In the Company of Socialist Saints

...As the authors write, "Laski was devastated...

...He is capable but should stick to his line...

...Especially noteworthy is the detailed account Kramnick and Sheerman provide of the tragic libel action Laski instituted that year against several newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook, the British press magnate...

...Then there was the unfinished episode in Laski's relationship to Zionism...

...Tawney of England, and Ignazio Silone of Italy...

...After each participant had spoken, Gandhi called on his friend, Professor Laski, to sum up...

...Dalton also mocked his "yideology...

...Feeling he had been "declared a liar," Laski offered to resign from his professorship at the London School of Economics...

...Harold's two-year romance and marriage at age 18 to Frida Kerry, a Gentile woman eight years his senior, only exacerbated matters...

...Laski was a most adroit fielder, too, of the questions hurled at him during the discussion period...

...Frankfurter smiled cheerfully, but seemed a trifle uncomfortable...

...In Israel in 1948 Ephraim Broido, editor of Molad—the literary-political organ of Histadrut, Israel's labor confederation?told me how Laski and he jointly had composed the resolution in the 1945 British Labor Party program that placed the party behind the Zionist enterprise...

...They look upon his advocacy of political pluralism as having been of relatively small intellectual significance...

...Laski, never at a loss, replied calmly that he had immense faith in Felix Frankfurter, the man who had done the most to bring the injustice meted to Sacco and Vanzetti to the attention of the American people...

...He would tell the elderly jurist about the books he was reading, the latest finds he had made in some obscure bookshop, and the people he was meeting of all classes, nations and callings...

...At odds with his highly successful, widely respected father, who practically disowned him, and taunted by his older brother Neville, who became a distinguished figure in the Manchester Jewish community, Harold took to lying as part of his pattern of coping with the hostile environment...

...She got much applause...

...Did they debate the apparent conflict between improving the lot of the lower classes and fiddling with heredity to breed a "superior" race...

...The applause was tremendous, although the questioner was never really answered...

...When the delegation was leaving, he later claimed, Stalin whispered to him to leave his umbrella behind so there would be an excuse for him to return, because the Soviet ruler wanted to have a talk with him alone...

...Among the more than 5,300 contributors who sent checks were Laski's numerous friends in America, from Albert Einstein to New York's Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia to Eugene Meyer Jr., publisher of the Washington Post...

...Laski maneuvered gently around such issues as the Supreme Court's negative decision in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, where Holmes thought propagandist emotions beclouded his correspondent's reasoning...

...A small, frail youngster, he spent most of his "bar mitzvah year" sick in bed...

...This was to be a major intellectual event and was keenly awaited...

...His wife told how "he bore up well till he got home and then wept as I have never seen a man weep...

...Broido expected Laski to describe the evolution of his ideas about Zionism...

...He embarrassed both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called on them to lead the postwar world into the Socialist future...

...Francis Place has been transmogrified into "William Place," and Molad is mistakenly turned into Molah...

...In conclusion, one cannot help observing that Kramnick and Sheerman's book lacks the element of comradeship with Laski that, for instance, gave a warmth and eloquence to Kingsley Martin's biography...

...Though he read widely, his grades at Manchester Grammar School were poor and absences due to illness frequently resulted in his not receiving a grade...

...Nonetheless, Holmes lovingly spoke of Laski as "my boy"—and was moved to revive a family lore that a Dutch Jewish forebear, Vondel by name, had been the source of his Wendell ancestry...

...Questions of this sort have yet to be answered...

...Following the collapse in 1931 of the second roundtable conference in London on dominion status for India, Gandhi met with a group of sympathizers to solicit their assessments of the situation and policy suggestions before returning home...

...his resignation was refused...

...For example, Laski told Professor Morris Cohen at New York's City College that Bertrand Russell had said Cohen was the ablest philosopher in America, but before long it transpired that Russell did not even know who Cohen was...

...Regrettably, a fair number of proofreader's mistakes mar the comprehensive text of Harold Laski...

...The judge, who was sparing in his affections, had decided long ago that the metaphysical friend of his youth, William James, was talking moonshine...

...A Socialist form of pluralism might then arise after all to provide a viable alternative to the current all-dominant ideology of capitalism, and to totalistic economic planning with all its ill-directed consequences...

...The authors here find little value in most of Laski's writings on political theory...

...His Oxonian English seemed to convey all the insight of the political philosophers, as amended by Karl Marx' summons to build a Socialist society...

