Introduction

Harold Joseph Laski (Manchester, 1893 –London, 1950) was an “organic” intellectual – in the Gramscian sense of the term – who linked his activity of theoretical and scientific thinking to the demands of the labor movement and the political practice of British Labour and of socialist thought more broadly.

He was one of the most eminent and influential intellectuals and political philosophers of his time, swinging from pluralism to opinions closer to critical reformist socialism (at the time heavily influenced by Marxist theory). In this sense, Laski played a dual role in his capacity as a prestigious professor of political science and as éminence grise of the Labour Party (of which he served as chairman between 1945 and 1946).

During his stay in the United States (beginning in 1916), he participated in the foundation of the New School in New York, and within the frame of his collaboration and friendship with Felix Frankfurter, he advised Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he shared the ideology of the New Deal and the need to give a prompt answer in beating back the totalitarian and imperialist understanding of Adolf Hitler’s German government.

Fabian-Inspired Social Liberalism

Needless to say, Laski was one of the great renovators of philosophy and political science in the first half of the twentieth century, this owing to his deep knowledge of the history of political and legal thought.

He was aware of the role of intellectuals in society; thus, he wrote his books based on his active experience in political life, interpreting changes and suggesting measures to be adopted. This gave meaning to his life of fighting for his ideals, placing all his knowledge at their service. He gradually adopted a more critical understanding of capitalism and its future, rejecting the dogmatic philosophy of individualistic liberalism, based on unsupportive and “possessive individualism.” In so doing, he waged a battle in the field of philosophical political ideas and political action, at a later stage without challenging the Marxist vision of capitalism in the search for and defense of a peaceful pathway towards socialism. He made it his own practice to live out Weber’s maxim that “one has to get to work and respond, as a man and as a professional, to ‘everyday needs.’ This is simple and straightforward if each one finds the demon who pulls the strings of his life and pays obedience to him.”

He published an important academic work (The Problem of Sovereignty, 1917), after which would come additional ones, especially what can be considered the most significant work of political philosophy of his first stage, A Grammar of Politics (1925).

Progressively, his studies became increasingly functional to the demands of direct political intervention (which is the case, to a lesser extent, for his work Communism [1927], and more so for Democracy in Crisis [1929], The State in Theory and Practice [1934], and The American Democracy [1948]).

His efforts to get democratic socialism to break through in Europe and the United States were not as successful as he had predicted for the postwar world. Hence He was disappointment at the error of his prediction, and he had a certain dose of disenchantment with the possibility of realizing a socialist society through the wide participation of citizens – not converted into a simple ill-organized “mass” – that would overcome unequal capitalism (“liberal socialism”).

Laski was a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, as well as at Harvard, Yale, and other Northern American universities, and did intense teaching and lecturing in various countries. He belonged to the executive of the Labour Party. During his stay in North America, he and his wife, Frida, joined the Boston Group, which was a “platform for the army of the good”: he was a suffragist, supporting the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, later renamed League for Industrial Democracy (an organization similar to the London Fabian Society) and the Women’s Trade Union League. In the 1920s, he joined the Fabian Society and in 1926 took over Graham Wallas’s tenure (mentor to the young Laski, and one of the first members of the Fabian Society) in the School of Economics. It is quite significant that the best work of his early period, A Grammar of Politics, was dedicated “to the London School of Economics and Political Science and its founders, Sidney and Beatrice Web.”

From 1916 onwards, and for many years, he would maintain a significant correspondence with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (until his death in 1934), a renowned progressive justice of the United States.

He would later join the Labour Party. His position was initially moderate to progressively become more critical and yet closer to nondogmatic Marxist thought: this is evident after the publication of his work Communism in 1927, although he is particularly critical of the doctrine that later came to be called “real socialism,” which would emerge out of so-called Soviet Marxism. All of this led him to lead an important dissident trend within the Labour Party.

In May 1936, Laski collaborated with John Strachey on the project the publisher Victor Gollancz initiated to create a Left Book Club, of which Laski and Strachey were cosponsors. This group had great influence among Labour intellectuals until late in the 1930s. Against this backdrop, he actively intervened in favor of women’s suffrage and support for a United or Popular Front and solidarity with the Spanish Republic. Many left-wing Fabian socialists had come to the same conclusion of an active response in solidarity, faced with the hesitant position of Labour leaders, paralyzed by the fear of world war.

