justified. The main difficulty which has been raised by commentators centres on the matter of consistency. It is pointed out how Laski, beginning as a libertarian pluralist, then seems to swing over to Fabian collectivism, and finally appears to come to rest in some form of Marxist position. And (it is urged or implied) ideological tergiversation of this kind is hardly compatible with a genuine intellectual coherence or seriousness or honesty. Certainly the analysis is plausible and legitimately draws attention to Laski's eclectic and (it might seem) inconstant way of treating issues of political theory and policy.

But the nagging questions recurred. Are we seeing it all wrong? Might we be expecting something inappropriate, or too much? Is there somehow a perspective in which it is possible to discern a thread of consistency running through these labyrinthine ways? This was the kind of point that always seemed to be asserting itself when, recently, I had occasion to read or re-read a good part of Laski's published work. And, after it all, it did seem to me that there may be a more suitable context of interpretation and, as well, just such a dimension of uniformity to be discerned, so that all the windings of the intellectual path Laski followed appear at least to make in the same general direction. And, perhaps, this is all we can reasonably expect.

But before referring to the details of Laski's writings, I would like to sketch a background against which alone (I think) these exegetical specifics assume their proper hue and proportion. And what I have to suggest will consist of three elements or parts. First, some brief, very brief, reflections on the nature of ideological thinking as such: for Laski was above all a political ideologist. And I take the character of this sort of thinking to be essentially equivocal, ambivalent, and even inconsistent—necessarily so. Secondly, to illustrate the kind of doctrinal diversity involved by calling attention to the form and range of the variety of expression to be observed in the context of British Socialism in particular. Then, finally, to say something about the ideas of Laski himself as a writer who, while occupying an admittedly not wholly constant place in the spectrum, nevertheless manifests a greater persistence of purpose and ideas than is often acknowledged.

II

I use the terms 'ideology' and 'doctrine' very loosely indeed, and synonymously, simply to mean a set of attitudes and beliefs about political and social arrangements. Socialism is one such confluence of ideas and policies; Conservatism and Liberalism are others, though these do not, of course, complete the list of exemplary possibilities. And the initial point is that any such syndrome of assumptions, arguments, and purposes—any ideology—manifests a notable variety of internal differences. For one thing, there may be disagreement about the precise nature of the objectives to be sought and the means of their achievement or the priority of their pursuit. For another the language of discussion and persuasion used need by no means be constant; the often disparate idioms and concepts of religion, the moral life, natural science, the law, history, philosophy, and economics are alike commonly deployed and in no uniform fashion: fellow partisans can urge even similar goals in very varied ways (just as the same sort of argumentation drawn from a common world of discourse can be used to contrasting purpose by ideological opponents). In addition, the level of delivery achieved will fluctuate markedly for not all doctrine is articulated on the same plane of expression. The ephemeral effusion of the party diatribist or pamphleteer is to be distinguished from a more considered or extensive justification of position in which there is reference to, or examination of, some kind of general principle drawn perhaps from conventional norms of political behaviour and assessment, from ethical criteria, or whatever it might be. And this in turn has to be differentiated from the mature exploration of a political creed, deliberately set within the framework of a philosophy, a view of things as a whole. And at any level, the case can be put with more or less skill and sophistication, systematically or otherwise. In addition, the emphasis of a political doctrine is never static; it is always changing, continually being modified. Its exposition is subject not only to the spell of intellectual fashion and the varied possibilities of different modes of expression, it is also, to an important extent, at the mercy of circumstance and all sorts of external pressures. For it constitutes a kind of rhetoric swayed by all the winds of obliquity to which the hustings are open; and what is said may be more indicative of what the speaker thinks will persuade an audience than of what he himself deems convincing. And different contexts of blandishment and artifice may suggest an array of themes not wholly conformable to one another. For, properly and necessarily, it could never be said of the politician what Goldsmith wrote of the country preacher: 'Unpractis'd he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour.'²

Yet in the study of any such themes the entire range of manner and attainment revealed has to be contained within the designated ideological pale. And the student of these matters, faced with such dissimilarities of stance and expression, may feel impelled to seek stability amid the chaos by looking for some constant core of ideas which underlies the different versions of theory and policy. When achieved, this essence would be taken to constitute a standard of credal identity and purity. What is involved is a sort of Platonic attempt to transcend the contingency and vagaries of the world of ideological Becoming and to attain the immutable certainty of real Being manifested in the unchanging doctrinal Idea.

But such an enterprise is not without difficulties, problems that, in the end, must lead to a rejection of the procedure in view, however reasonable it may appear at first sight and however subtle its application. For the truth is that not only does it prove impossible in practice to achieve an adequate or agreed reduction, but also that any attempt to do so is bound to be misleading. It is found that by no means all the exemplars of the doctrine concerned represent the components of its supposed core in the same way, combination, or extent; that it is not easy to reduce to such a denominator the rich variety of personalities and ideas in evidence: too much refuses to fit into the nice conformity of a delimited and unchanging system. Of course, the ideological imprimatur could be refused to writers whose work fails to conform to the established stereotype. But this procedure is all too likely to violate common political usage and to this extent at least to be unsatisfactory. And it would involve something like heresy—not necessarily a belief in any false quantity but an exaggeration of an aspect of things which is insisted on to the damage or denial of other equally important facets of the whole truth. It is the depiction of a caricature rather than a full (and multiform) characterization of the ideology in question. Moreover even if it were feasible to separate agreed basic themes of a general kind from other, less noumenal, elements in the doctrine, these could not entail any necessary consequences as to issues of detailed policy or action so that in their application (if not in their theoretical statement) a wide diversity of programmatic possibilities must be reintroduced rather than transcended or avoided.

