Liberty in the modern stateLaski, Harold J. (Harold Joseph)
Science
Liberty in the modern state
Laski, Harold J. (Harold Joseph)
Liberty; Political science
the _status quo_; and, _mutatis mutandis_, this is true of all claims
which seek alteration in a significant degree.
Now it is, I think, unquestionable that in an unequal society, the
effort of ordinary men to attain the condition we call happiness is
hampered at every turn. The power of numbers is sacrificed to the
interest of a few. The truth of the facts which might make a just
solution is distorted for a similar end. Freedom, therefore, in an
unequal society has no easy task as it seeks realization. For its
search is not to realize itself for its own sake, but for what, as it
is realized, it is able to bring. We seek religious freedom for the
truth our religion embodies. We seek political freedom for the ends
that, in the political world, we deem good. We seek economic freedom
for the satisfaction brought by making an end of the frustration to our
personality an irrational subordination implies. Men do not, I believe,
resent an environment when they feel that they share adequately in its
making and in the end for which it is made. But they are bound to be
at least apathetic, and possibly hostile, when the sense is wide and
deep that they are no more than its instruments. That is the secret of
the profound allegiance trade unionism is able to create. Its members
see in its activities the expression of the power for which they
are individually searching. Few states--it is surely a significant
thing--have ever won from their subjects a loyalty so profound as the
Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, or the trade unions in the cotton
trades. Even the blunders of their leaders meet with a pardon far more
generous than would be extended to the political heads of the state.
The reason lies in the degree to which the trade union expresses the
intimate experience of its members. And until the policy of the state
meets that experience with similar profundity conflict between the
government and the trade union will rarely involve the desertion by
the members of the association they have themselves made. What the
government will represent as disloyalty to the state will seem to trade
unionists a service which is freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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