In the 1940s, he continued to participate in the Labour Party’s policy design, beginning with the important resolution on the general orientation policy (The Old World and the New Society), which was approved in the conference of 1942. It was a statement of objectives for a socialist world reconstruction through the legal channels of parliamentary democracy. It was deemed to be the most appropriate political formula for solving the inherent plurality of human existence (which extended to all the broad aspects of political, social, economic, and cultural life). Democracy respected such pluralism and provided a shared space for its free expression within an open framework for deliberation (deliberative democracy) and political decision-making (in turn reflecting the necessary unity in the diversity of interests and values). It was based on tolerance (Hans Kelsen) and respect for the adversary and minorities, with rules of the game, kept to a bare minimum, that all political and social actors would play by.

This program maintained a lasting peace based on the agreement between the great powers, public control of the economy, full employment, the universalization of social services (social insurance legislation), and a comprehensive educational policy. The connection among all these elements of the program became even more evident in light of S. W. Beveridge’s social liberalism, outlined in his two well-known reports on employment and social security (based on J. M. Keynes’s contributions). In those years, the intervention continued to be persistent, given the very close relationship between the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, bearing in mind that the latter sought to reorganize society through a vigorous intervention by the state.

Sovereignty and Pluralism in Laski

To Laski, the state, as a particular association, is the apex of the entire modern social structure, whose special nature lies in its supremacy over all other forms of social grouping. The state is a way of organizing collective life in a given society. It is the cornerstone of social structure: it shapes the form and character of millions of human beings, whose destiny is entrusted to it, and is key to social order, but it is not identical to society. This is the purely realistic understanding of the state, which should not be confused with Laski’s supposed attachment to political realism in the narrowest sense, as he always affirmed the primacy of interests over values, as well as of international law over national laws. In the modern world, the state is a territorial community in whose name certain agents exercise sovereignty, the latter understood as the legal power to issue orders without having to submit to a higher authority.

The orders thus issued constitute laws, which bind all those who fall within the state’s jurisdiction. In a democratic society, the fact that the law emanates from sovereign power is not enough for it to be accepted, even when it is presented as an effort to achieve a just result (“legitimate power”). Its claim to command obedience is based on human judgment on the legitimacy of such claims. To Laski, citizens have the right to have their wishes taken into consideration, and these conditions must be respected by any state that claims to be worthy of obedience. When these conditions are not respected, those citizens who suffer from such a lack of legitimacy have the right to deny that the state is the guardian of their interests, which gives justification for disobedience. According to Laski, the law can only be considered such when the recipients are willing to cooperate in its application.

In the framework of such a pluralist theory of the state, which the first Laski fully accepted, he stated that its foundation lies in the denial that an association of people within the community inherently enjoys supremacy over any other existing association.

Pluralism is an attempt to recognize the individual conscience as the only and true origin of a law that requests the obedience of its subjects; it means recognizing that there is no jurisprudence worthy of such a name that tries to separate the idea of law from justice. According to pluralistic political and legal philosophy, the state is an organization like any other, to which the performance of certain functions is entrusted; thus, the character of these functions does not imply the right to sovereignty, as realism brings him to admit that this would amount to conferring unlimited authority on ordinary and fallible men.

As to the international perspective, Laski adheres to Kelsen’s conception expounded in his well-known work Das Problem der Souveränität (second ed., 1923), in Principles of International Law (1952), and in the work of I. L. Kunz and Verdross, in which that conception is echoed. He then highlights that the supremacy of international law over state law must be affirmed, such that the community of states – what has been called the civitas maxima – dictates laws that stand supreme over all other laws. To him, the states would, as it were, be “provinces” of this civitas maxima, whose authority stems from the rules that are considered necessary to maintain common international life.

According to Laski, a legal theory that does not start by establishing the purpose of the law cannot give meaning to its claim to obedience, without which the elaboration of legal norms is useless. In his opinion, formalist conceptions have been completely superseded by historical events, despite the fact that the traditional theory of the state has been built under the understanding that it would be definitive. Historical events were putting things in place, and the construction of a new legal-political order was underway. It is necessary to come up with a political philosophy not based on the nation-state but rather aimed at creating a cosmopolitan order in which said national state in the international political situation is gradually reduced to a “province.” The age of Grotius was coming to an end. In the future, it would be necessary to build the fundamental notions of international law not based on the relationships between states, but rather on national laws as a system derived from the norms of international law. In such a new order, it will not be possible for any state to have absolute and unappealable powers; rather, they will be much more similar to those of a “province” in a world federation, with authority in a certain area, beyond which there will be strict limits. To Laski, the evolution of the government of states was increasingly dismantling the categories within which the nation-state had tried to enclose it. The “universal state,” whatever its structure and degree of decentralization, excludes the separation of multiple and isolated sovereignties, as the functions that influence the life of society have to submit to the collective and concerted decision of men. To Laski, modern science and the current economic organization had made the world a set of interdependent elements: this leads him to theorize “the principle of supremacy of cosmopolitan needs over national requirements.”

