Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
Laski was one of Britain's most influential intellectual spokesmen for Marxism in the interwar years. In particular, his teaching greatly inspired students, some of whom later became leaders of the newly independent nations in Asia and Africa. He was perhaps the most prominent intellectual in the Labour Party, especially for those on the far left who shared his trust and hope in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union; however, he was distrusted by the moderate Labour politicians who were in charge, such as Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and he was never given a major government position or a peerage.
Born to a Jewish family, Laski was also a supporter of Zionism and supported the creation of a Jewish state.
Early life
Harold Laski was born in Manchester on 30 June 1893 to Nathan and Sarah Laski. Nathan Laski was a Lithuanian Jewish cotton merchant from Brest-Litovsk in what is now Belarus, as well as a local leader of the Liberal Party, while his mother was born in Manchester to Polish Jewish parents. He had a disabled sister, Mabel, who was one year younger. His elder brother was Neville Laski, and his cousin Neville Blond was the founder of the Royal Court Theatre and the father of the author and publisher Anthony Blond.Laski attended the Manchester Grammar School. In 1911, he studied eugenics under Karl Pearson for six months at University College London. 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 by claiming that reason prevented him from believing in God. After studying for a degree in history at New College, Oxford, he graduated in 1914. He was awarded the Beit memorial prize during his time at New College.
In April 1913, in the cause of women's suffrage, he and a friend planted an explosive device in the men's lavatory at Oxted railway station, Surrey; it exploded but caused only slight damage. Laski failed his medical eligibility tests and so 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.
Career
Academic career
In 1916, Laski was appointed as a lecturer of modern history at McGill University in Montreal and began to lecture at Harvard University. He also lectured at Yale in 1919 to 1920. 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, where he also lectured.Laski cultivated a large network of American friends centred at Harvard, whose law review he had edited. He was often invited to lecture in America and wrote for The New Republic. He became friends with Felix Frankfurter, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and Charles A. Beard. His long friendship with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was cemented by weekly letters, which were later published. 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".
Laski returned to England in 1920 and began teaching government at the London School of Economics. In 1926, he was made professor of political science at the LSE. Laski was an executive member of the socialist Fabian Society from 1922 to 1936. In 1936, he co-founded the Left Book Club along with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey. He was a prolific writer and produced a number of books and essays throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
At the LSE in the 1930s, Laski developed a connection with scholars from the Institute for Social Research, now more commonly known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, with almost all the Institute's members in exile, Laski was among a number of British socialists, including Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney, who arranged for the establishment of a London office for the Institute's use. After the Institute moved to Columbia University in 1934, Laski was one of its sponsored guest lecturers invited to New York. Laski also played a role in bringing Franz Neumann to join the Institute. After fleeing Germany almost immediately after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Neumann did graduate work in political science under Laski and Karl Mannheim at the LSE and wrote 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.
Teacher
Laski was regarded as a gifted lecturer but he would alienate his audience by humiliating those who asked questions. Despite this, he was liked by his students, and was especially influential among the Asian and African students who attended the LSE. Describing Laski's approach, Kingsley Martin wrote in 1968:Ralph Miliband, another of Laski's students, praised his teaching:
Laski also had a large influence on Indian independence activist and later India's first Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon, both politically and personally. Indeed Laski is famously quoted as stating "Krishna Menon
is the best student I ever had."
Ideology and political convictions
Laski's early work promoted pluralism, especially in the essays collected in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, Authority in the Modern State, and The Foundations of Sovereignty. He argued that the state should not be considered supreme since people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions, and societies. The state should respect those allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation.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. He also believed that since the capitalist class would not acquiesce in its own liquidation, the co-operative commonwealth was not likely to be attained without violence. He also had a commitment to civil liberties, free speech and association, and representative democracy. Initially, he believed that the League of Nations would bring about an "international democratic system". 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 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and wrote a preface to the Left Book Club collection criticising it, titled Betrayal of the Left.
Between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which drew the United States into the war, Laski was a prominent voice advocating American support for the Allies, became a prolific author of articles in the American press, frequently undertook lecture tours in the United States and influenced prominent American friends including Felix Frankfurter, Edward R. Murrow, Max Lerner, and Eric Sevareid. In his last years, he was disillusioned by the Cold War and the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état. George Orwell described him as a "socialist by allegiance, and a liberal by temperament". Laski tried to mobilise Britain's academics, teachers, and intellectuals behind the socialist cause, the Socialist League being one effort. He had some success but that element typically found itself marginalised in the Labour Party.
Zionism and anti-Catholicism
Laski was always a Zionist at heart and always felt himself a part of the Jewish nation but viewed traditional Jewish religion as restrictive. In 1946, Laski said in a radio address that the Catholic Church opposed democracy, and said 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." In his final years, he became critical of what he saw as extremism in Israel at the outbreak of the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, arguing that they had not prevailed "upon an indefensible group among them to desist from using indefensible means for an end to which they were never proportionate."Political career
Laski's main political role came as a writer and lecturer on every topic of concern to the left at that time, including socialism, capitalism, working conditions, eugenics, women's 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.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 of the Labour Party.
In 1937, he was involved in the failed attempt by the 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. In 1934 to 1945, he served as an alderman in the Fulham Borough Council and also the chairman of the libraries committee. Also 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 and he remained a member until 1949. In 1944, he chaired the Labour Party Conference and served as the party's chair in 1945 to 1946.