J. S. Mill surely had this sort of consideration in mind when, in the Chapters on Socialism, he wrote that 'One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas'.³ Equally a recent observer of the ideological character of Liberalism firmly and properly rejected any attempt on the citadel of 'essentialism' as a means of establishing the nature of the doctrine he was describing.⁴ Conservatives, of course, usually (or at least very often) pride themselves on not possessing any systematic theory of things at all.

I suggest it follows that students of the logical form of political doctrines must reckon on and accept variety, change, inconsistency, and even contradiction as features intrinsic to their subject-matter. And they can only define their area of concern by admitting as inevitable the many diversities and contrasts they detect and then delimiting them by observation of the extreme and antithetical manifestations within which the point of view appears to be confined. The basic rule of analysis is that any ideology is essentially ambivalent in the principles, arguments, and policies it encompasses.

It may be this point is really pretty obvious; and I would not have laboured it as I have were it not for the apparently continuing appeal of the other approach, the search for a doctrinal core or nucleus—as in Dr. B. C. Parekh's recent analysis of the concept of Socialism in the symposium of that name which he edited.⁵ He finds the essential character of Socialism, that which distinguishes it from other political creeds, in its 'specific conception of man and society'. But the themes of which this conception is said to consist are so general that they can encompass a range of meaning thus admitting in interpretation just the diversity of ideas it is intended to exclude. Moreover it is admitted that the central principles concerned are by no means exclusive to Socialist writers. Nor, of course, does every writer called Socialist accept them all. It is simply necessary, therefore, to accept that Socialism is 'an intellectual Proteus' and that it assumes a multifarious appearance—and so does every other political ideology.⁶

III

It is in this general context, then, that the second point arises, a specific historical question about the precise nature of the variety to be observed in British Socialism in particular. In fact, the limits of the native brand of the doctrine seem to be set by the two rather distinct, and ultimately contrasting, motives or goals that have been at work in this Socialism over the past century and a half. These poles of endeavour, potentially so antithetical, are (on the one hand) organization and efficiency, and (on the other) liberty, fulfilment, and moral regeneration. Of course, these ends may be intertwined but equally they may involve distinct emphases that emerge in a more than notional separation. This is especially the case so far as one major question (perhaps the major question) of political thought is concerned: that is, the attitude to be adopted to the state and its proper role and purpose. For if the object is to organize society correctly, indeed, scientifically, to eliminate all the wastes and defects that have hitherto disfigured the conduct of our economic and social affairs, then the achievement of this purpose will involve supervision and control. It will necessarily mean a growth in governmental or some surrogate power (such as that of a party) and this may not be easily compatible with the continuation of extensive freedom of personal choice and action. Yet the alternative aim of realizing an ethical ideal, it may be of making it possible for the individual to develop his abilities and attain his potential, has in the end a different kind of motivation or order of priorities. The protest here is not primarily about the inefficiency of the existing arrangements but rather about their pitiless inequity, their immorality and godless nature even. And while in the reform of this state of affairs the role of public authority may not be unimportant, it can (from this second point of view) never be more than a means of transient significance. Indeed—and this is the crucial point of difference—because of the control this public activity involves, it may be seen, in the last resort, as a positive hindrance to the fulfilment of the moral purpose; and so the restriction or even elimination of the state may be a condition of the achievement of the Socialist ideal interpreted in this way.

Let me illustrate this ambiguity which is at the heart of British Socialism with some concrete examples. And let me add, too, that, of course, the groups to which I shall now refer were themselves not without internal diversity; though it is their most extravagant aspect which really presses for notice here.

What the reorganizational or statist aspect of Socialism may entail is suitably represented by the Fabians (or many of them) who believed that the key to the transformation of society was not so much the cultivation and recognition of democracy or self-sustaining individuality but rather wise and authoritative direction from above. Sidney Webb was as honestly blunt about this in public as his wife was in the privacy of her diary. He was certain the best government was no longer that which governed least but that which could 'safely and advantageously administer most'. It was foolish, he said, to suppose that the affairs of 'a complicated industrial state' could be run 'without strict subordination and discipline, without obedience to orders'; it was 'to dream, not of Socialism, but of anarchism'. In any such community, however formally democratic it might be, affairs would perforce become 'more and more the business of persons elaborately trained and set apart for the task, and less and less the outcome of popular feeling'.⁷ Efficiency in production, the achievement of the national minimum, and other forms of betterment demanded a society deliberately organized on 'scientific' principles by an administrative élite of superior knowledge and experience. 'We wish', wrote Mrs. Webb, 'to introduce into politics the professional expert—to extend the sphere of government. . . .'⁸

