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Harold Laski
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Harold Laski
Born Harold Joseph Laski
30 June 1893
Manchester, England
Died 24 March 1950 (aged 56)
London, England
Political party Labour
Spouse(s) Frida Kerry (m. 1911)
Academic background
Alma mater New College, Oxford
Influences: Neville Figgis[1] Otto von Gierke[1] Frederic William Maitland[1] John Lewis Paton[2]
Academic work
Discipline
Economics history political science
Sub-discipline
Political economy political theory
School or tradition: Socialism
Institutions London School of Economics
Doctoral students
Ralph Miliband Franz Neumann
Notable students: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Jawaharlal Nehru C. B. Macpherson V. K. Krishna Menon K. R. Narayanan Pierre Trudeau
Notable works A Grammar of Politics (1925)
Influenced: Robert Dahl Jawaharlal Nehru
Harold Joseph Laski (30 June 1893 – 24 March 1950) was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party during 1945–1946, and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism, emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930 he shifted to a Marxist emphasis on class conflict and the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent.[3] Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy came under further attack from Winston Churchill in the 1945 general election and the Labour party had to disavow Laski, its chairman.[4]
Laski was one of Britain's most influential intellectual spokesmen for socialism in the interwar years. In particular, his teaching greatly inspired men (such as Jawaharlal Nehru) who later became leaders of new nations in Asia and Africa as the British Empire dissolved. He was perhaps the most prominent intellectual in the Labour Party, especially for those on the left who shared his trust and hope in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.[5] He was distrusted by the Labour politicians who were in charge, such as Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and was never given a major government position or a peerage.
Early life and education
Harold Laski was born in Manchester on 30 June 1893 to Nathan Laski and Sarah Laski (born Frankenstein). Nathan Laski was a Jewish cotton merchant from Brest, Belarus[6] and a leader of the Liberal Party, while his mother was born in Manchester to Polish Jewish parents.[7] He had a disabled sister named Mabel who was 1 year younger. His elder brother was Neville Laski, while a cousin (Neville Blond) was the founder of the Royal Court Theatre and father of the author and publisher Anthony Blond.[8]
Harold attended the Manchester Grammar School. In 1911, he studied eugenics under Karl Pearson for six months. The same year he met and married Frida Kerry, a lecturer of eugenics. His marriage to Frida, a gentile and eight years his senior, antagonised his family. He also repudiated his faith in Judaism, claiming that reason prevented him from believing in God.
In 1914, he obtained a degree in history from New College, Oxford. He was awarded the Beit memorial prize during his time at New College.
He failed his medical eligibility tests and thus missed fighting in World War I. After graduation he worked briefly at the Daily Herald under George Lansbury. His daughter Diana was born in 1916.[9]
Academic career
In 1916, Laski was appointed as a lecturer of modern history at McGill University and also started lecturing at Harvard University. He also lectured at Yale in 1919–20. For his outspoken support of the Boston Police Strike of 1919, Laski received severe criticism. He was briefly involved with the founding of The New School for Social Research in 1919.[10]
Laski cultivated a large network of American friends centred at Harvard, whose law review he had edited. He was invited often to lecture in America and wrote for The New Republic. He became friends with Felix Frankfurter as well as Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and Charles A. Beard. His long friendship with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was cemented by weekly letters, which have been published.[11] He knew many powerful figures, and claimed to know many more. Critics have often commented on Laski's repeated exaggerations and self-promotion, which Holmes tolerated. His wife commented that he was "half-man, half-child, all his life."[12]
Laski returned to England in 1920 and began teaching government at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1926, he was made professor of political science at the LSE. Laski was an executive member of the socialist Fabian Society during 1922–1936. In 1936, he co-founded the Left Book Club along with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey. He was a prolific writer, producing a number of books and essays throughout the 1920s and 1930s.[13]
While at the LSE in the 1930s, Laski developed a connection with scholars from the Institute for Social Research, more commonly known today as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, with almost all the institute's members now in exile, Laski was among a number of British socialists, including Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney, to arrange for the establishment of a London office for the institute's use. After the institute's move to Columbia University in 1934, Laski was one of its sponsored guest lecturers invited to New York.[14] Laski also played a role in bringing Franz Neumann to join the institute. After fleeing Germany almost immediately after Hitler's takeover, Neumann did graduate work in political science under Laski and Karl Mannheim at the LSE, writing his dissertation on the rise and fall of the rule of law. It was on Laski's recommendation that Neumann was then invited to join the institute in 1936.[15]
Teacher
As a lecturer, Laski was brilliant, but he would alienate his audience by humiliating people who asked questions. However, he was popular amongst his students, and was especially influential among Asian and African students who attended LSE.[12] Describing Laski's popularity, Kingsley Martin wrote in 1968:
Ralph Miliband, another student of Laski, praised his teaching as follows:
His lectures taught more, much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting ... His seminars taught tolerance, the willingness to listen although one disagreed, the values of ideas being confronted. And it was all immense fun, an exciting game that had meaning, and it was also a sieve of ideas, a gymnastics of the mind carried on with vigour and directed unobtrusively with superb craftsmanship. I think I know now why he gave himself so freely. Partly it was because he was human and warm and that he was so interested in people. But mainly it was because he loved students, and he loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager and enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave world in which he so passionately believed.[17]
Ideology and political convictions
Laski's early work promoted pluralism, especially in the essays collected in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1917), Authority in the Modern State (1919), and The Foundations of Sovereignty (1921). He argued that the state should not be considered supreme, because people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions, and societies. The state should respect these allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation.[18]
Laski became a proponent of Marxism and believed in a planned economy based on the public ownership of the means of production. Instead of, as he saw it, a coercive state, Laski believed in the evolution of co-operative states that were internationally bound and stressed social welfare.[19] He also believed that, since the capitalist class would not acquiesce in its own liquidation, the cooperative commonwealth was not likely to be attained without violence. But he also had a commitment to civil liberties, free speech and association, and representative democracy.[20] Initially, he believed that the League of Nations would bring about an "international democratic system". However, from the late 1920s his political beliefs became radicalised and he believed that it was necessary to go beyond capitalism to "transcend the existing system of sovereign states". Laski was dismayed by the Hitler–Stalin pact of August 1939 and wrote a preface to the Left Book Club collection criticising it, Betrayal of the Left.[21] Between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the United States into the war in 1941, Laski was a prominent voice advocating American support for the allied powers, becoming a prolific author of articles in the American press, frequently undertaking lecture tours in the US, and influencing prominent American friends including Felix Frankfurter, Edward R. Murrow, Max Lerner, and Eric Sevareid.[22] In his last years he was disillusioned by the Cold War and the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.[9][13][20] George Orwell described him as "A socialist by allegiance, and a liberal by temperament".[12]
Laski was always a Zionist at heart and always felt himself a part of the Jewish nation, although he viewed traditional Jewish religion as restrictive.[23] In 1946, Laski said in a radio address that the Catholic Church opposed democracy,[24] and he thinks that "it is impossible to make peace with the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in the human spirit."[25]
Laski tried to mobilise Britain's academics, teachers, and intellectuals behind the socialist cause; the Socialist League was one effort. He had some success but this element typically found itself marginalised in the Labour Party.[26]
Political career
Laski's main political role came as a writer and lecturer on every topic of concern to the left, including socialism, capitalism, working conditions, eugenics, woman suffrage, imperialism, decolonisation, disarmament, human rights, worker education, and Zionism. He was tireless in his speeches and pamphleteering, and was always on call to help a Labour candidate. In between he served on scores of committees and carried a full load as a professor and advisor to students.[27]
Laski plunged into Labour party politics on his return to London in 1920. In 1923, he turned down the offer of a parliament seat and cabinet position by Ramsay MacDonald, and also a seat in the Lords. He felt betrayed by MacDonald in the crisis of 1931, and decided that a peaceful, democratic transition to socialism would be blocked by the violence of the opposition. In 1932, Laski joined the Socialist League, a left-wing faction inside the Labour Party.[28] In 1937, he was involved in the failed attempt by Socialist League in co-operation with the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain to form a Popular Front to bring down the Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain. During 1934–45, he served as an alderman in the Fulham Borough Council and also the chairman of the libraries committee.
