Liberty in the Modern State (Works of Harold J. Laski)

Harold J. Laski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317585428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Updated to take into account the post-war political landscape, this book, consisting of some undelivered lectures originally dating from 1929, discusses the meaning and place of liberty and freedom in a global post-war context.

2 FREEDOM OF THE MIND

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742199-3

I

Have sought, so far, to show that, however important be the political mechanisms on which liberty depends, they will not work of themselves. They depend for their creativeness upon the presence in any given society of a determination to make them work. The knowledge that an invasion of liberty will always meet with resistance from men determined upon its repulsion, this, in the last analysis, is the only true safeguard that we have. It means, I have admitted, that a certain penumbra of contingent anarchy always confronts the state; but I have argued that this is entirely desirable since the secret of liberty is always, in the end, the courage to resist.

The most important aspect of this atmosphere is undoubtedly freedom of the mind. The citizen seeks for happiness, and the state, for him, is in institution which exists to make his happiness possible. He judges it, I have urged, by its capacity to respond to the needs he infers from the experience he encounters. That experience, I have insisted, is private to himself. Its predominant quality is its uniqueness. Either it is his own, or it is nothing. The substitution for it of someone else's experience, however much wider or wiser than this, is, where it is based upon constraint, a denial of freedom. What the citizen, quite rightly, expects from the state is to have his experience counted in the making of policy, and to have it counted as he, and he only, expresses its import.

Obviously enough if his experience is to count a man must be able to state it freely. The right to speak it, to print it, to seek in concert with others its translation into the event, is fundamental to liberty. If he is driven, in this realm, to silence and inactivity, he becomes a dumb and inarticulate creature, whose personality is neglected in the making of policy. Without freedom of the mind and of association a man has no means of self-protection in our social order. He may speak wrongly or foolishly; he may associate with others for purposes that are abhorrent to the majority of men. Yet a denial of his right to do these things is a denial of his happiness. Thereby, he becomes instrument of other people's ends, not himself an end. That is the essential condition of the perversion of power. Once we inhibit freedom of speech, we inhibit criticism of social institutions. The only opinions of which account is then taken are the opinions which coincide with the will of those in authority. Silence is taken for consent; and the decisions that are registered as law reflect, not the total needs of the society, but the powerful needs which have been able to make themselves felt at the source of power. Historically, the road to tyranny has always lain through a denial of freedom in this realm.

I desire here to maintain a twofold thesis. I shall seek to show, first, that liberty of thought and association—the two things are inextricably intertwined—is good in itself, and second, that its denial is always a means to the preservation of some special and, usually, sinister interest which cannot maintain itself in an atmosphere of freedom. I shall then discuss what restrictions, if any, must be placed upon this right, and the conditions it demands for its maximum realization. I shall, in particular, maintain that all restrictions upon freedom of expression upon the grounds that they are seditious or blasphemous are contrary to the well-being of society.

The case for the view that freedom of thought and speech is a good in itself is fairly easy to make. If it is the business of those who exercise authority in the State to satisfy the wants of those over whom they rule, it is plain that they should be informed of those wants; and, obviously, they cannot be truly informed about them unless the mass of men is free to report their experience. No State, for instance, could rightly legislate about the hours of labour if only business men were free to offer their opinion upon industrial conditions. We could not develop an adequate law of divorce if only those happily married were entitled to express an opinion upon its terms. Law must take account of the totality of experience and this can only be known to it as that experience is unfettered in its opportunity of expression.

Most people are prepared to agree with this view when it is made as a general statement; most people, also, recoil from it when its implications are made fully known. For it implies not only the right to beatify the present social order, but the right, also, to condemn it with vigour and completeness. A man may say that England or America will never be genuinely democratic unless equality of income is established there; that equality of income may never be established except by force; that, accordingly, the way to a genuine democracy lies through a bloody revolution. Or he may argue that eternal truth is the sole possession of the Roman Catholic Church; that men can only be persuaded to understand this by the methods of the Inquisition; that, therefore, the re-establishment of the Inquisition is in the highest interest of society. To most of us, these views will seem utterly abhorrent. Yet they represent the generalizations of an experience that someone has felt. They point to needs which are seeking satisfaction, and the society gains nothing by prohibiting their expression.

