The Evolution of Harold J. Laski’s Political Thought: An Overview

Abstract

Harold J. Laski who has been hailed as a scholar, a political philosopher, a politician, an author, a talented teacher, a great friend and compared to Montesquieu and De Tocqueville in respect of his political ideas, occupies an important place in modern  political thought. Laski did not confine his ideas to a particular philosophy. He was the child of his age and so in his writings he reflected the spirit of the period he was living in. We may, remember that the times in which he was born and lived was the period of revolution and reform. The liberalism of the Victorian Age was crumbling down and various theories like those of communism, Fabian Socialism and Pluralism were becoming more and more popular. Under the influence of these theories Laski studied the political institutions of his times and tried to reform the same. He was not an arm-chair thinker but on the contrary he was out and out a practical thinker. He was always ready to admit his mistakes and revise his political ideas according to the changed political and economic conditions. He had no theory of mankind, and no objective criteria to enable him to evaluate the varying aspirations of the human heart. He had no abstract conception of justice, nor any belief in a natural law-nothing to protect him from the dreadful alternation between individualism and tyranny, nothing to provide a nonmaterial standard whereby to set a bound to liberty, or a restraint upon the exercise of power.  So while he had the instincts and many of the gifts of a prophet, he drifted through life with the limitations of an advocate in a sphere where mere advocacy is scarcely respectable. That in the course of this life he managed to win and charm a host of those who did not admire his achievements or accept his opinions, is rather a tribute to his endearing nature than to the brilliant gifts which he squandered rather than usefully employed.