In 1937, the Socialist League was rejected by the Labour Party and folded. He was elected as a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, of which he remained a member until 1949. In 1944, he chaired the Labour party conference and served as the party's chair during 1945–46.[18]
Declining role
During the war, he supported Prime Minister Churchill's coalition government and gave countless speeches to encourage the battle against Germany. He suffered a nervous breakdown brought about by overwork. During the war he repeatedly feuded with other Labour leaders, and with Churchill, on matters great and small. He steadily lost his influence.[29]
In the 1945 general election campaign Churchill warned that Laski—as the Labour Party chairman—would be the power behind the throne in an Attlee government. While speaking for the Labour candidate in Nottinghamshire on 16 June 1945, Laski said, "If Labour did not obtain what it needed by general consent, we shall have to use violence even if it means revolution". He was replying to a question planted by Conservatives hoping to get exactly that response. The next day, accounts of Laski's speech appeared and the Conservatives attacked the Labour Party for its chairman's advocacy of violence. Laski filed a libel suit against the Conservative Daily Express newspaper. The defence showed that over the years Laski had often bandied about loose threats of "revolution". The jury found for the defendant within forty minutes of deliberations.[30]
Clement Attlee gave Laski no role in the new Labour government. Even before the libel trial, Laski's relationship with Attlee was a strained one. Laski had once called Attlee "uninteresting and uninspired" in the American press and even tried to remove him by asking for Attlee's resignation in an open letter. He tried to delay the Potsdam Conference until after Attlee's position was clarified. He tried to bypass Attlee by directly dealing with Winston Churchill.[13] Laski tried to preempt foreign policy decisions, laying down guidelines for the new Labour government. Attlee rebuked him:
Though he continued to work for the Labour party until his death, he never regained political influence. His pessimism deepened as he disagreed with the anti-Soviet policies of the Attlee government in the emerging Cold War, and he was profoundly disillusioned with the conservative direction of American policy.[18]
Laski contracted influenza and died in London on 24 March 1950, aged 56.[18]
Legacy
Laski's biographer Michael Newman wrote:
Blue plaque, 5 Addison Bridge Place, West Kensington, London
Herbert A. Deane has identified five distinct phases of Laski's thought that he never integrated. The first three were pluralist (1914–1924), Fabian (1925–1931), and Marxian (1932–1939). There followed a 'popular-front' approach (1940–1945), and in the last years (1946–1950) near-incoherence and multiple contradictions.[33] Laski's long-term impact on Britain is hard to quantify. Newman notes that "It has been widely held that his early books were the most profound and that he subsequently wrote far too much, with polemics displacing serious analysis."[18]
However, Laski had a major long-term impact on support for socialism in India and other countries in Asia and Africa. He taught generations of future leaders at the LSE, most famously, his prize student, Jawaharlal Nehru. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, "the centre of Nehru's thinking was Laski" and "India the country most influenced by Laski's ideas".[20] It is mainly due to his influence that the LSE has a semi-mythological status in India. He was steady in his unremitting advocacy of the independence of India. He was a revered figure to Indian students at the LSE. One Indian Prime Minister of India said "in every meeting of the Indian Cabinet there is a chair reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski".[34][35] His recommendation of K. R. Narayanan (later President of India) to Jawaharlal Nehru (then Prime Minister of India), resulted in Nehru appointing Narayanan to the Indian Foreign Service.[36] In his memory, the Indian government established The Harold Laski Institute of Political Science in 1954 at Ahmedabad.[18]
Speaking at a meeting organised in Laski's memory by the Indian League at London on 3 May 1950, Nehru praised him as follows:
Laski also educated the outspoken Chinese intellectual and journalist Chu Anping at LSE. Anping was later prosecuted by the Chinese Communist regime of the 1960s.[38]
Laski was an inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943).[39] The posthumously published Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman, include a detailed description of Rand attending a New York lecture by Laski, as part of gathering material for her novel, following which she changed the physical appearance of the fictional Toohey to fit that of the actual Laski.[40]
Laski had a tortuous writing style. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" cited, as his first example of extremely bad writing, a 53-word sentence from Laski's "Essay in Freedom of Expression" that contains five negative phrases.
Partial bibliography
• Basis of Vicarious Liability 1916 26 Yale Law Journal 105
• Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty 1917
• Authority in the Modern State 1919, ISBN 1-58477-275-1
• Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham 1920
• The Foundations of Sovereignty, and other essays 1921
• Karl Marx 1921
• The state in the new social order 1922
• The position of parties and the right of dissolution 1924
• A Grammar of Politics, 1925
• Socialism and freedom 1925
• The problem of a second chamber 1925
• Communism, 1927
• The British Cabinet : a study of its personnel, 1801-1924 1928
• Liberty in the Modern State, 1930
• "The Dangers of Obedience and Other Essays" 1930
• The limitations of the expert 1931
• Democracy in Crisis 1933
• The State in Theory and Practice, 1935, The Viking Press
• The Rise of Liberalism, 1936
• The American Presidency, 1940
• Where Do We Go From Here? A Proclamation of British Democracy 1940
• Reflections on the Revolution of our Time , 1943
• Faith, Reason, and Civilisation, 1944
• The American Democracy, 1948, The Viking Press
• The Rise of European Liberalism
See also
• American studies in the United Kingdom
References
1. Deane, Herbert A. (2008). "Laski, Harold J.". International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Thomson Gale. Retrieved 4 May2019.