The first Laski was indeed an extreme pluralist fighting against the Hegelian case for the establishment of an absorbing state: “any society,” he says, “is essentially federal in nature. The State is, formal law apart, one with other associations, and not over and above them. Its legal imperatives succeed by being in a creative relationship with those which other associations lay down for their members. What it should largely seek to register as the law is the body of demands it encounters among them which represent the largest total of satisfaction in society.”

According to Laski, the monist theory of the state – whereby the modern state is a sovereign one, an independent entity as opposed to other communities, projecting its will over them and excluding any other internal or external will – is at odds with some of the deepest and most common experiences and conditions of humankind. The contemporary state imposed a pluralist conception of power, as opposed to the monistic one, thus breaking with the model of formal rationality. Public opinion cannot be assumed to be homogeneous, nor can the will of the state be simply described as its deliberate expression without further ado.

He maintains that the construction of a full international order requires the abandonment of state sovereignty. Furthermore, a good theory of politics must start from the incompatibility of the sovereign state with the world economic order and emphasize that the state is the guardian of class relations that prevent us from achieving a richer civilization. However, it should consider that the sovereignty of the state cannot be abandoned while its power is still available to capital owners. He pointed out that this is precisely why the League of Nations had failed, since for it to have an actual chance to succeed, it would have been necessary to prevent it from deeming war a legitimate instrument of foreign policy. To avoid this, it is crucial to abandon the idea of sovereignty, because until this elimination has been achieved, no serious cohesion can take place at the international level.

Due to his excellent theoretical background and his direct political experience, Laski was aware that extreme pluralism was unfeasible for the governance of a society as complex as that of developed capitalism. His conception, as it emerges from his work, is to be understood in the framework of a broader reflection on the modern theory of the state and on the troubled democracy and the parliamentary system crisis in the interwar period, as well as on the growing role that interest organizations play in the policymaking process. Laski denounced the traditional liberal theories’ fiction of a unified will for the realization of general interest (the undifferentiated common good), arguing that such an artifice had the serious drawback of neutralizing, blurring, and even making existing plural interests disappear. Hence, a dual mechanism was added to complement parliamentary democracy so that it could overcome its insufficiencies: the recognition of areas of social autonomy for groups, on the one hand, and on the other the establishment of specific professional or corporate representation mechanisms (secondary or tertiary professional or labor chamber, economic councils with members representing social groups, having advisory or decision-making functions on certain issues, etc.).

This represents a dual integration of socioeconomic interest groups both in the political-legislative process and in the governmental and administrative ones. As regards the former, propositions for corporate representation were made, involving functional or professional representation techniques (or representation by interests) of a professional or union nature, aiming to link interest groups with legislative decision-making. Laski himself was highly influenced by two intellectual currents of professional or corporate representation: at the level of political philosophy with its link with Fabian socialism (and to a lesser extent with union socialism) and at the legal-political level through the solidaristic theory of Leon Duguit, who had considerable influence on Laski.

In the first third of the twentieth century, proposals for the establishment of professional or economic chambers proliferated (based on the distinction between a social and a political parliament). This was a political response to the crisis the liberal parliamentary system was undergoing at that time, with the increasing displacement of the single-class state by the plural-class state, as a reflection of the loss of the illusion of the idea of the substantial homogeneity of a supposedly “undifferentiated” population. This is the crisis of the liberal project, which is above all the crisis of parliamentarism, with a critical final act at the end of a period of (apparent) security, before a period of dizzying transformations. The plural-class state opens up new penetrating interventions and public processes for planning private economic, social, and cultural activities, which led to a politicization of economic life. Therefore, consensus on goals and collective action, due to their heterogeneity, is more difficult to achieve than with homogeneous groups. On the other hand, it is clear that Laski openly rejected any authoritarian (fascist corporatism) or allegedly “democratic” (“guildism”) version of integral corporatism, which would involve the replacement of a political parliament, inherent in modern democracy, by social or economic parliaments, or even chambers or union corporations. Laski was more inclined to establish economic parliaments or economic councils, their functions either merely consultative or authoritative only to a limited extent, and serving to complement, rather than replace, classic channels of parliamentary democracy.

