The Inventor of 'Pluralism'
FEUER, LEWIS S.
Perspectives THE INVENTOR OF 'PLURALISM' BY LEWIS S. FEUER A delegate to the new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies that convened this summer exclaimed, "Pluralism, pluralism is what...
...What made Harold Laski a mythologizer...
...The strike was broken...
...Susceptible as he was to deceptive rhetoric, Laski had grasped the essential truth that for liberty and creative initiative to flourish, a society must nurture a multiplicity of associations—political, religious, economic, ethnic—and preserve them from state interference...
...Otherwise, what John Dewey called "the experimental standpoint" would be suffocated...
...James saw the universe as akin to a federal republic, and waged knightly combat on behalf of individual freedom against what he perceived to be the coercive generality of the Hegelian "Absolute...
...Freud said children begin to lie when trust in their parents is shaken by parental deceit...
...yet another analyst proposed that it was poetic wish-fulfillment...
...Like Marx and Engels before him, he saw in the expected emergence of world Communism a historic phenomenon comparable to the rise of Christianity in the waning years of the RomanEmpire...
...Not long afterward, Laski accepted a post at the London School of Economics...
...Four hundred Harvard students were enrolled as volunteer strikebreakers, and Governor Calvin Coolidge sent in the Massachusetts State Guard troops, who fired on a mob, killing two people...
...Basic to his thought was the conviction that only in a society where power was diffused among a plurality of independent associations would individual liberty be safeguarded...
...One participant said lying was an aggressive manifestation...
...Dewey held that only through practical experience could one learn the proper limits of decentralized power...
...Laski also looked forward to a postwar renaissance of culture and science in the Soviet Union...
...Lewis S. Feuer, a longtime NL contributor, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Virginia...
...Under the impact of the Great Depression and the growth of fascism, Laski's pluralism became muted as he moved from reformism to Marxism...
...During the War, the Soviet resistance at Stalingrad stirred him into an apocalyptic mood...
...The historical referents in Laski's writings ranged, over the course of his career, from medieval churches clashing with monarchs to modern trade unions struggling with prime ministers...
...He neglected to mention the decline in Western European civilization which accompanied that development...
...A liberal with Socialist leanings, Laski, who was concerned about the increasing tendencies toward an all-dominant state, drew his early inspiration from William James, the American pragmatist and psychologist...
...Although Justice Holmes was no longer alive to apply his "cynical acid" to such previsions, Laski himself, after serving a brief term as chairman of the British Labor Party, would find it increasingly difficult to accommodate the reality of Stalinist rule to his civilized values...
...Laski, in turn, declared: "What the Absolute is to metaphysics, that is the State to political theory...
...Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and their fellow members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society once spent an evening proposing explanations for why people lie...
...An omnipotent state would, among other things, impede scientific progress, which requires the stimulating conflict of opposing ideas...
...another thought it arose from the neurotic belief that reality is unbearable...
...The Harvard Lampoon devoted an issue to scurrilities against Laski...
...He was planning a visit to Israel to study its pluralistic structure when he died suddenly in the spring of 1950...
...Perspectives THE INVENTOR OF 'PLURALISM' BY LEWIS S. FEUER A delegate to the new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies that convened this summer exclaimed, "Pluralism, pluralism is what we want...
...Perhaps Laski lied because reality so frequently falsified his dearest hopes...
...Their anxieties about the radical Left were heightened when rioting and looting broke out after the police were denied the right to unionize...
...Nevertheless, every time the term "pluralism" is uttered today, every time a delegate to the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies invokes the idea, the truth in his life's work rises above its pathetic falsehoods...
...new policemen were recruited, replacing all those who struck...
...One of his closest friends, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, continued to differ with him politically, gibing that if war should break out, Laski would be "on the other side...
...The colleague who rose to rebut him feared the advent of competition among blocs, factions and parties, yet also identified himself as a pluralist: "Pluralism of opinion is a must," he insisted...
...Later, Laski reported that Bertrand Russell had also said as much, though in fact—as Sidney Hook discovered while organizing a testimonial dinner for Cohen, his teacher—Russell did not even know who the legendary mentor was...
...The term "political pluralism" was introduced back in 1915 when Harold J. Laski, a very young English Jew teaching history at McGill University, came down from Montreal to read a paper at Columbia University...
...But Laski's lies were sometimes more grandiose...
...After going to the Soviet Union with a Labor Party delegation in 1946, he could not resist telling friends that at a secret midnight meeting he had with Stalin the dictator proposed specific measures to bring about friendlier Anglo-Soviet relations...
...In September 1919 the 25-year-old Laski's outspoken support of the famous Boston Police Strike alienated many would-be followers...
...The pluralist vocabulary, revived in Western Marxist circles during the past 20 years by theorists chafing under a monolithic conception of class struggle, apparently is now finding its way into the Soviet lexicon as well...
...When Morris Raphael Cohen was gloomy with a philosophic block, Laski informed him thatF.H...
...If the logic of his analogy was unclear, everyone nevertheless understood that he firmly opposed those in politics who wanted to institute a superdirective Will, Church or Party whose dogma (or party line, as it was later called) could be invoked on all subjects from sin to science...
...The father of political pluralism always had a mendacious tendency, though generally his lies seemed designed to bolster the egos of discouraged friends...
...Bradley had confided to him at Oxford that he thought Cohen the only American thinker worth watching...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 13