2. Lamb, Peter (2014). "Laski's Political Philosophy Today: Socialism for an Individualist Age" (PDF). Retrieved 4 May 2019.
3. Bill Jones (1977). The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. Manchester University Press. p. 16.
4. Kenneth R. Hoover (2003). Economics As Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 164.
5. Michael R. Gordon (1969). Conflict and Consensus in Labour's Foreign Policy, 1914–1965. Stanford UP. p. 157.
6. UK, Naturalisation Certificates and Declarations, 1870–1916
7. 1871 England Census
8. Obituary: Anthony Blond, telegraph.co.uk, 1 March 2008
9. Lamb, Peter (April 1999). "Harold Laski (1893–1950): Political Theorist of a World in Crisis". Review of International Studies. 25 (2): 329–342. doi:10.1017/s0260210599003290. JSTOR 20097600.
10. http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=9060
11. M. de Wolfe, ed., Holmes–Laski letters: the correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski (2 vols. 1953)
12. Schlesinger, 1993
13. Mortimer, Molly (September 1993). "Harold Laski: A Political Biography. – book reviews". Contemporary Review.
14. Martin Jay The Dialectical Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p.30, 115
15. Franz Neumann Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009, p. ix–x
16. Kingsley Martin (1968). Editor: a second volume of autobiography, 1931–45. Hutchinson. p. 94. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
17. Michael Newman (2002). Ralph Miliband and the politics of the New Left. Merlin Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-85036-513-9. Retrieved 22 April2012.
18. Newman, Michael. "Laski, Harold Joseph (1893–1950)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 11 June 2013doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34412
19. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (Transaction Publishers, 2009) p. 242
20. Schlesinger, Jr, Arthur. "Harold Laski: A Life on the Left". The Washington Monthly. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
21. Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain, 1939–1945 (Panther Books, 1969) p. 733.
22. O'Connell, Jeffrey; O'Connell, Thomas E. (1996). "The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Harold Laski". Maryland Law Review. 55 (4): 1387–1388. ISSN 0025-4282. Retrieved 23 July 2014.
23. Yosef Gorni, "The Jewishness and Zionism of Harold Laski," Midstream(1977) 23#9 pp 72–77.
24. "Catholic Church for Democracy, Foley Says in Reply to Laski", Poughkeepsie Journal, 7 February 1946, p. 9. (Newspapers.com)
25. "Walls Have Ears", Catholic Exchange, 13 April 2004
26. Robert Dare, "Instinct and Organization: Intellectuals and British Labour after 1931," Historical Journal, (1983) 26#3 pp. 677–697 in JSTOR
27. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left(1993)
28. Ben Pimlott, "The Socialist League: Intellectuals and the Labour Left in the 1930s," Journal of Contemporary History (1971) 6#3 pp. 12–38 in JSTOR
29. T. D. Burridge, "A Postscript to Potsdam: The Churchill-Laski Electoral Clash, June 1945," Journal of Contemporary History (1977) 12#4 pp. 725–739 in JSTOR
30. Rubinstein, Michael (1972). Wicked, wicked libels. Taylor & Francis. pp. 167–168.
31. Martin Pugh (2010). Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party. Random House. p. 282.
32. Michael Newman, "Laski, Harold" in Fred M. Leventhal, ed., Twentieth-century Britain: an encyclopedia (Garland, 1995) p 441-42.
33. Deane, Herbert A. The Political Ideas of Harold Laski (1955)
34. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, The Penguin Press, 1993
35. Guha, Ramachandra (23 November 2003). "The LSE and India". The Hindu.
36. Gandhi, Gopalakrishna (2 December 2005). "A remarkable life-story". Frontline. Archived from the original on 7 February 2010.
37. "Tributes to Harold Laski". The Hindu. 4 May 1950. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
38. Fung, Edmund S. K. (2000). In search of Chinese democracy: civil opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949. Cambridge University Press. p. 309. ISBN 978-0-521-77124-5.
39. Olson, Walter (1998). "The Writerly Rand", Reason.com, October 1998
40. Rand, Ayn (1997). Harriman, David, ed. "Journals of Ayn Rand". New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94370-6. OCLC 36566117.
Further reading
• Deane, H. The Political Ideas of Harold Laski (1955)
o The Viscount Hailsham (Quintin Hogg), "The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski by Herbert A. Deane: Review," Yale Law Journal, (1955) 65#2 pp 281–88 in JSTOR
• Ekirch, Arthur. "Harold Laski: the Liberal Manqué or Lost Libertarian?" Journal of Libertarian Studies (1980) 4#2 pp 139–50.
• Elliott W. Y. "The Pragmatic Politics of Mr. H. J. Laski," American Political Science Review (1924) 18#2 pp. 251–275 in JSTOR
• Greenleaf, W. H. "Laski and British Socialism," History of Political Thought (1981) 2#3 pp 573–591.
• Hawkins, Carroll, "Harold J. Laski: A Preliminary Analysis," Political Science Quarterly (1950) 65#3 pp. 376–392 in JSTOR
• Hobsbawm, E.J., "The Left's Megaphone," London Review of Books (1993) 12#13 pp 12–13. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n13/eric-hobsb ... -megaphone
• Kampelman, Max M. "Harold J. Laski: A Current Analysis," Journal of Politics (1948) 10#1 pp. 131–154 in JSTOR
• Kramnick, Isaac, and Barry Sheerman. Harold Laski: A Life on the Left' (1993) 669pp
• Lamb, Peter. "Laski on Sovereignty: Removing the Mask from Class Dominance," History of Political Thought (1997) 28#2 pp 327–42.
• Lamb, Peter. "Harold Laski (1893–1950): political theorist of a world in crisis," Review of International Studies (1999) 25#2 pp 329–342.
