the heart and mind of harold laski

The Heart and Mind of Harold LaskiAuthor(s): K. CallardSource: The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienned'Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1954), pp. 243-251Published by: Wiley on behalf of Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/138605 .

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REVIEW ARTICLE

THE HEART AND MIND OF HAROLD LASKI

K. CALLARD McGill University

HAROLD LASKI was a highly controversial figure while he lived and now that he is dead the argument that surrounds his name seems to have become more bitter and more virulent. Much of the discussion has been centred around the

published collection of letters exchanged between Laski and Mr. Justice Holmes.' The book is really about Laski. The greater share of the letters is from his pen and those from Holmes are designed primarily as replies to Laski's; "My beloved Laski:" he writes, "For once, four or five days, including a week-end when I suppose a vessel sails for England, have gone by after a letter from you before I answered."

This book has been received as a work of importance on both sides of the Atlantic. But the attitude of several of the reviewers can be described only as one of vindictive malice. Professor Rodell, writing in the Saturday Review, ranks him "as no less than the Baron Munchausen of the twentieth century," and says that the careful reader will find that "the bulk of Laski's journal is no

diary at all but a great work of autobiographical fiction." The conclusion he reaches is that, "if Laski's letters had not been written to him, Holmes would doubtless have applied to the flattery and the fiction, respectively, his two favorite epithets-'drool' and 'humbug.'" A. A. Berle, Jr., in the New York Times Book Review, though more graceful in his technique, makes a similar

point: "To use his [Laski's] own phrase, he was 'organizing his own immor-

tality', and he did it thoroughly." And this opinion is confirmed by Professor A. L. Goodhart in the Observer: "If accuracy is an essential quality of all true scholars, then it is difficult to include him in their company." And so the pro- fessors of law of Yale, Columbia, and Oxford unite in their condemnation.

The editor of the Holmes-Laski Letters was aware that the publication of the complete text of the correspondence might bring reflections upon his own taste and upon the characters of the two principals. "It would be less than honest to pretend that the exuberant, the passionate, and the controversial strains in Laski's character were loved and admired by all who knew him and his work. Among those who did not admire, some will be quick to see in his letters to Holmes justification for their distrust. There they may find exaggera- tion, distortion, and falsehood."2 But Mr. Howe feels that the material is of sufficient importance to justify laying the whole before the informed public, "warts and all."

1Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr, Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935. I, II. Edited by MARK DEWOLFE HOWE. With a Foreword by FELIX FRANK- FURTER. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company Limited]. 1953. Pp. xvi, 1-813; viii, 815-1650. $16.75.

2Ibid., vi.

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Vol. XX, no. 2, May, 1954



The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

It was Felix Frankfurter, whose friendship for both was to endure throughout their lives, who first presented Laski to Holmes in July, 1916. Laski, at 23, had just finished two years as Lecturer at McGill and was about to take up an appointment at Harvard. Holmes, at 75, enjoyed a world-wide reputation and had served fourteen of his thirty years on the Supreme Court. The cor-

respondence began immediately, Laski describing his visit as "the realisation of one of my dreams." The Justice, who was very far from senility, was accustomed to receive adulation from many sources. In his reply he gently regrets his inability to remember the passage from Morley "in which he so

charmingly puts the mixture of flattered vanity and genuine love for the

young-it so exactly expressed my feelings." Mr. Rodell asks the question, "Was Holmes really taken in by the charming

charlatan to whom he was indubitably devoted; if so, how come; if not, why did he love Laski so?" He seeks to provide his own answer: "The evidence is

strong that he was gulled from start to finish like a greenhorn at poker to whom the art of bluffing is utterly foreign." But this is 0. W. Holmes, Jr., that the critic is discussing, the sceptic, the man of the mordant and ironic wit. Was he, on this occasion (which lasted nineteen years), charmed into a

suspension of disbelief? He had once written to Laski "-an ounce of charm is worth a pound of intellect." But immediately following he added, in paren- thesis, 'But that depends."

It may be that Mr. Rodell, malgre lui, has provided an explanation when he talks of Holme's love for Laski. For it is not straining the term too far to describe theirs as a romance and their correspondence as an exchange of love letters. I have already cited the use by Holmes, the aging New England jurist, of the words, "My beloved Laski." Laski's announcement of his decision to return to England is pitched in the same key. "You will know what I mean when I say that my love for you and Felix is the one thing that holds me back. It is one of the two or three most precious things I have ever known." He

promises to write regularly from England and says, "If I could not do that I would not, of course, go. For I realise that the bigger thing is to contribute what I can to your happiness." Is this laying it on too thick? Holmes's reply gives no such indication. "But oh, my dear lad, I shall miss you sadly. There is no other man I should miss so much. Your intellectual companionship, your suggestiveness, your encouragement and affection have enriched life to me very greatly and it will be hard not to look forward to seeing you in bodily presence.