Because of sentiments such as these it is easy to see why the Fabians are so appropriately regarded as representative exponents of a directorial Socialism. Nor is it surprising that they exemplified such a 'habit of authority' given the kind of persons they were, their backgrounds and callings, and the nature of the intellectual tradition (from Bacon to Bentham and St.-Simon as it were) by which they were influenced. There are two comments or observations by which (I always think) this Fabian ethos is nicely (and humorously) caught. One is Max Beerbohm's cartoon of Mr. Sidney Webb on his birthday: he is shown, short-trousered and kneeling on the nursery floor, moving manikin people and politicians about like so many toy soldiers. The other is G. K. Chesterton's remark that 'Mrs. Sidney Webb . . . settles things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state, as she might the servants in a kitchen.'⁹

Yet by no means all Socialists have been content with this Fabian (or Webbian) ethos even though it has been so influential in forming the mind and policy of the Labour movement in this country. Consider initially the very perceptive remarks of a foreign observer, the Spanish journalist Ramiro de Maeztu. He had many English connexions, lived in this country for a number of years (before and during the Great War), and moved in Fabian and similar circles. He was impressed, but not persuaded. The Webbs and their like, he wrote, 'looked upon officialism as the instrument of Divine Providence for the solution of social problems'; and though they were certainly the enemies of the rich and would abolish their wealth in favour of common ownership, the means by which this transformation would be effected was the state, and this would have certain consequences which were not at all desirable. The passages in which the Spaniard reflects on the Fabian scene are significant. This state, he says, 'will not be as the idealogues appear to think, a pure entity of reason, but a government, an executive power, a bureaucracy; and the men who will assume the power under it now possessed by the capitalists will consequently be men of flesh and bone, constituted as a governing class.' Maeztu recognized that under such a régime it was likely that the workers would enjoy better conditions of life than under capitalism but, he added, 'at bottom, they will have done no more than change their masters and their form of government.'¹⁰

These remarks indicate the other major strand in this country's Socialist tradition, one that is indeed hostile to what the Fabians and their followers have stood for. Socialism, in this other guise, was often far removed from questions of statist reorganization or executive efficiency. For people like Robert Blatchford and Keir Hardie, Bruce Glasier and Sidney Ball, it could never simply concern the acquisition of political power, a nationalization programme, or anything like that: it was rather a matter of Christian love and service, of the common humility of men before God: the doctrine—or, better, the faith—was a direct deduction from moral principles or it was nothing. The stark Calvinism of Tawney's 'self-consciously religious' creed is perhaps one of the fullest expressions of what is involved. And the rejection of mere administrative tinkering or social engineering—what he called 'a de-humanized socialism'—is manifest in his writings. Late in life, and with an obvious jibe at the welfare state which he regarded as Fabian-inspired, Tawney said he was sure that 'However the socialist ideal may be expressed, few things could be more remote from it than a herd of tame animals with wise rulers in command.'¹¹

There is one particular aspect of this anti-Fabian brand of Socialism that is especially relevant here and that is the protest against the large-scale, against the centralized bureaucracy and control that seemed necessarily to be implied by Fabianism (and this, despite its frequent concern with administrative diffusion as in the doctrine of Municipal Socialism). This pluralist theme took many forms but one important version of the tendency which flourished in the period about the Great War was that of the guildsmen. The Guild Socialists believed in the abolition of the private ownership of the instruments of production but were much afraid of the collectivist state that might develop if centralizing officials had the greatest sway. State control and nationalization were not, in themselves, policies adequate to achieve Socialism because such programmes never seemed to give sufficient attention to the fact that work was the central feature of a person's life. Man was primarily a producer; and so the just society was one in which he had meaningful control over his working life and could make this more satisfying. Political democracy and action could never be enough, therefore, not least because the only result (if affairs were conducted on Fabian lines) would be to place the worker in greater subjection than before to superior (in this case bureaucratic) authority that would, in fact, be even more autocratic than the power it succeeded because it could claim to be the agent of the popular will. So the Fabian political goals should be replaced as Socialist priorities by the pursuit of economic democracy and various forms of direct action in industry which, in due course, would be reorganized through a series of self-governing associations. For the guildsmen the state is, then, a threat and an enemy and it cannot be accepted as the dominating force in the community or easily used, as the Fabians naively wished, as the main instrument of reform. Rather, society has to be seen pluralistically as an array of groups of diverse sorts. The individual seeks fulfilment through them and not primarily through the territorial state which can indeed claim no real primacy and is simply one association among many.

There is thus a world of difference between the Webbian and Guild versions of Socialism; and this difference is, for me, above all reflected in the career and theories of the real founder of the Guild idea in this country, the young architect from York, Arthur J. Penty, a nowadays much-forgotten prophet but a writer who was described in 1922 by a sympathetic observer as 'one of the most interesting of living men . . . one of the two or three truly original minds of the modern world'.¹² On moving to London, Penty joined the Fabian Society but was subsequently disenchanted with the prospects it offered. He then said he found Fabianism 'ugly, complacent and arrogant: its ideal could be defined as efficient emptiness.'¹³ This uncongenial attitude was, for him, epitomized (he was after all an architect) in the way the Webbs chose the design for the new LSE buildings. Penty says they simply worked out which plan had the largest classroom area and decided on this basis quite regardless of such other factors as proportion, appearance, taste, facilities, and the like. For him this typified the narrow, material pragmatism that characterized the Fabians. With his fellow guildsmen he did not believe it was enough to make industrialism efficient and simply to see to the equitable distribution of its product. This was to be concerned with a relatively superficial aspect of the contemporary problem. Instead, it was really industrialism and technology themselves that must be mitigated where it mattered, at the point of production, so as to give to the masses a sense of creative participation and fulfilment in their working lives, the dominant part of their existence.