• Martin, Kingsley. Harold Laski (1893–1950) A Bibliographical Memoir (1953)
• Miliband, Ralph. "Harold Laski's Socialism" (1995 [written 1958/59]) Socialist Register 1995, p. 239–65 (on marxists.org website)
• Morefield, Jeanne. "States Are Not People: Harold Laski on Unsettling Sovereignty, Rediscovering Democracy," Political Research Quarterly(2005) 58#4 pp. 659–669 in JSTOR
• Newman, Michael. Harold Laski: A Political Biography (1993), 438pp
• Newman, Michael. "Laski, Harold Joseph (1893–1950)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 11 June 2013 doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34412
• Peretz, Martin. "Laski Redivivus," Journal of Contemporary History (1966) 1#2 pp. 87–101 in JSTOR
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur. "Harold Laski: A Life on the Left," Washington Monthly (1 November 1993) online
External links
• Works by Harold Joseph Laski at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Harold Joseph Laski at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Harold Laski at Internet Archive
• Works by Harold Laski at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Biography and various quotations regarding Laski
• Brief biographical sketch from the London School of Economics
• Neil Clark Harold Laski,the Man who influenced Ralph Miliband New Statesman, 3 January 2013.
• Newspaper clippings about Harold Laski in the 20th Century Press Archives of the German National Library of Economics
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Freda, along with many October Club stalwarts, had started out as a member of the Labour Club and then gravitated towards the breakaway group. 'The idealism of our generation was the idealism of helping the underprivileged,' she recalled. 'If the Labour Club to which I belonged ... had any meaning, it was showing that we cared if people hadn't got enough food when they took the government dole, and we did care if the hunger marchers went all the way from Reading to London, we cared if there were children in the slums with no shoes and that children hadn't got enough food.' Her years in Oxford, she said, were 'radical years ... we used to attend all the clubs like the Labour Club and later on the more extreme October Club ... The whole atmosphere was electric with social demands and social change. We were, as it were, the Depression generation.' [38] Both Freda and Bedi attended the socialist G.D.H. Cole's lectures and Harold Laski's seminars on Marx and -- in a joint activity which served to demonstrate both their intellectual and personal compatibility -- they scoured the British Library to track down Marx's journalism about India.
-- 2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT, by Andrew Whitehead
Harold Laski
Born Harold Joseph Laski
30 June 1893
Manchester, England
Died 24 March 1950 (aged 56)
London, England
Political party Labour
Spouse(s) Frida Kerry (m. 1911)
Academic background
Alma mater New College, Oxford
Influences: Neville Figgis[1] Otto von Gierke[1] Frederic William Maitland[1] John Lewis Paton[2]
Another visitor to South Africa during the period of the Kindergarten was H. A. L. Fisher. Fisher, a famous historian in his own right, can be regarded as one of the founders of the Kindergarten and was a member of the Milner Group from at least 1899. The chief recruiting for the Kindergarten, beyond that done by Milner himself, was done by Fisher and his close friend Sir William Anson. The relationships between these two, Goschen, and Milner were quite close (except that Milner and Anson were by no means close), and this quartet had a great deal to do with the formation of the Milner Group and with giving it a powerful hold on New College and All Souls. Fisher graduated from New College in 1888 and at once became fellow and tutor in the same college. These positions were held, with interruptions, until 1912, when Fisher left Oxford to become Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. He returned to New College as Warden for the last fifteen years of his life (1925-1940). Fisher originally expected to tutor in philosophy, but his appointment required him to teach history. His knowledge in this field was scanty, so it was amplified by vacation reading with A. L. Smith (the future Master of Balliol, an older contemporary of Milner's at Balliol, and a member of the Milner Group). Smith, in addition to teaching Fisher history, also taught him how to skate and to ride a bicycle and worked with him on the literary remains of Fisher's brother-in-law, Frederic W. Maitland, the great historian of the English law. As a result of this last activity, Fisher produced in 1911 a three-volume set of Maitland's Collected Works, and a biographical sketch of Maitland (1910), while Smith in 1908 published two lectures and a bibliography on Maitland. Smith's own biographical sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by another member of the Milner Group, Kenneth Norman Bell (Fellow of All Souls, 1907-1914; Beit Lecturer in Colonial History, 1924-1927; and member of the family that controlled the publishing house of G. Bell and Sons). His son, Arthur Lionel Foster Smith, was a Fellow of All Souls under Anson (1904-1908) and later organized and supervised the educational system of Mesopotamia (1920-1931).
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
Academic work
Discipline
Economics history political science
Sub-discipline
Political economy political theory
School or tradition: Socialism
Institutions London School of Economics
Doctoral students
Ralph Miliband Franz Neumann
Notable students: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Jawaharlal Nehru C. B. Macpherson V. K. Krishna Menon K. R. Narayanan Pierre Trudeau
Notable works A Grammar of Politics (1925)
Influenced: Robert Dahl Jawaharlal Nehru
Harold Joseph Laski (30 June 1893 – 24 March 1950) was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party during 1945–1946, and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism, emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930 he shifted to a Marxist emphasis on class conflict and the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent.[3] Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy came under further attack from Winston Churchill in the 1945 general election and the Labour party had to disavow Laski, its chairman.[4]
Laski was one of Britain's most influential intellectual spokesmen for socialism in the interwar years. In particular, his teaching greatly inspired men (such as Jawaharlal Nehru) who later became leaders of new nations in Asia and Africa as the British Empire dissolved. He was perhaps the most prominent intellectual in the Labour Party, especially for those on the left who shared his trust and hope in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.[5] He was distrusted by the Labour politicians who were in charge, such as Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and was never given a major government position or a peerage.
Early life and education
Harold Laski was born in Manchester on 30 June 1893 to Nathan Laski and Sarah Laski (born Frankenstein). Nathan Laski was a Jewish cotton merchant from Brest, Belarus[6] and a leader of the Liberal Party, while his mother was born in Manchester to Polish Jewish parents.[7] He had a disabled sister named Mabel who was 1 year younger. His elder brother was Neville Laski, while a cousin (Neville Blond) was the founder of the Royal Court Theatre and father of the author and publisher Anthony Blond.[8]
Harold attended the Manchester Grammar School. In 1911, he studied eugenics under Karl Pearson for six months. The same year he met and married Frida Kerry, a lecturer of eugenics. His marriage to Frida, a gentile and eight years his senior, antagonised his family. He also repudiated his faith in Judaism, claiming that reason prevented him from believing in God.
Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.
-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain", by Dan Stone
In 1914, he obtained a degree in history from New College, Oxford. He was awarded the Beit memorial prize during his time at New College.
The original members of the Milner Group came from well-to-do, upper-class, frequently titled families. At Oxford they demonstrated intellectual ability and laid the basis for the Group. In later years they added to their titles and financial resources, obtaining these partly by inheritance and partly by ability to tap new sources of titles and money. At first their family fortunes may have been adequate to their ambitions, but in time these were supplemented by access to the funds in the foundation of All Souls, the Rhodes Trust and the Beit Trust, the fortune of Sir Abe Bailey, the Astor fortune, certain powerful British banks (of which the chief was Lazard Brothers and Company), and, in recent years, the Nuffield money....
