On the Dangers of Being a Radical

...This might occur if the representatives of the owning classes entrenched in decision-making, administrative and enforcement institutions vetoed in self-defense the socialist reforms of a constitutionally elected socialist government...

...Laski's writings have been just a little over-Stalinized in the interpre tations of recent years...

...However, this defect carries with it associated virtues, for when we are in doubt about the real meaning of one of Harold Laski's theories, we can often turn to the problems he was dealing with at the time and find decisive explication in his actions...

...In addition to a professionalized civil service, bureaucratization had spawned the newer white collar in tellectualized classes whose political aspirations were symbolized in and represented by Laski...

...This we recognize as true for Laski, especially in recalling the enigmatic message he dispatched from his deathbed: "The King's life is drawing peacefully to a close...

...Most professional political theorists could have made the distinction between Laski's own type of constitutional radicalism and outright revolutionary incitement...

...There were such similarities with present-day America, but there were also important distinctions...

...However, there remains a much more important point...

...And he always remained a constitutionalist, even in the later days when he grew uncomfortably tolerant of Stalinism...

...It was a remarkably self-conscious spirit of historical prometheanism...

...A very large majority of the opinion leaders in every political party believed or feared that socialism offered the only real solution...

...For although we are able to correct Laski s thesis concern ing England's counter-revolutionary potential during the '30s (and I have tried to do this in another connec tion), we cannot disprove it...

...His efforts at revolution by consent were aimed at the achievement by peaceful means of what he had "proved" to be impossible in his writings...

...Men of the stature of Wallas, Wells, Shaw, Webb, Hobson, Russell, Tawney, Cole, Mannheim and innumerable others were in substantial agreement on this point...

...Laski was a revolutionary...

...However, despite this distinction, England's period of ideological inclemency was in some respects similar to our own...

...The muckraker has been transformed into the Man from Mars...

...THE REAL DANGERS of being a radical may be, for society, just the opposite of those usually associated with the term, especially in the case of constitutionalized white-collar radicalism...

...It was foolish to expect Churchill to send his own bitterest critic to America as an official representative of the war-time government...

...Yet once again, note the paradox between radical and constitutionalist...

...Political radicalism is virtually nonexistent...

...For he came very close to actually making radicalism respectable, and this was the great need of the reform ing intellectuals of the thirties...

...There were many somber years for English radicalism following Ramsey MacDonald's departure in the Cabinet Crisis of 1931 and the resulting disintegration of the Labor Party...

...And despite some internal theoretical contradictions in Laski's development of these points—the mere fact of internal contradictions tells no more against Laski's political theory than against other political theorists, Machiavelli and Rousseau, for example— despite contradictions, and despite Laski's congenital tendency to accredit conspiratorial explanations of political events, his revisionist conclusions provided one of the most obvious explanations of the facts...

...The libel suit Laski brought was more complex...

...The integrity and responsibility of their leadership in the "keep left" program for a "revolution by consent" helped to make it a success and thereby helped England forge a peaceful transition to her welfare state...

...Another form of the sublimation of American radicalism has come under the aegis of the return to religion...

...ANOTHER FACTOR, almost a lesson, stands out when one reconsiders Laski's life of applied political theory...

...And if it is also true that Laski was disheartened by the failure of the victorious Labor Party properly to memorialize his services, then here again was the tragedy of the aging radical aspiring to the perquisites and accolades of propriety...

...He had daily vilified Churchill for "eighteenth century anti-democratic prejudices," yet he strangely seemed to assume that Churchill, as a proper English gentleman, would ignore these as mere debating points...

...Laski was a radical all right, and he was a Fabian...

...This affected the general intellectual atmosphere as seen in the way the Labor Party reacted to the disaster of 1931...

...Laski seemed to grow frantic in his study when he felt a historical moment was being ignored by the men of practical affairs who succumbed to their own bureaucratic impulses rather than his latest communique...

...Domestic and international disasters had led after 1931 to Laski's well known Marxist revision: the advent of socialism in England might be associated with violence rather than parliamentary consent...

...They could see no radical good at all in religion...

...But more than this, he was a new kind of white-collar radical who refused to compromise away the participational courage of traditional lower-class radicalism, as he refused also to abandon the constitutional creed of English gentlemen...

...If Peter Viereck can be be lieved, we have come to the time of the last bohemian...