For no one really ceases to be a revolutionary Communist or a passionate Roman Catholic by being forbidden to be either of these. His conviction that society is rotten at its base is only the more ardently held, his search for alternative ways of expressing his conviction becomes only the more feverish as a result of suppression. Terror does not alter opinion. On the one hand it reinforces it, on the other it makes the substance of opinion a matter of interest to many who would, otherwise, have had no interest whatever in it. When the United States Customs Department suppressed Candide on the ground that it was an obscene book, they merely stimulated the perverse curiosity of thousands to whom Candide would have remained less than a name. When the British Government prosecuted the Communists for sedition in 1925 the daily reports of the trial, the editorial discussion of its result, made the principles of Communism known to innumerable readers who would never, under other circumstances, have troubled to acquaint themselves with its nature. No State can suppress the human impulse of curiosity, and there is always a special delight, a kind of psychological scarcity value, in knowledge of the forbidden. No technique of suppression has so far been discovered which does not have the effect of giving wider currency to the thing suppressed than can be attained in any other fashion.

But this is only the beginning of the case for freedom of speech. The heresies we may suppress today are the orthodoxies of tomorrow. New truth begins always in a minority of one; it must be someone's perception before it becomes a general perception. The world gains nothing from a refusal to entertain the possibility that a new idea may be true. Nor can we pick and choose among our suppressions with any prospect of success. It would, indeed, be hardly beyond the mark to affirm that a list of the opinions condemned as wrong or dangerous would be a list of the commonplaces of our time. Most people can see that Nero and Diocletian accomplished nothing by their persecution of Christianity. But every argument against their attitude is an argument also against a similar attitude in other persons. Upon what grounds can we infer prospective gain from persecution of opinion? If the view held is untrue, experience shows that conviction of its untruth is largely a matter of time; it does not come because authority announces that it is untrue. If the view is true in part only, the separation of truth and falsehood is accomplished most successfully in a free intellectual competition, a process of dissociation by rational criticism, in which those who hold the false opinion are driven to defend their position on rational grounds. If, again, the view held is wholly true, nothing whatever is gained by preventing its expression. Whether it relates to property, or marriage, to religion or the form of the State, by being true it demands a corresponding change in individual outlook and social organization. For untrue opinions do not permanently work. They impede discovery and they diminish happiness. They enable, of course, those to whom they are profitable, to benefit by their maintenance, but it is at the cost of society as a whole.

There is the further question, moreover, of the persons to whom the task of selecting what should be suppressed is to be confided. What qualifications are they to possess for their task? What tests are they to apply from which the desirability of suppression is to be inferred? A mere zeal for the well-being of society is an utterly inadequate qualification; for most persons who have played the part of censor have possessed this and have yet been utterly unfit for their task. The selfappointed person, Mr. Comstock, for instance, merely identifies his private view of moral right with the ultimate principles of ethics; and only the intellectually blind would ask that the citizen be fitted to his vicious bed of Procrustes. The official censor, a man like the famous Pobedonostev, normally assumes that any thorough criticism of the existing social order is dangerous and destructive; and, thereby, he transforms what might be creative demand into secret attack which is ten times more dangerous in its influence. If you take almost any of those who are appointed to work of this kind, you discover that association with it seems necessarily to unfit them for their task. For it turns them into men who see undesirability in work which the average man reads without even a suspicion that it is not the embodiment of experience with which he ought to be acquainted. Anyone who looks through the list of prohibited publications enforced by the Dominion of Canada will, I think, get a sense that the office of censorship is the avenue to folly.¹ No one with whom I am acquainted seems wise enough or good enough to control the intellectual nutrition of the human mind.

¹ A list is printed in Ernst and Segal, To the Pure (1929), pp. 296–302.