In the sixth (1893) and seventh (1899) wills, the personnel of the trustees shifted considerably, ending up, at Rhodes's death in 1902, with a board of seven trustees: Lord Milner, Lord Rosebery, Lord Grey, Alfred Beit, L. L. Michell, B. F. Hawksley, and Dr. Starr Jameson. This is the board to which the world looked to set up the Rhodes Scholarships....
[Lionel] Curtis was registered as an undergraduate at New College for fourteen years (1891-1905) because he was too busy to take time to get his degree. This is undoubtedly also the reason he was admitted to All Souls so belatedly, since an ordinary fellowship requires as a qualification the possession either of a university prize or of a first-class honours degree. By the time Curtis took his degree he had fought in the Boer War, been Town Clerk of Johannesburg, and been assistant secretary for local government in the Transvaal. In 1906 he resigned his official positions to organize "Closer Union Groups" agitating for a federation of South Africa. When this work was well started, he became a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council and wrote the Transvaal draft of a projected constitution for such a federation. In 1910-1912, and at various times subsequently, he traveled about the world, organizing Round Table Groups in the Dominions and India. In 1912 he was chosen Beit Lecturer in Colonial History at Oxford, but gave it up in 1913 to turn his attention for almost six years to the preparatory work for the Government of India Act of 1919. He was secretary to the Irish Conference of 1921 (arranged by General Smuts) and was adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office for the next three years. In 1919 he was one of the chief — if not the chief, — founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and during the 1920s divided his attention between this and the League of Nations — in neither case, however, in a fashion to attract public attention....
[Abe] Bailey was not only the chief financial support of the Kindergarten's activities for closer union in South Africa, but also the first financial contributor to The Round Table in 1910, and to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919. He contributed to both during his life, and at his death in 1940 gave The Round Table £1000 a year for an indefinite period. He had given the Royal Institute £5000 a year in perpetuity in 1928. Like his close associates Rhodes and Beit, he left part of his immense fortune in the form of a trust fund to further imperial interests. In Bailey's case, the fund amounted to £250,000....
The Rhodes Trust was already in operation when Milner returned from Africa in 1905, with the actual management of the scholarships in the hands of George Parkin, who had been brought from his position as Principal of Upper Canada College by Milner.... The real control of the trust has rested with the Milner Group from 1902 to the present. Milner was the only really active trustee and he controlled the bureaucracy which handled the trust. As secretary to the trustees before 1929, we find, for example, George Parkin (1902-1920), Geoffrey Dawson (1921-1922), Edward Grigg (1922-1925), and Lord Lothian (1925-1940) — all of them clearly Milner's nominees. On the Board of Trustees itself, in the same period, we find Lord Rosebery, Lord Milner, Lord Grey, Dr. Jameson, Alfred Beit, Lewis Michell, B. F. Hawksley, Otto Beit, Rudyard Kipling, Leopold Amery, Stanley Baldwin, Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher, Sothern Holland, and Sir Edward Peacock....
A somewhat similar situation existed in respect to the Beit Railway Fund. Although of German birth, Alfred Beit became a British subject and embraced completely the ideas on the future role of the British Empire shared by Rhodes and Milner. An intimate friend of these and of Lord Rosebery, he was especially concerned with the necessity to link the British possessions in Africa together by improved transportation (including the Cape to Cairo Railway). Accordingly, he left £1,200,000 as the Beit Railway Trust, to be used for transportation and other improvements in Africa. The year before his death (1906), he was persuaded by the Milner Group to establish a Beit Professorship and a Beit Lecturership in Colonial History at Oxford. The money provided yielded an income far in excess of the needs of these two chairs, and the surplus has been used for other "imperialist" purposes. In addition, Beit gave money to the Bodleian Library at Oxford for books on colonial history. In 1929, when Rhodes House was opened, these and other books on the subject were moved from the Bodleian to Rhodes House, and the Beit Professor was given an office and lecture hall in Rhodes House.... There have been only two incumbents of the Beit Professorship since 1905: Hugh Edward Egerton in 1905- 1920, and Reginald (Sir Reginald since 1944) Coupland since 1920. Egerton, a member of the Cecil Bloc and the Round Table Group, was a contemporary of Milner's at Oxford whose father was a member of the House of Commons and Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He was originally private secretary to his cousin Edward Stanhope, Colonial Secretary and Secretary of War in Lord Salisbury's first government. In 1886, Egerton became a member of the managing committee of the newly created Emigrants Information Office. He held this job for twenty years, during which time he came into the sphere of the Milner Group, partly because of the efforts of South Africa, and especially the British South Africa Company, to encourage emigration to their territories, but also because of his Short History of British Colonial Policy, published in 1897. On the basis of this contact and this book, he was given the new Beit Chair in 1905 and with it a fellowship at All Souls. In his professional work he constantly supported the aims of the Milner Group, including the publication of Federations and Unions within the British Empire (1911) and British Colonial Policy in the Twentieth Century (1922). His book Canadian Constitutional Development, along with Sir Charles Lucas's edition of Lord Durham's reports, was the chief source of information for the process by which Canada was federated used by the Milner Group. He wrote the biography of Joseph Chamberlain in the Dictionary of National Biography, while his own biography in the same collection was written by Reginald Coupland. He remained a Fellow of All Souls and a member of the Milner Group until his death in 1927, although he yielded his academic post to Reginald Coupland in 1920. Coupland, who was a member of the Milner Group from his undergraduate days at New College (1903-1907), and who became one of the inner circle of the Milner Group as early as 1914, will be discussed later. He has been, since 1917, one of the most important persons in Britain in the formation of British imperial policy.
The Beit Railway Trust and the Beit chairs at Oxford have been controlled by the Milner Group from the beginning, through the board of trustees of the former and through the board of electors of the latter. Both of these have interlocking membership with the Rhodes Trust and the College of All Souls. For example, the board of electors of the Beit chair in 1910 consisted of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, the Regius Professor of Modern History, the Chichele Professor of Modern History, the Secretary of State for Colonies, Viscount Milner, H. A. L. Fisher, and Leopold Amery. By controlling All Souls and the two professorships (both ex-officio fellowships of All Souls), the Milner Group could control five out of seven electors to the Beit professorship. In recent years the board of electors has consistently had a majority of members of All Souls and/or the Milner Group. In 1940, for example, the board had, besides three ax-officio members, two members of All Souls, a Rhodes Trustee, and H. A. L. Fisher.