Mr. Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker, has suggested that Laski, who had quarrelled with his parents, saw in Holmes a second father and that Holmes found in the young Laski a filial consolation in his old age. If this be the true parallel then it must be conceded that the "son" showed a constant and remarkable desire to please, impress, and gratify his parent and the "father" evidenced the greatest reluctance to criticize or to pain the son, in

spite of grave disapproval of some of his attitudes and actions. In fact the one seems to use the language of a father who woos his son and the other that of a child who courts his parent. That such a relationship is unusual must be

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admitted, and may well have given ground for the suspicion, though unjusti- fied, that one party was deceiving the other.

They do not quarrel in their letters and very seldom argue. If Holmes presses too hard, Laski is conciliatory or contrives to change the subject. Yet each is aware of the gap between their positions. Holmes's scepticism, often cynicism, had for long been a matter of public record. And, of course he makes no effort to hide his attitude in his letters. He is unable to see, for example, why otherwise sensible people should make so much fuss about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. "So far as one who has not read the evidence has a right to an opinion I think the row that has been made idiotical, if considered on its merits, but of course it is not on the merits that the row is made, but because it gives the extremists a chance to yell. If justice is the interest why do they not talk about the infinitely worse cases of the blacks?" He had shared "the martyr spirit" during the Abolitionist movement and was determined never to allow himself to be deluded again.

Laski arranged to have Holmes's opinions sent to him as they appeared and frequently offered his praise and congratulations. He seldom criticized; he had disagreed, in print and in private, with the opinion in Kawanakoa v. Polyblank3 and Holmes referred to that case no less than six times in the next three years. However it would be quite untrue to suggest that Laski wished to conceal his own views from Holmes. He talked of the books he was writing and of his political activities and always sent a copy of anything he wrote. Of his Gram- mar of Politics he writes: "Agreement I don't expect, for I have convictions built on faith while you (forgive me!) have doubts built on fears." Agreement he certainly did not get; the sole compliment is left-handed: "I never read so

penetrating a socialist book." And then comes Holmes's real outlook. "I take no stock in abstract rights, I equally fail to respect the passion for equality. I think it an ignoble aspiration which only culminates in the statement of one of your Frenchmen that inequality of talents was an injustice." He attacks also the tendency to advocate the enlargement of control over individuals. "I think I perceive at critical moments a tacit assumption that papa Laski, or those who think like him, are to regulate paternally the popular desires."

In Holmes's letters one finds his philosophy associated with the names and events of the twenties and early thirties of this century. It requires something of an effort to realize that he received much of his formal education in the period from 1850 to 1860. But an examination of his grim utilitarianism con- firms this fact many times. "Pleasures are ultimates and in cases of difference between oneself and another there is nothing to do except in unimportant matters to think ill of him and in important ones to kill him." He is also a good Malthusian: "As I have said, no doubt, often, it seems to me that all society rests on the death of men. If you don't kill 'em one way you kill 'em another- or prevent their being born." He had no belief in progress to a better world either by liberty or by regulation. He simply did not believe in interference and was willing to let men or governments choose their own road to damnation,

3205 U.S. 349 (1907). Holmes had written of the "logical and practical" ground for sovereign immunity from suit.

Review Article 245




the more especially as he doubted the existence of damnation. To such an extreme did he carry this attitude that he often declined even to resolve his own mind.

But there were limits to this indecision-pleasures, prejudices, ultimates, formulated in doubt but none the less firm. "I fear we have less freedom of

speech here than they have in England. Little as I believe in it as a theory I hope I would die for it and I go as far as anyone whom I regard as competent to form an opinion, in favor of it." This was a state of mind that Laski could share. For throughout his life he was a passionate advocate of the right of unpopular causes to secure a hearing. Perhaps he himself held and propagated too many opinions which those in authority, at times especially in his own party, disapproved, to be unaware of the practical advantages of toleration. In the midst of preparing his book on communism he writes that he emerges, "with the conviction that toleration and good will, bourgeois as they are, out- weigh in virtue all the other qualities in the world. And the dogmatism that is the price of a communist scheme seems the more unlovely the more one examines it." Laski may have written of the necessity of the Russian Revolu- tion and of the communist dictatorship which followed it, but he never altered in his detestation of those who sought to incorporate the regimentation of opinion into the basic structure of a scheme of government.