...This close relation between his theories and the problems of the day turned much of his writing into highly perishable polemics...

...But he was also a firm believer in English constitutionalism, though this side of Laski has become somewhat over-shadowed by events toward the end of his life...

...However, Laski's life recalls something Americans have almost forgotten...

...England's intellectual atmosphere in the '30s was less restrictive than America's in the '50s largely because England had not at that time undergone her welfare state reforms...

...But he was also a thoroughgoing constitutionalist in that he spent the last fifteen years of his life, not in organizing a Leninist cadre, but in disproving some of his own theories...

...And yet this is precisely the type of radicalism which has now been largely eliminated from the American scene...

...Laski himself had trouble with his chief at the London School, Sir William Beveridge, over his caustic profiles of prom inent people in Labor's Daily Herald...

...This was the way the BBC had reported the King's approaching death, and Laski, in quoting it about himself, seemed to want to cloak his unsuspected terminal illness in high drama and the aura of impersonal persecution (seen also in his paper, "On Be ing a Plaintiff...

...This concerns his own well known concept of "revolution by consent...

...When J. B. Matthews tried to carry on a Senate investigation of ecclesiastical radicalism a few years ago, this was the point he had in mind...

...For the general permissiveness to radicalism was such that following the crisis men like Laski were able to assume an ever larger role in Labor Party policy during the opposition period of the '30s...

...Laski's mind was that of a radical, but his instincts were those associated with gentlemanly English constitutional proprieties...

...Yet all these forms of contemporary radicalism remain politically covert...

...Those who point out the conservative overtones of the return to religion overlook the radical significance of the fact that on campuses where there are no longer young socialist clubs or Marxist study groups, there are reli gious rallies to promote slum clearance, to serve sharecropper communities, to foster desegregation, to discuss the moral foundations of democracy, and to spell out in practical terms what it means to be a "radical" practicing Christian...

...his life was wrapped up in the struggle to achieve socialism...

...And certainly we can see from many current examples, as well as from the example of Laski's own life, why this is true, and how dangerous it is to be a radical...

...Perhaps without a determined group of radicals, electioneering to reform the fundamentals of English society, yet dedicated to following democratic and constitutional means—perhaps without such whitecollar radicalism—England might have courted the outbreak of violence by postponing too long her needed basic reforms...

...And they uniformly threw their influence behind the "keep left" policy, reproaching the old leaders of '31 for a failure of socialist nerve...

...But to a jury of middle-class Englishmen led by skilled opposition attorneys, these distinctions seemed preposterous...

...The Labor Cabinet crisis of 1931, the failures of the League of Nations, and the dynamics of the trends toward fascism in the continental democracies all seemed to Laski to prove the case...

...Though Laski himself was not explicit about this, it is what provides the basis for under standing his special ideological con tributions and for understanding the appeal of his own white-collar radical ism...

...However, what Laski's career also illustrates is that a constitutionalized radicalism may serve a crucial social function in helping to provide for peaceful transitions between old and new premises of society...

...There has also been a romantic reaction in American radicalism...

...If the moment were passed over, it might never again return...

...Of radical political organizations there are almost none...

...Utopianism has fled to the pages of the science-fiction journals...

...For we know that societies which inhibit radicalism foster thereby the dangers they abhor...

...To READ THE LASKI correspondence with great men of affairs: FDR, Churchill, Attlee, Holmes and Frankfurter, recalls a spirit which was quite common a few years ago...

...In bringing suit Laski ignored the parts of his own theories which had told him the "inarticulate major premises" of English society were so strongly capitalist as to crush any apparent threat...

...Ironically, it was Laski, the soon to be discredited English libertarian, who felt it necessary in 1941 to reassure Americans through the pages of the Washington Post that despite certain failings, civil liberties were relatively well intact in England...

...Hardly any college today supports radical heretics loudly and proudly critical of all propriety, though there was a time when every campus confidently displayed such members...

...The fact that despite this they, together with Laski, joined in the leadership of a movement which was self-consciously both radical and constitutional contains a significant lesson...

...Laski had to defend this outside writing before the school's governors, and finally his profiles ceased to appear...

...In order to read popular socialist literature in America today it is necessary first to learn the romantic jargon of teletransportation of atomic configurations and game theory extrapolations of interplanetary warfare strategy...