What tests, further, are they to apply? Broadly speaking, we suppress publications on the ground that they are obscene or dangerous. But no one has ever arrived at a working definition of obscenity, even for legal purposes. Take, for instance, two books suppressed by the English magistrates for obscenity in 1929. One, Miss Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, seemed to men like Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Bernard Shaw a work which treated a theme of high importance to society in a sober and high-minded way. They saw no reason to suppose that the treatment of its difficult subject—sexual perversion—could be regarded by any normal person as offensive. The magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, took a different view. I, certainly, am not prepared, on a priori grounds, to say that a lawyer, however well trained in the law, has a better sense of what is likely to produce moral depravity than Mr. Bennett or Mr. Shaw; and a reading of Miss Hall's dull and sincere pamphlet only reinforces that impression. Another book was distributed privately and secretly—Mr. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover— in a limited and expensive special edition. I gather that its public sale would have been definitely prohibited. Yet I observe that some of the most eminent American critics have praised it as the finest example of a novel seeking the truth about the sexual relations of men and women that an Englishman has published in the twentieth century. That may be—I am not competent to say—excessive praise. My point is that in a choice, say, between the average police magistrate and Mr. Robert Morass Lovett, I am not prepared to accept the former's opinion of what I may be safely left to read.

Let me remind you, moreover, of what cannot too often be pointed out, that the rigorous application of the legal tests of obscenity would prohibit the circulation of a very considerable part of the great literature of the world. The Bible, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Plato, Horace, Catullus, to take names at random, would all come under the ban. It is worth while pointing out that those most concerned with the suppression of ‘obscene’ books are religious people. On their tests of obscenity the Bible certainly could not hope to escape; yet they believe, in general, that the Bible is the inspired word of God, a position which, I venture to suggest, should at the least give them pause. I do not know, indeed, how we are to create a healthy social attitude to the problems of sex, if all that deals with it from a new point of view, and with a frankness that admits the experimental nature of our contemporary solutions, is to be dismissed as ‘obscene’. Questions like those of birth control, extra-marital love, companionate marriage, sexual perversion, cannot really be faced in a scientific fashion by applying to them the standards of a nomadic Eastern people which drew up its rules more thans two thousand years ago. Virtuous people who shrink from frank discussion in this realm seem to me responsible for probably more gratuitous suffering than any other group of human beings. The thing they call ‘innocence’ I believe to be quite wanton ignorance, and, by its abridgment of freedom, it imprisons human personality in a fashion that is quite unpardonable.

The same seems to me to be the case in the realm that is called blasphemy. I have no sort of sympathy with that attitude of mind which finds satisfaction in wanton insult to the religious convictions of others. But I am not prepared for its suppression. For I note that, historically, there are no limits to the ideas which religious persons will denounce as blasphemous; and, especially, that in an age of comparative religious indifference, the hand of persecution almost invariably chooses to fall only on humble men.¹ It attacks Mr. G. W. Foote, but it leaves Lord Morley free to do infinitely more damage than any for which Mr. Foote can ever have been responsible. I cannot, moreover, forget that what is blasphemy in Tennessee is common sense in New York, that the works of Wollaston and Toland and Chubb, which seemed entirely blasphemous to their generation, seem commonplace to ourselves. Every religious body really means by blasphemy an attack upon its fundamental principles. Such attacks are, of course, necessarily circulated to bring them into contempt. We who read Paine's Age of Reason with admiration for its cogency of argument, its trenchant style, its fearless appetite for truth, can hardly avoid a sense of dismay when we remember the days when it was secretly passed from hand to hand as an outrageous production, the possession of which was itself an indication of social indecency.

² This is brought out well in Mr. Nokes’ excellent book on the blasphemy laws.

And here let me remind you of certain facts on the other side. We denominate as blasphemous works calculated to bring the principles of Christianity into hatred, ridicule, or contempt. As I have said, I entirely dislike the type of work which finds pleasure in offensiveness to Christians. But if we are to suppress works, and punish their authors, because they cause grief to certain of our fellow-citizens, exactly how far are we to carry the principle? A very large part of propagandist religious literature is highly offensive to sincere and serious-minded persons who are unable, in their conscience, to subscribe to any particular creed. When you remember the descriptions applied by Mr. William Sunday to those who do not accept Christianity, you cannot, I think, avoid a sense that there is a religious blasphemy for which, at least from the angle of good manners, nothing whatever can be said. Mr. Sunday is only one of the worse offenders in a whole tribe of preachers and writers to whom belief, however sincere, that is alien from their own, is normally and naturally described in the language it is a euphemism to call Billingsgate; and charges of immorality are brought against unbelievers by them for which not an atom of proof exists. Are we to suppress all such publications also? And if we are to continue this campaign of prohibition to its appointed and logical end, shall we have time for any other social adventure?