It is a common characteristic among sectarians to find no virtue in those who hold different views, and to confine even their acquaintance to the ranks of the faithful. Laski had his dislikes, both intellectual and personal, but he could not, he said, "follow the modern method of not dining with the man with whom you disagree." Laski did dine, though not perhaps as frequently as he claims, with persons of all beliefs and occupations. And his affections were not restrained by intellectual difference. He took real pleasure in Churchill's verbal exuberance and came to regard Baldwin as "one of the most loveable people I have met since I came home."

Laski had a curious but quite genuine respect and affection for the thinking Tory. His admiration for Burke was established early (he published the Selected Letters of Edmund Burke in 1922), and he spent considerable time in his lectures to show that Burke's thought was not really inconsistent, merely unsystematized. In praising the American Revolution and condemning the French, Burke was being true to the fundamentals of the British constitution and upholding the principles established by prescription. Holmes and Laski were united in their belief that Hobbes was England's most powerful political thinker and both delighted in his ability to penetrate to the hard realities of force and fear behind the fagade of political organization. They shared some of the attributes of Voltaire, an iconoclast without being a radical. Each was explicitly anti-religious, Laski remarking that "the fear of the Lord is the end of all wisdom is what the preacher really ought to have said." Thus they often agreed upon the brilliance of an aperfu (a word each was fond of using), without being able to accept a common theoretical system. Burke and Voltaire were both men of ideas wielding their greatest influence by the effect of the written word upon the minds of the leaders of the time. (For it is said that even Burke's most famous parliamentary orations were dull to hear though

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magnificent to read.) Each was most effective in clothing contemporary events with the ideas that move men to action. This was the role that Laski aspired to fill for his own day.

He was destined to live in a period which he described as one of social revolution. It is not surprising that he spent most of his efforts in trying to influence the character of that revolution. His idea of research was to discover and arrange the ideas of the past in such a manner that they might cast light upon the needs of the present. In books and lectures he examined the social revolutions of the past, the English Civil War, and the French and the Russian revolutions. He sought to determine the common characteristics of such periods of social upheaval. He encouraged students and colleagues to analyse the lesser literature of those times. He himself collected widely the pamphlets and tracts of the English seventeenth century, the Levellers, the Diggers, the Seventh Monarchy Men, and in his lectures would quote extensively from Lilburne, Winstanley, and the speeches of common soldiers at the Putney Debates.

Laski accepted a broadly economic interpretation of history. And he was concerned therefore, to trace the underlying causes that had shaped the im- mediate past and were shaping the present. He saw the rise of liberalism in

Europe as a result of the Reformation and the predominance, economic and

subsequently political, of the bourgeoisie. The special conditions of the nineteenth century had made possible the dual triumph of the British Empire and

parliamentary government. But the nineteenth century ended in 1914 and the twentieth was no longer prepared to accept the relations of production en- tailed by the capitalistic system. An average figure exceeding one million

persons unemployed in the United Kingdom seemed to him to indicate the

tragic and irreversible failure of the economic and social structure. The liberals of the previous century had fought for national independence, free

speech, free elections, and a wide franchise. These had been worth fighting for but were now in danger. Was a man free if faced with the alternative of con- formity or near-starvation? The old order had to go since it no longer fulfilled the reasonable expectations of its citizens. They were right to demand certain positive freedoms to supplement and make real the negative freedoms of the

preceding era. This was where Russia had accomplished real success. Laski would use the phrase "bread for all before cake for some," to give point to his purpose. The positive freedoms which he thought modern industrial societies capable of providing would include the right to work and the right to eat. In contrast with Holmes, Laski was both an enthusiast and a moralist. "I should be inclined to guess," he wrote, "that few governments can live long without acquiring a tradition that it is worth while to seek the right."

Laski was concerned to study not only the theorists of the past and the great movements of ideas, but also the political institutions that surrounded him. He believed in the unity of theory and practice; a theory that failed to account for contemporary reality had demonstrated its inadequacy as a theory. Hobbes and Voltaire and Burke had written for their own times and he wished to write for his. He was pressed, on several occasions, to enter Parliament and devote most of his time to practical politics. He refused not because of

Review Article 247




personal distaste nor because he feared that he would be ineffective (which is

probable), but because he felt that his influence would be greater as a theorist and publicist. It must be admitted that he delighted in irresponsibility. He liked to feel free to attack any project which he disapproved and to attack it in terms that might well wound its sponsor whether he be Tory, socialist, or a professor of economics debating academic policy.