...Roosevelt much appreciated the letters Laski wrote to Frankfurter describing the indomitable will of the British people as they stood alone to resist Hitler and the German Nazis, but he found Laski naive and irresponsible as a postwar guide...

...Green once fulfilled at Oxford...

...Two other aspects of Laski's life remain something of a mystery...

...As one of four members of an official Labor Party delegation to the Soviet Union, he took part in a private two-hour session with Stalin on August 7, 1946...

...Reviewed by Lewis S. Feuer Professor emeritus of sociology, University of Virginia FOR ALMOST three decades, beginning in 1919, Harold J. Laski was the leading Socialist intellectual in the Anglo-American world...

...Harold Laski: A Life on the Left traces its subject's dual career in the United States and his native Britain...

...Next came the shock when the jury of seven, after deliberating for only 40 minutes, found against Laski...

...Matthiessen, Herbert Samuel, Jane Addams, George Sokolsky, Archibald Cary Coolidge, Emanuel Shin-well, and Moshe Sharett...

...The saddest problem for any biographer of Harold Laski is how to deal with his propensity for fabricating untruths...

...The next day, according to Laski, Stalin and he chatted for several hours...

...Besides political scientists, general readers will be grateful to the authors, Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, for the vast and careful scholarship that has gone into the writing of this very readable biography...

...And Leon Blum, the French Socialist Prime Minister, is said to have been "a professor of literature...

...Moore and John Maynard Keynes...

...He knows not whereof he speaks," FDR wrote Frankfurter, "and that is bad for Harold and his reputation...

...Fauer...

...Laski's loyal wife, Frida, once characterized her husband as "half-man, half-child," and despite all his erudition and experience, he sometimes seemed precisely that to his political friends as well...

...Usually his lies were well-meaning, encouraging ones...

...Pandit Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi looked up to him...

...Broido was entrusted with its preparation...

...Hastings fastened on the passages in Laski's writings where he maintained that if a "revolution by consent" to socialism failed because of the upper classes' resistance, then a "revolution by violence" would be necessary...

...Yet during his last decades he found delight in the young Laski's wonderfully gossipy, bookwormish, anecdotal, and philosophical stream of communications...

...Holmes did not agree...

...Felix Frankfurter was the evening's chairman...

...During World War II his attitude changed...

...he put no stock in socialism, nor did he have a high opinion of Bertrand Russell's quarreling with the universe...

...By 1945, however, he had forgotten his own wisdom...

...Then Laski got up to speak...

...He stood erect before the audience, clutched his lapels and talked without a halt or hesitation about his vision of the Socialist future that could emerge from the trials of the Depression, and how America indeed could lead the way...

...He was ready to sell his library to pay the considerable court costs of 12,000 pounds, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison together loyally asked the secretary of the Labor Party, Morgan Phillips, to raise the money through public subscription...

...He had simply predicted that it was almost historically inevitable, he said, and alerted the working class to the need for responding against illegal actions if an effort at violent counterrevolution developed...

...The first concerns his involvement with the pioneer mathematical statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson, in whose biometrical laboratory at the University of London he worked while still in his teens...

...Did Pearson and the young Laski ever discuss these problems...

...The Beaverbrook newspapers had charged that he advocated the use of violence to achieve a revolutionary transition to a Socialist order...

...As a young man he had asked Karl Marx for permission to translate Das Kapital into English, but evidently Marx preferred his own cronies to this Cambridge wrangler who had even written a novel about young German Socialists and composed Socialist hymns that are to this day sung in England's Labor Churches...

...Thereafter, whenever he suffered frustration in politics or personal relations he was tempted to seek fulfillment through a lie...

...But on March 24 came the distressing news of Laski's death at age 56...

...Being a Marxist, Laski had practically asserted that such violence would be required because the upper classes would resort to violence to prevent the majority from founding a socialist society: Mussolini's Fascist Party had used terrorism to drive the Socialists from political life in Italy, while Hitler's Nazis had ousted the Social Democratic administration in Berlin and dissolved the Socialist and Communist parties nationally...

...But in addition he was held in high esteem by many Asian leaders...

...And the old Civil War veteran made it plain that if it came to an armed showdown with a Socialist uprising, he would be fighting on the other side...

...One of Laski's greatest joys was his 19-year exchange of letters with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, perhaps the most poignant and intellectual correspondence in the history of Anglo-American literature...

...In his latter years, Shaw wrote that Pearson was right and socialism would have to be founded on "anthropometry...

...Laski delicately suggested that their divergences reflected different generations...

...he thus inherited the inspirational role T.H...