Nor is this all. In the world of education we are continually presented with the problem of text-books which are offensive to a particular denomination. We are asked, for instance, to prohibit their use in schools. I sat as an appointel member of the Education Committee of the London County Council. I was presented there with a requisitory, drawn up by a Catholic body, against the use of certain books on the ground that they contain untrue statements about questions like the Reformation, in which Catholics are particularly interested. But I have not observed in the same Catholic body a desire only to use those textbooks in their own denominational schools which Protestants are prepared to accept as a true picture of the Reformation. Nor is this problem of school textbooks merely religious in character. Americans of our own generation have seen passionate controversy over the view of the War of Independence, of the Constitution, of the motives and responsibility in the war of 1914, which are to be presented not merely to school children, but also to university students; there is a heresy-hunt in the fiels of politics and economics, a desire to have only ‘true’ opinions taught to the immature mind. But ‘true’ opinions, on examination, usually turn out to be the opinions which suit the proponents of some particular cause. In London we used to think that a ‘true’ theory of value is best obtained from the works of Professor Cannan; in Cambridge they pinned their faith to Marshall and Pigou, in the Labour Colleges ultimate wisdom is embodied in the writings of Marx, and Cannan, Marshall and Pigou are all dismissed as the pathetic servants of bourgeois capitalism. Is anything gained for anyone by insisting that truth resides on one side only of a particular Pyrénées? It is not wisdom to begin by an admission of its manysidedness? And does not that admission involve an unlimited freedom of expression in the interpretation of facts? For facts, as William James said, are not born free and equal. They have to be interpreted in the light of our experience; and to suppress someone's personality, to impose upon him our view of what his life implies to the forcible exclusion of that in which alone he can find meaning. I see neither wisdom nor virtue in action of this kind.

So far, I have restricted my discussion to the nonpolitical field, and before I enter this area, I want, for a moment, both to summarize the position we have reached and to admit the one limitation on freedom of expression I am prepared to concede. I have denied that prohibitions arising from blasphemy or obscenity, or historical or social unfairness, have any justification. They seem to me unworkable: They are bad because they prevent necessary social ventilation. They are bad because they exclude the general public from access to facts and ideas which are often of vital importance. They are bad because no one is wise or virtuous enough to stand in judgment upon what another man is to think or say or write. They are bad because they are incapable of common-sense application; there is never any possibility of a wise discrimination in their application. They give excessive protection to old traditions; they make excessively difficult the entrance of new. They confer power in a realm where qualifications for the exercise of power, and tests for its application, are, almost necessarily, non-existent. For the decision of every question of this kind is a matter of opinion in which there is no prospect of certainty. Suppression here means not the prohibition of the untrue or the unjust or the immoral, but of opinions unpleasing to those who exercise the censorship. Historically, no evidence exists to suggest that it has ever been exercised for other ends.

I do not see any rational alternative to this view. But here I should emphasize my own belief that, broadly speaking, such freedom of expression as I have discussed means freedom to express one's ideas on general subjects, on themes of public importance, rather than on the character of particular persons. I have not, I think, a right to suggest that Jones beats his wife, or that Brown continually cheats his employer, unless I can prove, first that the suggestions are true, and, second, that they have a definite public importance. I have not a right to create scandal because I find pleasure or profit in speaking ill of my neighbour. But if Brown, for instance, is a candidate for public office, my view that he cheats his employer is directly relevant to the question of his fitness to be elected; and if I can prove that my view is true, it is in the public interest that I should make it known. I cannot, that is to say, regard my free...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1948
• PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1930
• I. Introduction
• II. Freedom of the Mind
• III. Liberty and Social Power
• Conclusion