Penty summarized his anti-Fabianism in this way: 'In the days of Collectivism the State was idealized. Always a necessity, the State was converted by Collectivists into The Good. . . . For every social evil there was one and only one remedy—apply the magic formula of State control, and evil would be suddenly transformed into good.' But this, he went on, was 'a pure illusion'. The collectivists demand that the state 'should take over and administer land, capital and the means of production and exchange; not understanding that... the highly centralized State of modern times is itself a part of or a symptom of the disease of society, and that the remedy is not to be found in the direction of increasing [its role].'¹⁴

It would be foolish to pretend that since the time when that was written, on the eve of the Guild Socialist collapse, Fabian collectivism has not been triumphant. But there has remained a substantial undertow of the other current of thought, as Professor W. B. Gwyn of Tulane University (among others) has latterly reminded us.¹⁵ Moreover, perhaps because of the further substantial extensions of state activity over the half century that has elapsed since the guildsmen's day, there has occurred of late a fascinating recurrence of ideas that in substantial part they would recognize as their own.¹⁶ In particular, of course, there has been the recent rash of publication and discussion about the extension of the representative principle to economic life, about industrial democracy and the idea of workers' control.

British Socialism has not, therefore, been a single, uniform phenomenon resting on a constant core of unchanging ideas but has manifested a more complex life oscillating in its particular expression between the two extreme tendencies just described: one statist and directorial, the other anti-statist and pluralist. And, in this context, part of the interest attaching to Harold Laski's ideas derives from the way in which they draw on both these aspects of Socialist thought and hold them together in what may seem a rather uneasy alliance. At the same time, and despite the many indications to the contrary, it seems to me that, although he often plunges in a collectivist direction, basically Laski favours a libertarian view of Socialist doctrine. At least, the conclusion I came to (on studying the canon) was that he reflects both a typical ideological ambivalence and as well a certain, though never complete, tendency to favour one side of the spectrum.

IV

Later in life Laski claimed he had been a Socialist ever since his school-days.¹⁷ Certainly as a young man he kept radical company and supported an array of unconventional causes. But, of course, it was through the exploration of group theory in particular that he first discovered a congenial political theme, one he elaborated to such effect indeed that he became, as one commentator of the twenties had it, 'the accepted leader of contemporary political pluralism'.¹⁸

From the outset, therefore, his views were strongly antistatist: we have, he wrote in one early essay, been too frankly worshippers of the state. He was very critical of the 'abstract' 'chimera' of absolute legal sovereignty, of what in one place he called 'our thoughtless Austinianism', because he did not see how it could ever offer a realistic 'basis for a working philosophy' of political and social relationships.¹⁹ Monistic doctrine was administratively incomplete and ethically inadequate. The individual personality and its capacity for fellowship could not be exhausted by membership of the state only: man 'refuses that reduction to unity'.²⁰ So Laski stressed instead the primacy of other associations through which above all individuals found fulfilment, groups (like clubs, trade unions, churches, and so forth) which in no sense derived their life or their rights from some kind of concession from the state: they were 'simply basic'.²¹ He was naturally most concerned as well that the power of central government should be kept within bounds. He was very much alive to the dangers of functionarism, even of otherwise desirable social legislation, because of the official trammels it would impose on individual freedom, and the way in which it would hinder initiative and a sense of self-reliance. Moreover, whatever public authority was envisaged ought to be decentralized: localism should be revived and strengthened; the only free society is one that is 'basically federal in nature'.

This is the sort of political case Laski was developing during and after the Great War, and it is reminiscent in a number of ways of what are called classical Liberal ideas: many of his comments at this time would undoubtedly have much gratified Herbert Spencer or the members of the British Constitution Association (a contemporary pressure group devoted to showing how the demands of biological evolution required the diminution of state control). He described his distrust of the drift towards governmental regulation; thought that one good thing to come out of the war was the discovery that state Socialism meant a bureaucracy utterly incompatible with liberty. He worried about government intervention in industrial disputes; deplored the consequences of what he called 'the triumph of socialized liberalism in 1906'; and he was not above adopting very social Darwinist views on the need to allow people to develop their varied talents as fully and as freely as possible, this being the only way to substantial progress. And it should always be remembered that his orientation in respect of political theory was not primarily derived from Socialist sources at all. He was then mainly under the influence of people like Barker, Figgis, Maitland, and Duguit and the context within which he initially explored the ideas they offered was a religious one. Following Figgis in particular he was most concerned with the relationship between the state and the churches as the crucial case concerning the place of groups in society: he believed (with Figgis) that political liberty was the fruit of ecclesiastical resistance to 'the all-devouring Leviathan'. And it was in long and learned essays on such subjects as the difficulties of the Free Church of Scotland, Irish Church Reform, the tractarians, the Oxford movement, and ultramontanism that Laski first formulated his pluralist warning against the 'all-absorptive state' and his assertion of the autonomy of corporate life. Apart from a certain affinity with the guild or syndicalist position (which however he explicitly repudiated) none of it had any necessary or obvious connexion with Socialism at all—an interesting example of what might be called 'ideological overlap'. At the same time, aspects of these religious debates with such an association did begin increasingly to attract his attention.

