Harold Joseph Laski

In the twentieth century, Professor Laski can be considered as an important positive liberal, though he shifted his ideas from positive liberalism, to Fabian socialism, to pluralism, to Marxism, to democratic socialism, during the course of his prolific intellectual and political career. At times, he argued for individual liberty and at other end he made the State a ‘crowning-point of modern edifice’⁵⁵ and yet at another he said, ‘the State … expresses the wants of those who dominate the economic system.⁵⁶ From the pluralist point of view, he will say, individual is not merely a member of the State. In the society of which he is a part, there are innumerable interest-units to which he may belong.⁵⁷ This eclecticism of Laski’s views on individual liberty and role and position of the State in modern society is a proof of his dynamic understanding but at the same time a cause for incoherency in his thought.