Laski did engage in public life and in such fashion as to involve much hard work and little glory. For many years he was a member of the Industrial Court and was an arbitrator in disputes involving Co-operative employees. He served on the Committee on Ministers' Powers and helped direct the affairs of a municipal gas-works; he was a member of the Education Committee of the London County Council and of the Lord Chancellor's Committee on Legal Education-the full list of his services is far too long to reproduce here. And, of course, he worked for the Labour party. For years he stood at the head of his section of the poll for election to the party's executive and he enjoyed the confidence and the real affection of the unions as well as of the constituency parties. He was Chairman in the year of victory, 1945, and was one of the few leaders who saw that victory could be achieved.

Laski felt that he had a special role to play in interpreting American politics to England and British politics to the United States. Laski was in fact, pro- American, so much so that he felt himself almost to be an American. He watched the American scene closely and rejoiced in the successes or lamented the failures of his friends and the causes they espoused. He was, in short, a

partisan and a partisan on behalf of a minority and an unpopular minority at that. Inevitably he incurred dislike and even hatred. His observations of the United States were coloured by his prejudices. Perhaps no one whose first years in that country are spent at Harvard is entitled to claim to "understand" America. For in that somewhat self-conscious island of culture set in a hostile sea, merely to be an Englishman (and especially to be an Oxford man) confers a certain cachet. And this may deny him the opportunity of appreciating the very real qualities of those parts of the United States that are not in the least conscious of the debt they owe to three thousand years of European civiliza- tion. Laski was not, I think, an intellectual snob but he was certainly an intellectual. He could see and value the qualities of the North Country miners who wanted to keep him up until midnight to discuss Marx or Herbert Spencer. But somehow he did not often encounter West Virginia miners, or even Boston policemen who shared the same tastes, and he was precluded by his

intellectuality from making discoveries about them that he would have found attractive to the same degree.

He was a political-system maker and held that the hard facts of economic organization were the major determinants of the forms of political life. There is always danger in transferring conclusions drawn from the analysis of one social entity to another which has experienced a different history. Laski was aware of the danger; indeed he had criticized Marx for applying to the world what was meant for Germany. It must be conceded that Laski's major attempt to interpret the American scene, The American Democracy, is not an outstanding success. It is, however, a piece of vigorous journalism. Informed

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journalism on American topics was rare in England before 1945 and the scarcity has not since been entirely overcome. For thirty years Laski poured forth a

steady stream of comment on the political life of the United States. His

opinions were sometimes wild but he was a man who knew that a Supreme Court decision might be the major political event of the year and that the result of a senatorial primary in a small state might be the decisive factor in the shaping of American foreign policy. He was able to convey this sense of

actuality to a substantial audience in England and elsewhere. He sought to combat British indifference to the United States. Between the wars it was easy to obtain a hearing for views on France or Germany; Laski insisted that the United States was important and worth the effort of understanding. And this insistence was not the least of his public services.

It is possible to question Laski's ability as a theorist, as a politician, and as a journalist, but beyond doubt he was a great teacher. He liked teaching and he liked students. He had the capacity of becoming excited about some one else's pet ideas, not because they were always original or even very sensible but because they seemed to matter to a mind that was doing its best to find its own way. His method was almost entirely one of encouragement. He would

urge the student to pursue the more fruitful of his ideas and the less tenable were lost to view in the exhilaration of the new chase. He was delighted when a student ventured to disagree and though at times he became heated in

argument, he would end by telling the student to go away and demolish his (Laski's) case in ten thousand words. Generosity was the outstanding characteristic of his relations with those who studied under him at the London School of Economics. He gave them his time, to some of them his money, and as an

especial sign of favour he would even lend one of his very precious books which might be unobtainable in the libraries. Immense demands were made

upon his time but he was always available to students and never seemed to

regard a request as an imposition. It was always a pleasure for a young man to go to see Laski, for he loved

to talk and would spread his celebrated anecdotes as freely before one second-

year undergraduate as before Cabinet ministers-"And I turned to him and said, 'Mr. Stalin .. .'" Now, the student would know that Laski had visited Moscow and had dined in the Kremlin, but was it conceivable that he had

really addressed that remark to the Generalissimo? Each story of Laski's was near enough to the known truth that by a stretch of the imagination it might well have been true. But as a group, no, even the believing student mind had to admit that at least some of the stories had suffered "improvement." Some

persons whose standards are perhaps a little puritanical or who may, at some time, have been fooled by Laski and are still annoyed about it, have sought to elevate (or lower) this irresponsible trait to the level of a major sin. It seems out of proportion to attempt a substantial defence. His anecdotes were told to amuse. His letters to Holmes were filled with them and Holmes obviously enjoyed reading them. It is perhaps unfortunate that in the printed version the same story, with variations, may be told twice in a hundred pages. But

they were not written that they might be read seriatim by a critical audience which had never known him in person.