This widening concern seems to have been caused by a number of influences. One was nominalistic criticism (particularly that of Morris Cohen) of the idea that groups had an independent corporate life. Another was the growing realization that the crucial social forces are of an economic nature and that political authority is simply their 'handmaid'. However, this insight was not at all, I think, of specifically Marxist provenance; much more important was his personal experience of the United States. It was there brought home to him that the property relation was fundamental and that the crucial struggle in society was not that between church and state but between capital and labour.

He began to examine the implications of all this in a number of the papers he published in the early 1920s. The core of the discussion is the notable hiatus between political and economic life. The former was already well suffused by the idea of representative democracy; the great question of the day is, however, whether this principle can be extended to the economic field, and private ownership substantially replaced by some kind of producers' control.

In what is possibly his most well-known work,A Grammar of Politics (1925), Laski examined in considerable detail the theoretical basis of this extension of the democratic idea and, as well, its institutional implications. The book constitutes, in effect, a more or less complete programme of social, economic, and political reform to show how to do this. It is not worked out in quite the programmatic detail of, say, the Liberal 'yellow book' which appeared not long after; but there is often substantial attention to the specifics of policy. Nor is the book's general style wholly new: there are some notable resemblances, for instance, to Sidgwick's The Elements of Politics (especially in the concern with instrumental details and the attempt to relate these to theoretical principles); and much is owed, too, to Idealist political thought (the doctrine of rights, for instance). Nevertheless it is an impressive original achievement. Tawney's tracts apart, nothing quite like it had previously appeared in the Labour Party context or was to appear again for some time, for another thirty years in fact.

And, as Laski begins systematically to explore what is involved in the changes he supports, an apparent paradox appears: a growing role emerges for the state as a major instrument of reform. If a wider form of welfare is to be achieved, if a greater degree of equality is to be pursued, if industrial organization is to be democratized in terms both of its ownership and operation, then the sphere of public action must be extended so as to attain these ends. It is this undoubted aspect of the book which has led to its being characterized as collectivist in the Fabian manner and to the suggestion that it thereby stands in contrast to the earlier pluralism. And Laski frankly admitted that there was a difference of emphasis. But I think the contrast can be (and usually has been) exaggerated.

For one thing, the possibility of positive government is not one suddenly realized for the first time. Even in his pluralist stage, Laski had accepted that, in certain circumstances and on certain conditions, state power might be exercised to promote the good life for the community. So this aspect of affairs is not in principle new even if the scope of action envisaged may be notably greater. Moreover the effect of the enhanced role he now envisages for the state reinforced all his old fears of centralized power and bureaucracy. Far from being abated this concern is heightened. He continues to criticize the doctrine of absolute legal sovereignty; asserts that whatever exercise of state power is permitted must be strictly limited to specific purposes justified on moral grounds; and uses indeed the old language of Duguit and Maeztu (that Tawney had also taken over), writing about legitimate arrangements as being 'functional' in form, and urging that the only test of social organization is the service it can render. The theme is pursued, of course, in the detailed analysis of the doctrine of rights Laski took from T. H. Green. He also continues to regard the state primarily as a kind of 'public service corporation' and to insist (in the pluralist fashion) that it is simply one association among many and, to individuals seeking to become their best selves, not always the most important. He has by no means given up the belief that society is 'essentially federal in its nature' and writes in the old way about the reality of group life in church or trade union and of the claims of this life against those of the territorial state. And he is always on the look-out for ways in which the dangers of increased centralization and the growth of bureaucratic power may be mitigated. If he does indeed now consider the state has a greater part to play, then he also devotes a substantial amount of time and effort to such topics as how to ensure wide participation, consultation, and informed criticism; the development of local initiative; the devolution of power; the application of the representative principle to industry (state-owned or otherwise); and so on.

So, while there are in the Grammar emphases of an undoubtedly collectivist kind, these seem nevertheless to be premeditated within the framework of thought Laski had already established and do not constitute a wholly new departure of ideas. It would be wrong to think of him at this time simply as a convert to Webbism and as having forgotten the pluralism of which he had previously been a leading exponent. He is concerned with how to achieve practical reform in a genuinely diverse society. And if this involves a greater role for one important association, the state, this is a growth of power which is always contingent on or limited to the fulfilment of a proper purpose and one which must be safeguarded by appropriate institutional precautions. Laski is no simple Fabian collectivist. Often he seems not too sure about what he has recommended in respect of growing state control and continually wonders whether his advocacy has not done violence to essential principles of human association. He remains at heart a pluralist or libertarian who has to admit the practical necessity of a more active public authority but who never ceases to be perturbed about the dangers to individual freedom involved. His notorious inconclusiveness about the meaning of the concept of liberty simply reflects this unease.