The Beit Lectureship in Colonial History was similarly controlled. In 1910 its board of electors had seven members, four ex-officio (The Vice-Chancellor, the Regius Professor of History, the Chichele Professor of History, the Beit Professor) and three others (A. L. Smith, H, A. L. Fisher, and Leopold Amery). In 1930 the board consisted of the Vice- Chancellor, the Beit Professor, H. A. L. Fisher, F. M. Powicke, and three fellows of All Souls. As a result, the lectureship has generally been held by persons close to the Milner Group
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
He failed his medical eligibility tests and thus missed fighting in World War I. After graduation he worked briefly at the Daily Herald under George Lansbury. His daughter Diana was born in 1916.[9]
Academic career
In 1916, Laski was appointed as a lecturer of modern history at McGill University and also started lecturing at Harvard University. He also lectured at Yale in 1919–20. For his outspoken support of the Boston Police Strike of 1919, Laski received severe criticism. He was briefly involved with the founding of The New School for Social Research in 1919.[10]
Laski cultivated a large network of American friends centred at Harvard, whose law review he had edited. He was invited often to lecture in America and wrote for The New Republic. He became friends with Felix Frankfurter as well as Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and Charles A. Beard. His long friendship with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was cemented by weekly letters, which have been published.[11] He knew many powerful figures, and claimed to know many more. Critics have often commented on Laski's repeated exaggerations and self-promotion, which Holmes tolerated. His wife commented that he was "half-man, half-child, all his life."[12]
Laski returned to England in 1920 and began teaching government at the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1926, he was made professor of political science at the LSE. Laski was an executive member of the socialist Fabian Society during 1922–1936. In 1936, he co-founded the Left Book Club along with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey. He was a prolific writer, producing a number of books and essays throughout the 1920s and 1930s.[13]
While at the LSE in the 1930s, Laski developed a connection with scholars from the Institute for Social Research, more commonly known today as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, with almost all the institute's members now in exile, Laski was among a number of British socialists, including Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney, to arrange for the establishment of a London office for the institute's use. After the institute's move to Columbia University in 1934, Laski was one of its sponsored guest lecturers invited to New York.[14] Laski also played a role in bringing Franz Neumann to join the institute. After fleeing Germany almost immediately after Hitler's takeover, Neumann did graduate work in political science under Laski and Karl Mannheim at the LSE, writing his dissertation on the rise and fall of the rule of law. It was on Laski's recommendation that Neumann was then invited to join the institute in 1936.[15]
Teacher
As a lecturer, Laski was brilliant, but he would alienate his audience by humiliating people who asked questions. However, he was popular amongst his students, and was especially influential among Asian and African students who attended LSE.[12] Describing Laski's popularity, Kingsley Martin wrote in 1968:
He was still in his late twenties and looked like a schoolboy. His lectures on the history of political ideas were brilliant, eloquent, and delivered without a note; he often referred to current controversies, even when the subject was Hobbes's theory of sovereignty.[16]
Ralph Miliband, another student of Laski, praised his teaching as follows:
His lectures taught more, much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting ... His seminars taught tolerance, the willingness to listen although one disagreed, the values of ideas being confronted. And it was all immense fun, an exciting game that had meaning, and it was also a sieve of ideas, a gymnastics of the mind carried on with vigour and directed unobtrusively with superb craftsmanship. I think I know now why he gave himself so freely. Partly it was because he was human and warm and that he was so interested in people. But mainly it was because he loved students, and he loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager and enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave world in which he so passionately believed.[17]
Ideology and political convictions
Laski's early work promoted pluralism, especially in the essays collected in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1917), Authority in the Modern State (1919), and The Foundations of Sovereignty (1921). He argued that the state should not be considered supreme, because people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions, and societies. The state should respect these allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation.[18]
Laski became a proponent of Marxism and believed in a planned economy based on the public ownership of the means of production. Instead of, as he saw it, a coercive state, Laski believed in the evolution of co-operative states that were internationally bound and stressed social welfare.[19] He also believed that, since the capitalist class would not acquiesce in its own liquidation, the cooperative commonwealth was not likely to be attained without violence. But he also had a commitment to civil liberties, free speech and association, and representative democracy.[20] Initially, he believed that the League of Nations would bring about an "international democratic system". However, from the late 1920s his political beliefs became radicalised and he believed that it was necessary to go beyond capitalism to "transcend the existing system of sovereign states". Laski was dismayed by the Hitler–Stalin pact of August 1939 and wrote a preface to the Left Book Club collection criticising it, Betrayal of the Left.[21] Between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the United States into the war in 1941, Laski was a prominent voice advocating American support for the allied powers, becoming a prolific author of articles in the American press, frequently undertaking lecture tours in the US, and influencing prominent American friends including Felix Frankfurter, Edward R. Murrow, Max Lerner, and Eric Sevareid.[22] In his last years he was disillusioned by the Cold War and the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.[9][13][20] George Orwell described him as "A socialist by allegiance, and a liberal by temperament".[12]
Laski was always a Zionist at heart and always felt himself a part of the Jewish nation, although he viewed traditional Jewish religion as restrictive.[23] In 1946, Laski said in a radio address that the Catholic Church opposed democracy,[24] and he thinks that "it is impossible to make peace with the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in the human spirit."[25]
Laski tried to mobilise Britain's academics, teachers, and intellectuals behind the socialist cause; the Socialist League was one effort. He had some success but this element typically found itself marginalised in the Labour Party.[26]
Political career
Laski's main political role came as a writer and lecturer on every topic of concern to the left, including socialism, capitalism, working conditions, eugenics, woman suffrage, imperialism, decolonisation, disarmament, human rights, worker education, and Zionism. He was tireless in his speeches and pamphleteering, and was always on call to help a Labour candidate. In between he served on scores of committees and carried a full load as a professor and advisor to students.[27]
Laski plunged into Labour party politics on his return to London in 1920. In 1923, he turned down the offer of a parliament seat and cabinet position by Ramsay MacDonald, and also a seat in the Lords. He felt betrayed by MacDonald in the crisis of 1931, and decided that a peaceful, democratic transition to socialism would be blocked by the violence of the opposition. In 1932, Laski joined the Socialist League, a left-wing faction inside the Labour Party.[28] In 1937, he was involved in the failed attempt by Socialist League in co-operation with the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain to form a Popular Front to bring down the Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain. During 1934–45, he served as an alderman in the Fulham Borough Council and also the chairman of the libraries committee.