Review Article 249




There are other aspects of Laski's character that may perturb the reader of the letters. He displays an intellectual arrogance that verges on the insuffer- able. He feels for example that while he can usually grasp the essentials of a scientific work, the scientist seems unable to grasp the simplest truths of social or political life. That he attempts to form judgments in fields other than his own is no ground for criticism, but when those judgments are abusive and lacking in perception they hardly add to his reputation nor, after the first few shocks of surprise, do they entertain the reader. His pronouncements cover the fields of music and art, eliciting from Holmes the comment: "You gravel me again by your musical talk-I didn't know that you could speak critically of Bach and Beethoven-as you do of Rembrandt. I hope some day in a flush of conscience you will confess to faking a little-pour epater les bourgeois." It is in the literary realm that Laski is most self-assured. He was known to say, "Le style c'est l'homme" (alas, poor Laski to be judged by this criterion). His

preferences are simple, if not adventurous: Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot and, P. G. Wodehouse. His dislikes are numerous and savage, including James Joyce and the rest of the "lavatory school" of fiction and, above all, Henry James whom he describes as "A second-class mind dealing with funda-

mentally third-class material." His principal method of criticism is to arrange his subjects in an order of merit. The nicest example of this habit comes when he reports that he has been reading the New Testament: "I put John first, then Matthew, then Luke, then Mark; the rest moving in pieces."

The editor of the Holmes-Laski Letters faced a difficult problem. He could

produce a small volume of extracts from the correspondence and, by careful selection, avoid the repetition, the inaccuracies, and the passages of dubious taste. But this would be to distort the real character of both men and of the

correspondence as a whole. And so, Mr. Howe decided to give the public the

complete collection. It is undoubtedly a contribution to social history and to the knowledge of two men both of whom exerted considerable influence upon the societies in which they lived. But two volumes, containing 1,500 pages of letters, are too long to be read as connected narrative and the reader is induced to make his own selection by the random process of turning the pages.

Mr. Howe has done a great deal to make the volumes manageable. He has

supplied a magnificent index 120 pages long as well as liberal footnotes and a

biographical appendix. This last well repays attention; for example, this brief life of Mr. Justice McReynolds: "Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Wilson in 1914, he contributed little wisdom, much con- servatism, and unparalleled ill temper to the deliberations of the Court."

There are times, however, when the editor's zeal has led him astray. Apart from some matters of punctuation, he has attempted to reproduce the letters exactly as written, spelling and grammatical errors all preserved and carefully marked. But it is doubtful whether social historians will find importance in the fact that Laski once wrote, "'Phemomenology' [sic]." One or two errors have slipped through without being "sicced," and some have been added in the footnotes. In this respect Canadians come off badly, two prime ministers

being made to appear as Arthur Meigham and Richard Bedford. But this is to

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Review Article 251

cavil at a painstaking and devoted piece of scholarship that clearly deserves the highest praise.

The period of the letters, 1916-35, represents a small portion of the life of Mr. Justice Holmes but it constituted half the adult span of Harold Laski. And Laski was being consciously autobiographical; he was telling Holmes what he had done and said and thought in the past couple of weeks. These were glimpses of his activities specially selected for the eye of the older man and, as is the case with many a self-told life story, the author brings upon himself some unconscious, and at times unnecessary discredit.

It must be admitted that, in many of his qualities, Laski could not be ranked as a great figure. As a theorist and as a politician he had grave defects, many of them attributable to his spreading his energy too widely among too many interests. But such was his choice and I do not think he would have had it otherwise. For, in sum, he was a man of extraordinary influence. Throughout Africa and Asia and America his name was known and respected, and thousands of his pupils passed on something of what they had learned from him. In his way he was doctrinaire but he did not demand agreement. In his view, to be saved was not to believe, but to be interested.



the heart and mind of harold laski

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