His first view is that, in libertarian fashion, the idea rests on absence of restraint on individual action. This notion he repeats in the Grammar; but he also introduces there a more positive concept of the idea, now defining freedom as a series of opportunities or conditions that must be created to enable a person to fulfil his personality. But only four years later, in the preface to a new edition of the book, Laski says (without altering the main text at all) that he had changed his mind: the assertion of a positive view of freedom was 'a mistake' which he wanted to retract so as to return to the older notion of 'absence of restraint' as a safeguard to the citizen's personality. This is blunt, and startling, for it is in effect, a withdrawal of whatever collectivist emphasis there was in the Grammar: further evidence, that is, of the basic importance to Laski of the libertarian ideal. The publication in 1930 of Liberty in the Modern State is an attempt to achieve some stability amid the vacillation. This is attained through the covert re-introduction of the positive definition; but again it is significant that this is associated with a stress on the need continually to be on guard against undue encroachments by the public power.

He was indeed persuaded (at the very time when he was writing the Grammar) that 'the true Socialism is a libertarian, and not an authoritarian, Socialism'.²²

But even if it might be conceded that up to, say, 1930, Laski's major themes were pluralist ones with some increasing collectivist tendencies emerging within that context, it may still be urged that the Laski so far revealed is quite different from the later Marxist theorist of the 1930s and 1940s. Here surely there is a major qualitative change? But, again, this by now orthodox view does not seem wholly satisfactory.²³ Naturally it is not that there is no difference at all; there certainly is. But it is not quite the alteration usually implied: if Laski was or became a Marxist, then he was undoubtedly also 'a Marxist with a difference'.²⁴

There is no question he became explicitly critical of his earlier pluralism, urging in particular that the attack on legal sovereignty was not pressed far enough in that it failed to grasp the class nature of the state; and in the works he produced from the early 'thirties onward the conceptual and verbal apparatus of Marxist thought was often notably present. The distinct impression is created that he has, so to say, been converted to Marxism, the broad truth and pragmatic relevance of the doctrine being confirmed for him by the trend of contemporary events especially the rise of Fascism.

Yet this deliberate commitment may be misleading and imply a greater change of thought than really occurred. The way Laski himself tried to cast off his ideological past tends to create a false impression and to direct attention away from the substantial elements of continuity which remain. What is really involved is rather a change of emphasis and idiom than a basic switch of credal allegiance. I believe it is more appropriate to say, of the mass of books and articles Laski produced in the last two decades of his life, that they were not so much different because they were Marxist as that they were extensive illustrations of basic ideas long held and now explored in the favoured radical language of the day.²⁵ There was (so to say) a translation of ideas; or—to change the metaphor—the Marxism was a kind of fashionable veneer applied to the timber he had long worked.

For instance, he had many times asserted that the authority of government is used to sustain the interests of those who wield economic power and was a vital factor in the class war between capital and labour. In the early 1920s and even before, he had written about this 'historical truism' (as he called it) and about the outcome of unrest, repression, and civil war that might be anticipated.²⁶ It is not a theme he develops only in the 1930s and after although he sometimes gave the impression it was. Also the political focus of the capitalist crisis as seen in the later works was equally a familiar topic in the earlier ones too; that is, the crucial problems arising from the incompatibility between the economic and social situation on the one hand and the principles of representative democracy on the other. Again, Laski himself always seemed to take particular delight in playing down the originality of Marx and, when discussing the development of the ideas of class war and the economic basis of political power, referred to a long string of observers from Aristotle to St.-Simon who had anticipated Marx in this respect: Marx was one name only in the pantheon of illustrious predecessors.²⁷ And it was not one that Laski always highly commended; because, as well, he never ceased to be critical and partial in his Marxism. He was scathing about people he described as 'fanatics who cling to a Marxian historical analysis which serious students have long regarded as obsolete'.²⁸ In addition he never himself dallied with the metaphysics or the scientific determinism; and he passed by much of the detailed economic analysis. His works are searched in vain for much reference to the laws of the growth and concentration of capital; and far from anticipating as inevitable the increasing pauperization of the proletariat, he positively admires the wholesale process of concession and improvement that has occurred in working-class conditions, and has doubts rather because the capitalist system may not be able to continue in this way and will have to be replaced by arrangements that will make it possible, than that working-class life will collapse into poverty as Marx foretold. Further, he always found the Communist notion of an élitist party completely anathema (witness, for instance, his denunciation in the post-war pamphlet entitled The Secret Battalion). And in some quarters at least, Laski's Marxism was very suspect and he was there viewed rather as 'the faithful servant' of the capitalist ruling class.²⁹ It is clear, too, that the extent to which the later works reflect Marxist belief varies very much. In some of the books—like the pre-war trilogy and the wartime reflections—it may be dominant; in others the analysis is compatible rather with the populist radicalism with which he had long been associated. I think this is true, for instance, of both his Parliamentary Government in England (1938) and his post-war criticism of The American Democracy (1949). Sometimes, too, he asserted a book was Marxist more than reading shows it really was. Take, for example, the polemic published in 1944 entitled Faith, Reason and Civilisation. In the preface Laski writes that his purpose is 'to try to exhibit in a general way the Marxist approach' to the issues with which the work deals. But examine the text itself. There is, it is true, a persistent stress on what he calls 'the Soviet idea'—but he had been something of an admirer of the Russian revolution for a long time so this was nothing new. This apart, the dogma does not especially obtrude through the wordiness of the wartime rhetoric; and, of course, the anti-Christian sentiments which do strongly inform this work merely reflect at length the radical agnosticism of his younger days, an irreligion that appears so often, too, in his long correspondence with Mr. Justice Holmes.