In 1937, the Socialist League was rejected by the Labour Party and folded. He was elected as a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, of which he remained a member until 1949. In 1944, he chaired the Labour party conference and served as the party's chair during 1945–46.[18]
Declining role
During the war, he supported Prime Minister Churchill's coalition government and gave countless speeches to encourage the battle against Germany. He suffered a nervous breakdown brought about by overwork. During the war he repeatedly feuded with other Labour leaders, and with Churchill, on matters great and small. He steadily lost his influence.[29]
In the 1945 general election campaign Churchill warned that Laski—as the Labour Party chairman—would be the power behind the throne in an Attlee government. While speaking for the Labour candidate in Nottinghamshire on 16 June 1945, Laski said, "If Labour did not obtain what it needed by general consent, we shall have to use violence even if it means revolution". He was replying to a question planted by Conservatives hoping to get exactly that response. The next day, accounts of Laski's speech appeared and the Conservatives attacked the Labour Party for its chairman's advocacy of violence. Laski filed a libel suit against the Conservative Daily Express newspaper. The defence showed that over the years Laski had often bandied about loose threats of "revolution". The jury found for the defendant within forty minutes of deliberations.[30]
Clement Attlee gave Laski no role in the new Labour government. Even before the libel trial, Laski's relationship with Attlee was a strained one. Laski had once called Attlee "uninteresting and uninspired" in the American press and even tried to remove him by asking for Attlee's resignation in an open letter. He tried to delay the Potsdam Conference until after Attlee's position was clarified. He tried to bypass Attlee by directly dealing with Winston Churchill.[13] Laski tried to preempt foreign policy decisions, laying down guidelines for the new Labour government. Attlee rebuked him:
You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the Government. Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin. His task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making ... I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome.[31]
Though he continued to work for the Labour party until his death, he never regained political influence. His pessimism deepened as he disagreed with the anti-Soviet policies of the Attlee government in the emerging Cold War, and he was profoundly disillusioned with the conservative direction of American policy.[18]
Laski contracted influenza and died in London on 24 March 1950, aged 56.[18]
Legacy
Laski's biographer Michael Newman wrote:
Convinced that the problems of his time were too urgent for leisurely academic reflection, Laski wrote too much, overestimated his influence, and sometimes failed to distinguish between analysis and polemic. But he was a serious thinker and a charismatic personality whose views have been distorted because he refused to accept Cold War orthodoxies.[32]
Blue plaque, 5 Addison Bridge Place, West Kensington, London
Herbert A. Deane has identified five distinct phases of Laski's thought that he never integrated. The first three were pluralist (1914–1924), Fabian (1925–1931), and Marxian (1932–1939). There followed a 'popular-front' approach (1940–1945), and in the last years (1946–1950) near-incoherence and multiple contradictions.[33] Laski's long-term impact on Britain is hard to quantify. Newman notes that "It has been widely held that his early books were the most profound and that he subsequently wrote far too much, with polemics displacing serious analysis."[18]
However, Laski had a major long-term impact on support for socialism in India and other countries in Asia and Africa. He taught generations of future leaders at the LSE, most famously, his prize student, Jawaharlal Nehru. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, "the centre of Nehru's thinking was Laski" and "India the country most influenced by Laski's ideas".[20] It is mainly due to his influence that the LSE has a semi-mythological status in India. He was steady in his unremitting advocacy of the independence of India. He was a revered figure to Indian students at the LSE. One Indian Prime Minister of India said "in every meeting of the Indian Cabinet there is a chair reserved for the ghost of Professor Harold Laski".[34][35] His recommendation of K. R. Narayanan (later President of India) to Jawaharlal Nehru (then Prime Minister of India), resulted in Nehru appointing Narayanan to the Indian Foreign Service.[36] In his memory, the Indian government established The Harold Laski Institute of Political Science in 1954 at Ahmedabad.[18]
Speaking at a meeting organised in Laski's memory by the Indian League at London on 3 May 1950, Nehru praised him as follows:
It is difficult to realise that Professor Harold Laski is no more. Lovers of freedom all over the world pay tribute to the magnificent work that he did. We in India are particularly grateful for his staunch advocacy of India's freedom, and the great part he played in bringing it about. At no time did he falter or compromise on the principles he held dear, and a large number of persons drew splendid inspiration from him. Those who knew him personally counted that association as a rare privilege, and his passing away has come as a great sorrow and a shock.[37]
Laski also educated the outspoken Chinese intellectual and journalist Chu Anping at LSE. Anping was later prosecuted by the Chinese Communist regime of the 1960s.[38]
Laski was an inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943).[39] The posthumously published Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman, include a detailed description of Rand attending a New York lecture by Laski, as part of gathering material for her novel, following which she changed the physical appearance of the fictional Toohey to fit that of the actual Laski.[40]
Laski had a tortuous writing style. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" cited, as his first example of extremely bad writing, a 53-word sentence from Laski's "Essay in Freedom of Expression" that contains five negative phrases.
Partial bibliography
• Basis of Vicarious Liability 1916 26 Yale Law Journal 105
• Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty 1917
• Authority in the Modern State 1919, ISBN 1-58477-275-1
• Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham 1920
• The Foundations of Sovereignty, and other essays 1921
• Karl Marx 1921
• The state in the new social order 1922
• The position of parties and the right of dissolution 1924
• A Grammar of Politics, 1925
• Socialism and freedom 1925
• The problem of a second chamber 1925
• Communism, 1927
• The British Cabinet : a study of its personnel, 1801-1924 1928
• Liberty in the Modern State, 1930
• "The Dangers of Obedience and Other Essays" 1930
• The limitations of the expert 1931
• Democracy in Crisis 1933
• The State in Theory and Practice, 1935, The Viking Press
• The Rise of Liberalism, 1936
• The American Presidency, 1940
• Where Do We Go From Here? A Proclamation of British Democracy 1940
• Reflections on the Revolution of our Time , 1943
• Faith, Reason, and Civilisation, 1944
• The American Democracy, 1948, The Viking Press
• The Rise of European Liberalism
See also
• American studies in the United Kingdom
References
1. Deane, Herbert A. (2008). "Laski, Harold J.". International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Thomson Gale. Retrieved 4 May2019.
2. Lamb, Peter (2014). "Laski's Political Philosophy Today: Socialism for an Individualist Age" (PDF). Retrieved 4 May 2019.