...Rather than a moderating vital center, it was a more forthright and courageous radicalism that the English left adopted during the thirties...

...The young Laski understood the dangers in being a gentleman, but he never assimilated the dangers for old gentlemen in being radical...

...Now, however, one must add that religion furnishes just about the sole American institution recognizing the radical reform of society as a legitimate concern...

...Laski's radicalism was not only developed in his writings, it was also acted out in his career...

...This was the time when defenders of civil liberties and academic freedom looked from England to America rather than vice versa...

...One of Harold Laski's best essays concerned the dangers of being a gentleman...

...Harold Laski was preposterously presumptive about history, about his own ability to understand its secret social mechanics, his duty to apprise decision makers in great places of his findings, and then his expectation to sit back and watch history shift its direction and set course on the Laski bearings...

...Now they are silent, hidden away, or gone...

...With personal problems and in his own crises it was to his instincts that Laski turned, as if to say "'King's X' now on all this revolutionary analysis of mine, there is a real problem affecting me, and obviously we must deal with it constitutionally and in a gentlemanly fashion...

...Back of this was his creative sense of the historical moment...

...It was perhaps irrational for him to have been so naive...

...An historical transition could only be made under certain conditions...

...For Laski did not really believe his own theoretical conclusions...

...Having concluded that bureaucratization might provide the institutional basis for right-wing resistance to democratic socialist legislation, he revised and democratized the Fabian assumptions to fit this conclusion...

...He was a thoroughgoing radical in that he wanted to charge directly into the achievement of "socialism...

...To believe that capitalists will employ counterrevolutionary strategems against the parliamentary measures of constitutionally elected socialists is analytically distinguishable from inaugural advocacy of violent revolution...

...Revolutionary violence might come, not as an initial instrument of the lower classes, but from the counterrevolutionary actions of the owning classes...

...No great newspaper commemorates its past by fostering muckraking crusades...

...It was irrational to expect a middle-class jury to untangle radical paradoxes and make fine analytical distinctions...

...Radicalism has been sociologized and anthropologized, so that instead of listening to campus critics emotionally decry the malefactors of great wealth, we now listen to social scientists impersonally analyze social stratification in Elmtown and the sociometric communications systems between politicians and racketeers in street corner society...

...Their verdict was a crushing blow to Laski...

...And his own actions, based upon his constitutional instincts rather than his revolutionary theories, caused him at least two of the bitterest moments of his declining years: Churchill's wartime refusal to appoint him an official emissary to America, and the refusal of a middle-class jury to rule that he was a constitutional socialist rather than an advocate of violent revolution...

...Americans, in having made it prohibitively perilous to be a Laski-type white-collar radical in the fifties, may be courting consequences quite the opposite of those they intend...

...The English Left once underwent a period somewhat similar to that of the American '50s...

...This was really the nub of truth behind the fears of the Reece Committee's investigation of tax-exempt foundations, though Congressman Reece didn't know how to put his finger on it...

...The old-fashioned secularist radicals of the thirties tended to identify the church with superstition, fascism and the status quo...

...Leslie Fiedler, in his criticism of Hiss, makes a point that applies well to Laski: "He seemed to desire both the pathos of the persecuted and the aura of unbounded re spectability...

...His own career, by contrast, is in great part a demonstration of the dangers of being a radical...

...The differences in social dynamics between the pre-welfare state England of the thirties and the America of the fifties inevitably gave the two periods an opposing receptivity to radicalism...

...All during that time Englishmen like Laski looked to the United States, to FDR, and to achievements such as our TVA as relief from the defeat they had suffered at home...

...For Laski was always a radical, even in the early days when his most significant theoretical and constitutional studies were made...

...Romanticism has always been one form of reaction to ideological inclemency and today's radical-romantic exiles must be sought in the pages of the science-fiction journals, for that is our only popular literature concerned with man's ability to solve social problems...

...Of course there have come characteristic transplantations and sublimations...

...To make a theory of potential right-wing violence the basis for arguments to organize a peaceful revolution by consent and thereby prevent the outbreak of violence is also a position understand able to the professional social theorist...

...Perhaps there would have been greater danger for England in his not having been a radical...

...Possibly, then, there is a larger social sense in which Laski was right in trying to combine political radicalism with the gentlemanly proprieties of the English constitutional tradition...