The truth be told Laski's Marxism was very selective and uneven. Perhaps it was the element in Marx of moral, humanitarian protest that Laski really found most congenial, the passion for freedom and justice rather than any purely intellectual or instrumental paraphernalia. He certainly said this on more than one occasion.³⁰ And if Marxism is at bottom a kind of anarchism, looking to the withering away of the state, then to this element Laski could certainly commit his loyalties with perfect consistency because it was one of the pluralist (or libertarian) beliefs that had been important to him from the beginning.

Moreover Laski's concerns during the 1940s, at the height of his so-called Marxist period, reflected one central issue of long-standing interest: the problem of ensuring that, during a time when a notable increase in state control could be envisaged, there were developed pari passu ways of democratizing the economic process, of ensuring through what he called institutional 'multiformity' a numerous range of possibilities for popular involvement and otherwise protecting the freedom and initiative of the individual.³¹ He clearly still has in mind the kind of arrangements he had been preoccupied with in the Grammar and before that even.³² In 1950, in the last book published before he died, he still writes in conscious evocation of the old pluralist theme, asking how the stoutest hook can most effectively be put in Leviathan: 'I confess to a frank fear of what I used to call the "monistic" state.... Its consequence is in a high degree evil.'³³ He is here simply echoing the anxiety that had possessed him three decades before at the outset of his intellectual career.

It might, of course, be said that this interpretation of the later Laski, if it is to be sustained, must face the question what it is to be a 'genuine' Marxist. What are the criteria for saying that a person's thought employs or depends on Marxist categories? Part of the answer must be, of course, that there is no more a nuclear core of essential Marxist ideas than there is for any other doctrine. There is a range of Marxist positions, just as there are even different Marxes: which is the true, the essential, Marx, the Marx of the 1844 manuscripts or the Marx of Capital? the humanitarian idealist or the scientific sociologist? Like any other set of ideas, 'Marx' and 'Marxism' is an array of aims, arguments, and assumptions that may, indeed, often seem contradictory or at least not easily consistent. Moreover, amid this intellectual welter there is much that is shared with other doctrines; as Marx himself, for instance, admitted his great indebtedness to bourgeois economists, or as he was always strongly influenced by Hegelian notions. Now there is no way at all of denying the fact that Laski made increasing use of some Marxist concepts and terminology. Whether this made him a 'genuine' Marxist or not, it is very difficult to say. What must be noted is that it is easy to detect, in his so-called Marxist period, the steady continuance of previously established concerns coupled with both a very selective use of Marxist themes and at the same time a very keen criticism of various aspects of the doctrine. Maybe it is too harsh and cavalier a summary to say that the Marxism was mere window-dressing; but that the Marxism was in some way simply an incremental layer added to an existing palimpsest of ideas it is (I believe) unreasonable to doubt.

V

In this sense, then, it is possible to detect, in Laski's many writings, not only an obvious variation of style and emphasis but also a certain uniformity of concern. He clearly exemplifies the lesson that had been read centuries before, that the way is beset by those that contend on the one side for too great liberty and on the other for too much authority and that it is hard to pass between the points of both unwounded. Yet the sometimes uneasy coexistence of these different elements or stresses in his work is hardly an occasion for surprise, or criticism for that matter. It is simply an example of the nature of ideological thinking which (as I urged at the outset) is always likely to exhibit a range of possibility and expression. And altogether apart from the changes and developments that might be expected in the ideas of anyone over a period of thirty years or more, it has also to be recalled that for much of his career Laski was active in public life and trying to influence many different types of audience. It might even be said that he was really a politician who also happened to be an academic: a great deal of what he wrote was undoubtedly geared to passing controversy. And given this the wonder is perhaps that his doctrine did not vary more than it did. One irony is that he recognized himself the likelihood of intellectual dissipation in giving up to the platform what was meant for the study. What he wrote of Lamennais might be fitly applied to his own case: 'his books are no longer read; for they were written essentially for a series of specific situations and the great work he dreamed of writing he did not live to complete'.³⁴ But, in any event, what he did achieve conveniently reflects the diversity of emphasis to be found in British Socialism as a whole and manifests that essential ambivalence which is the marked characteristic of any ideological thinking. For what the old Staffordshire poet said of fortune can aptly be applied to political doctrine: it is always 'full of fresh varietie' and 'Constant in nothing but inconstancie.'³⁵

NOTES

¹ This paper was originally delivered as a public lecture in the University of London. I am grateful to Mr. T. A. Smith of Queen Mary College for thus prompting its composition. Some passages prefigure certain themes of my British Political Tradition, Volume II: 'The Ideological Heritage' (forthcoming).