A “Gradualist” Socialism

In one of his most important and influential works (written in 1924–1925), A Grammar of Politics, he embraced a “gradualist” socialism from a utilitarian perspective, claiming individual rights and autonomy for voluntary social groups (professionals, unions, trade groups, and churches) against the Leviathan state, embodying William James’s pluralism. To Laski, the state is an organization aimed at applying the law and maintaining order in society, coordinating the activities of other voluntary associations and organizing relations at the international level. He was very impressed with Otto von Gierke’s conception of the legal personality of industrial and religious organizations – as it gave them the ability to defend their rights and independence, as opposed to the situation in the Middle Ages – and at the same time to demonstrate that trade union organizations have a similarly autonomous position in contemporary society. In this work, he came to reject guildist socialism for being unfeasible, as well as the Webb spouses’ proposal to create two parliaments: a political one and an economic one. However, he still argued for the political pluralism of groups as a counterweight to the power of the state. Thus, the work carries a clear Fabian undertone, supporting state intervention to carry out economic and social reforms and at the same time the decentralization of political power and the right of producer and patient interest organizations to control and cooperate in the organization and administration of the welfare state or public service. On the legal front, very evident in this work was the influence of Duguit.

Laski intended for there to be “consensual revolution” (a legal reform through a social state as an essential element for a social-democratic transformation) as an alternative that would avert civil war and confrontation on a world scale. Indeed, he hoped for the real possibility of carrying out a peaceful transition to democratic socialism in England. This implies respect for democratic rules and conciliation with a minority disagreeing with radical reform measures. Peaceful change is necessary because revolution, like war, in its violent form, is an infinite tragedy and must be avoided. However, the hope for lasting peace and collaboration between the various powers seemed to disappear to a great extent with the death of the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in whose capacity and goodwill Laski had placed great hopes.

During the Second World War, he would be the actual leader of the left wing of the English Labour Party, even though he was part of the party’s executive committee, and in 1945 he even reached the chairmanship. Anyhow, Laski celebrated the Labour government’s triumphs in domestic policy (social security, social services, etc.) and maintained a critical position regarding the moderate stance in foreign policy. In 1949, he resigned, refusing to be reelected as a member of the executive committee of the Labour Party.

At the same time, with liberal states governed by the rule of law against the backdrop of the crisis of liberalism, extreme pluralism was overcome; this caused Laski’s thought to evolve in interaction with such a climate of social discontent, thus marking a shift to the “second Laski.” To a certain extent, the overcoming of “naive” pluralism (for its extremeness and lack of correspondence with internal and external political reality) would have to wait a few more years: in 1938, he expressly declared that he had abandoned pluralistic principles in the Fabian sense (Parliamentary Government in England). At the end of the 1920s, the misconceptions of an optimistic conception of pluralism were revealed, given the primacy of organizations with economic interests over the powers of the democratic state in organized capitalism and their ungovernability and the slippage of corporate pluralistic theories towards authoritarianism. This can be seen not only on the level of doctrinal reflection but also in the political practice represented by the more or less explicit agreements of the great economic organizations with the conservative parties. From that moment onwards, the “Fabian” Laski of 1925 gave way to the Laski of the critical endorsement of Marxism. However, with Marx, he always believed that a socialist society could be built in England without a violent revolution (Democracy in Crisis [1934], Chap. 4: “The Revolutionary Aspiration”). In any case, although Laski rejected Fabian socialism, he always retained one of its assumptions: unlike guildist socialism – the kind espoused by those concerned about excessive concentration of power in the hands of the state, who moved towards decentralizing corporatism – he always attached extraordinary importance to state intervention, although he also thought it was important to establish decentralized democratic procedures. Such was the kind of socialism that in the English state, suitably extended and reformed, saw the machinery with which to achieve all the needed reforms. In this respect, the second Laski could still stand behind the idea of a democratic social state, enhancing the function of nationalized companies that administrate public services.

Conclusion

Such an inclination towards Marxism had already been expressed before in works such as The State in Theory and Practice (1934), and even earlier in Democracy in Crisis (1933), which is an expanded version of the Weil Seminars he held in April 1931 (see Laski’s preface to the work). However, Laski always maintained that in a democracy, citizens must always be allowed to intervene actively, thereby guaranteeing “the capacity of continuous initiative” (Graham Wallas).

In these works, Laski takes into account the non-neutral character of the state, rejects its idealistic understanding as a servant of the common good, and affirms that the history of law cannot be understood without seeking its roots in the modes of economic production.

Cross-References