3. Bill Jones (1977). The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. Manchester University Press. p. 16.
4. Kenneth R. Hoover (2003). Economics As Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 164.
5. Michael R. Gordon (1969). Conflict and Consensus in Labour's Foreign Policy, 1914–1965. Stanford UP. p. 157.
6. UK, Naturalisation Certificates and Declarations, 1870–1916
7. 1871 England Census
8. Obituary: Anthony Blond, telegraph.co.uk, 1 March 2008
9. Lamb, Peter (April 1999). "Harold Laski (1893–1950): Political Theorist of a World in Crisis". Review of International Studies. 25 (2): 329–342. doi:10.1017/s0260210599003290. JSTOR 20097600.
10. http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/subpage.aspx?id=9060
11. M. de Wolfe, ed., Holmes–Laski letters: the correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski (2 vols. 1953)
12. Schlesinger, 1993
13. Mortimer, Molly (September 1993). "Harold Laski: A Political Biography. – book reviews". Contemporary Review.
14. Martin Jay The Dialectical Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p.30, 115
15. Franz Neumann Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009, p. ix–x
16. Kingsley Martin (1968). Editor: a second volume of autobiography, 1931–45. Hutchinson. p. 94. Retrieved 22 April 2012.
17. Michael Newman (2002). Ralph Miliband and the politics of the New Left. Merlin Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-85036-513-9. Retrieved 22 April2012.
18. Newman, Michael. "Laski, Harold Joseph (1893–1950)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 11 June 2013doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34412
19. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (Transaction Publishers, 2009) p. 242
20. Schlesinger, Jr, Arthur. "Harold Laski: A Life on the Left". The Washington Monthly. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
21. Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain, 1939–1945 (Panther Books, 1969) p. 733.
22. O'Connell, Jeffrey; O'Connell, Thomas E. (1996). "The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Harold Laski". Maryland Law Review. 55 (4): 1387–1388. ISSN 0025-4282. Retrieved 23 July 2014.
23. Yosef Gorni, "The Jewishness and Zionism of Harold Laski," Midstream(1977) 23#9 pp 72–77.
24. "Catholic Church for Democracy, Foley Says in Reply to Laski", Poughkeepsie Journal, 7 February 1946, p. 9. (Newspapers.com)
25. "Walls Have Ears", Catholic Exchange, 13 April 2004
26. Robert Dare, "Instinct and Organization: Intellectuals and British Labour after 1931," Historical Journal, (1983) 26#3 pp. 677–697 in JSTOR
27. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left(1993)
28. Ben Pimlott, "The Socialist League: Intellectuals and the Labour Left in the 1930s," Journal of Contemporary History (1971) 6#3 pp. 12–38 in JSTOR
29. T. D. Burridge, "A Postscript to Potsdam: The Churchill-Laski Electoral Clash, June 1945," Journal of Contemporary History (1977) 12#4 pp. 725–739 in JSTOR
30. Rubinstein, Michael (1972). Wicked, wicked libels. Taylor & Francis. pp. 167–168.
31. Martin Pugh (2010). Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party. Random House. p. 282.
32. Michael Newman, "Laski, Harold" in Fred M. Leventhal, ed., Twentieth-century Britain: an encyclopedia (Garland, 1995) p 441-42.
33. Deane, Herbert A. The Political Ideas of Harold Laski (1955)
34. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, The Penguin Press, 1993
35. Guha, Ramachandra (23 November 2003). "The LSE and India". The Hindu.
36. Gandhi, Gopalakrishna (2 December 2005). "A remarkable life-story". Frontline. Archived from the original on 7 February 2010.
37. "Tributes to Harold Laski". The Hindu. 4 May 1950. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
38. Fung, Edmund S. K. (2000). In search of Chinese democracy: civil opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949. Cambridge University Press. p. 309. ISBN 978-0-521-77124-5.
39. Olson, Walter (1998). "The Writerly Rand", Reason.com, October 1998
40. Rand, Ayn (1997). Harriman, David, ed. "Journals of Ayn Rand". New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94370-6. OCLC 36566117.
Further reading
• Deane, H. The Political Ideas of Harold Laski (1955)
o The Viscount Hailsham (Quintin Hogg), "The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski by Herbert A. Deane: Review," Yale Law Journal, (1955) 65#2 pp 281–88 in JSTOR
• Ekirch, Arthur. "Harold Laski: the Liberal Manqué or Lost Libertarian?" Journal of Libertarian Studies (1980) 4#2 pp 139–50.
• Elliott W. Y. "The Pragmatic Politics of Mr. H. J. Laski," American Political Science Review (1924) 18#2 pp. 251–275 in JSTOR
• Greenleaf, W. H. "Laski and British Socialism," History of Political Thought (1981) 2#3 pp 573–591.
• Hawkins, Carroll, "Harold J. Laski: A Preliminary Analysis," Political Science Quarterly (1950) 65#3 pp. 376–392 in JSTOR
• Hobsbawm, E.J., "The Left's Megaphone," London Review of Books (1993) 12#13 pp 12–13. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n13/eric-hobsb ... -megaphone
• Kampelman, Max M. "Harold J. Laski: A Current Analysis," Journal of Politics (1948) 10#1 pp. 131–154 in JSTOR
• Kramnick, Isaac, and Barry Sheerman. Harold Laski: A Life on the Left' (1993) 669pp
• Lamb, Peter. "Laski on Sovereignty: Removing the Mask from Class Dominance," History of Political Thought (1997) 28#2 pp 327–42.
• Lamb, Peter. "Harold Laski (1893–1950): political theorist of a world in crisis," Review of International Studies (1999) 25#2 pp 329–342.
• Martin, Kingsley. Harold Laski (1893–1950) A Bibliographical Memoir (1953)
• Miliband, Ralph. "Harold Laski's Socialism" (1995 [written 1958/59]) Socialist Register 1995, p. 239–65 (on marxists.org website)
• Morefield, Jeanne. "States Are Not People: Harold Laski on Unsettling Sovereignty, Rediscovering Democracy," Political Research Quarterly(2005) 58#4 pp. 659–669 in JSTOR
• Newman, Michael. Harold Laski: A Political Biography (1993), 438pp
• Newman, Michael. "Laski, Harold Joseph (1893–1950)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 11 June 2013 doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34412
• Peretz, Martin. "Laski Redivivus," Journal of Contemporary History (1966) 1#2 pp. 87–101 in JSTOR
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur. "Harold Laski: A Life on the Left," Washington Monthly (1 November 1993) online
External links
• Works by Harold Joseph Laski at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Harold Joseph Laski at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Harold Laski at Internet Archive
• Works by Harold Laski at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Biography and various quotations regarding Laski
• Brief biographical sketch from the London School of Economics
• Neil Clark Harold Laski,the Man who influenced Ralph Miliband New Statesman, 3 January 2013.
• Newspaper clippings about Harold Laski in the 20th Century Press Archives of the German National Library of Economics