² O. Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, lines 145-6.

³ J. S. Mill, Collected Works, ed. Robson et al. (London, 1963ff.), v. 750.

⁴ D. J. Manning, Liberalism (London, 1976), pp. 60-1, 139-40.

⁵ B. C. Parekh (ed.), The Concept of Socialism (London, 1975), introduction.

⁶ The phrase cited is H. G. Wells': see his The New Machiavelli (1911; Penguin ed., 1946), p. 91.

⁷ S. Webb, The Basis and Policy of Socialism (London, 1908), pp. 57, 71; The Necessary Basis of Society (Fabian tract no. 159; London, 1911), p. 6.

⁸ B. Webb, Our Partnership (London, 1948), pp. 97, 120.

⁹ The cartoon has often been reprinted, see e.g. M. Cole, The Webbs and their Work; Chesterton's comment occurs in his The Victorian Age in Literature (rev. edn., London 1920), p. 91.

¹⁰ R. de Maeztu, Authority, Liberty and Function (London, 1916), pp. 92, 199.

¹¹ Speeches given on various occasions, Tawney MSS, LSE, cited R. Terrill, R.H. Tawney and his Times (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 155.

¹² G. K. Chesterton in a preface to Penty's Post-industrialism (London, 1922), p. 7. Penty (who died in 1937) has not been accorded an entry in the D.N.B.

¹³ From an unpublished autobiographical fragment cited in S. James, 'Arthur J. Penty: Architect and Sociologist', The American Review, IX (1937), p. 95.

¹⁴ This and the preceding citations are from Penty's Towards a Christian Sociology (London, 1923), pp. 66-8.

¹⁵ W. B. Gwyn, 'The Labour Party and the Threat of Bureaucracy', Political Studies, XIX (1971), pp. 383-402.

¹⁶ cf. A. W. Wright, 'Guild Socialism Revisited', Journal of Contemporary History, IX (1974), pp. 165-80; R. S. Barker, 'Guild Socialism Revisited?', The Political Quarterly, XLVI (1975), pp. 246-54.

¹⁷ In W. H. Auden et al., I Believe (London, 1940), pp. 163-4.

¹⁸ W. Y. Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Freedom and the Constitutional State (1928; repr. New York, 1968), p. 167. cf. ibid., p. 143.

¹⁹ H. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1917; repr. London, 1968), pp. 118, 202, 245, 273; 'Notes on the Strict Interpretation of Ecclesiastical Trusts', Canadian Law Times, XXXVI (1916), p. 206; The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (London, 1921), p. 29.

²⁰ H. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, Conn., 1919), pp. 313-14.

²¹Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 4-5, 272; Laski to Holmes (22 July 1916), M. D. Howe (ed.), Holmes-Laski Letters: the Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935 (London, 1953), i. 7; The Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 85. On the concession theory, cf. ibid., pp. 143-5, 152, 157, 167-70.

²² H. Laski, Socialism and Freedom (Fabian tract no. 216; London, 1925), p. 12.

²³ For a recent example, see V. George and P. Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare (London, 1976), ch. 5, where Laski's thought is discussed entirely in a Marxist context.

²⁴ K. Martin, Harold Laski (1893-1950): A Biographical Memoir London, 1953), p. 87.

²⁵ cf. H. Laski, Where Do We Go From Here? (Hammersmith, 1940, repr. 1941), p. 44.

²⁶ Among many relevant passages, see e.g. Authority in the Modern State, pp. 38, 40, 52, 81, 92; 'The Pluralistic State' repr., The Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 238; Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 15-17; A Grammar of Politics, pp. 249, 278, 524; Howe, (ed.), Holmes-Laski Letters, i. 75, 206, 274, 328.

²⁷Authority in the Modern State, pp. 38, 48-9, 88; Duguit, Law in the Modern State (1913; trans. F. and H.J. Laski, London, 1919), pp. xiii-xiv, xxiv-xxv; H. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (London, 1935), p. 159.

²⁸ H. Laski, Trade Unions in the New Society (London, 1950), p. 84.

²⁹ Anon. 'The Voice of the Mean: Mr. Laski's Political Career', Indian Forum, I (1934), pp. 49-57. cf. G. Delisle Burns in The Green Leaf, no. 7 (15 June 1927), p. 701; R. Fox, A Defence of Communism: in Reply to H. J. Laski (London, 1927).

³⁰ H. Laski, Karl Marx (1921; repr. London, 1925), pp. 44-6; 'Marxism after Fifty Years', Current History, XXXVII (1932-3), p. 696; Marx and Today (London, 1943).

³¹ H. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1943; repr. London, 1944), pp. 163, 220, 307-11, 316-18, 325, 341-3; Will Planning Restrict Freedom? (Cheam, 1944), pp. 6-8, 16; The Dangers of Obedience and other Essays (New York, 1930), p. 72.

³²Will Planning Restrict Freedom?, pp. 5-10, 16, 18-19, 31.

³³Trade Unions in the New Society, pp. 42, 158.

³⁴Authority in the Modern State, p. 190.

³⁵ Richard Barnfield, 'The Shepherd's Content' (1594) in Poems, 1594-1598, ed. Arber (Westminster, 1896), p. 27.