...His opponents, from the Harvard Lampoon to British Labor Party ministers Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton, were wont to refer to him sneeringly as "little Laski...

...Laski seemed to belong to the company of Socialist saints whose ranks included Jean Jaures of France, William Morris and R.H...

...happily, there seems to be no Freudian pattern of unconscious political intent in the series of errors...

...Drawing a distinction between analysis and advocacy, though, Laski argued that he never advocated violence...

...At the end of his life Laski was working on The Dilemma of Our Times, a book in which he was carefully re-examining the philosophical method of the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and also scrutinizing the social outlooks that had predetermined the ethical "intuitions" of the influential Bloomsbury circle of G.E...

...Their judgment, it could be argued, was confirmed long ago when Morris Cohen's rather obvious criticisms easily undermined the doctrine...

...Still, the ordeal took a toll that no doubt shortened Laski's life...

...he filled a high administrative legal post, and did write literary criticism as well as a celebrated book on marriage, but was hardly a professor of literature...

...The tensions of growing up in, and rebelling against, a prominent Orthodox Jewish family in Manchester may account for Laski's habit of lying...

...Sometimes, to be sure, Laski's tales could seem self-aggrandizing...

...Pearson had been England's first university Marxist...

...What was it that made Laski a most revered "Socialist personality...

...Nevertheless, he persisted and was confronted by a ruthless cross-examiner, Sir Patrick Hastings, who over 20 years earlier had been Labor's Attorney General...

...This was a "dialectical" difficulty that beset virtually all Marxists, but for British Labor, now the elected governing majority party, the affair was a nuisance...

...maybe some new cosmological insight is involved...

...It led to major episodes of deception designed to thwart his parents, who were bent on breaking up the couple...

...Everyone present, Leonard Woolf would note in his autobiography, marveled at the way he wove the different views that had been expressed into a coherent approach...

...Would that I had seen this passage years ago, for despite the uncorrected misspelling of my name, it would have cheered me as Laski's generous words so often cheered other young writers...

...I recall one of Laski's appearances at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston in the mid-'30s...

...With a general election in the offing, Laski felt legal action on his part was mandatory so that the Labor Party, of which he was the elected chairman, would not be tarnished as committed to violence...

...every seat in the house and on the stage was taken...

...Since the Labor Party went on to win a decisive victory, he probably would have been wise to drop the lawsuit...

...Among those whose names are misspelled I noticed Charles Lindbergh, EO...

...Two years later, in the spring of 1950, Laski's first visit to Israel was being planned...

...But alas, Samuel Alexander's famous philosophical work Space, Time and Deity was inverted by the authors into Time, Space and Deity...

...On the other hand, it might well be that a Socialist philosophy, reviving from the present debacle, will find a greater kinship with the ideas of Pierre Proudhon and Eduard Bernstein than with the Marxist tradition...

...In his 1940 book, The American Presidency, Laski himself had defended Roosevelt against those who felt he had missed a great opportunity in 1933 to nationalize the whole banking system...

...Although he had a high regard for University of Manchester philosopher Samuel Alexander, a close family friend, ardent Zionist and intimate of the chemist Chaim Weizmann—who had emigrated to Manchester in 1904 and would become Israel's first president—Harold found the Zionist aspiration uncongenial...

...Of course, there was his achievement as a teacher: Sixty-seven of the Labor members of Parliament elected in 1945 had been students of his at the London School of Economics...

...One elderly woman rose to ask how Socialist reform could be realized if such men as the chairman continued to work within the established Democratic and Republican parties...

...Reading it, I found to my surprise a footnote that begins: "On all this there is a brilliant article by L.S...

...None of the other Labor delegates, however, had any recollection of his being out of their sight...

...George Bernard Shaw argued with Pearson about his insisting that scientific measurement and mathematics would be required to make socialism work...

...Like them, he adored the humanity in humankind and gave himself unstintingly to sincere seekers after knowledge, whether erudite scholars or eager worker-novices...

...Possibly Freud's essay, "Two Lies Told by Children," could illuminate this bizarre component in the character of one of the mid-20th century's most remarkable and committed British intellectuals...

...But his 20-odd books and countless articles were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, and audiences were transfixed by the magical fluency of his addresses and lectures...

...These critics forgot, said Laski, that a full discussion had to precede such a measure, that otherwise it stood outside the range of common expectation...

...Of his abundant writings, the most enduring may prove to be in the Holmes-Laski Letters...

...Though Laski's incomplete manuscript was published in 1952, 1 did not see a copy of it until recently...