Peripheral Vision: An Inspiring but neglected UK Intellectual of the early 20thC

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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

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The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, October 1, 2023

An Inspiring but neglected UK Intellectual of the early 20thC

It was Horia-Roman Patapeivici‘s praise of the clarity of Harold Laski’s A grammar of politics (published in 1925) which set me off yesterday in pursuit of the giants of the British Labour movement who are all too rarely celebrated. I’ve selected several figures, starting with Laski – GDH Cole and RH Tawney being older inspirational figures to whom I hope to do justice in future posts.

Laski was born in 1893, got himself married at the age of 18 (to an older academic), graduated with first class Honours from Oxford University in 1914 but failed his military physical and took an academic position (in history) at McGill University in Canada in 1916 – also lecturing at Harvard whose Law Review he edited, making many highly-placed American friends.

Returning to the UK in 1920, he was made Professor of Political Science at the LSE in 1926 – by which times he had published several popular books

“promoting pluralism, especially in the essays collected in “Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty” (1917), “Authority in the Modern State” (1919), and “The Foundations of Sovereignty” (1921). He argued that the state should not be considered supreme since people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions and societies. The state should respect those allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation”

He was one of the few leftists to pay attention to the State (his student, Ralph Miliband was another) – indeed it was the very first chapter of his “Grammar of Politics” where he set out what was then the highly controversial view (for an academic) that it reflected class interests. This is a subject of considerable interest to me and I was sad to see that the classic work in the field – Bob Jessop’s The State – past, present future (2016) fails to mention Laski – even in the index.

In a highly insightful memory of Laski, Miliband put it very well

It is his treatment of these themes which gave Laski so remarkable an influence on the intellectual configuration of his times. For a period of some twenty-five years, Laski contributed more to the discussion of the meaning and challenge of Socialism than any other English Socialist. From 1925, when his Grammar of Politics was published, until his death in 1950, countless men and women were given a new insight into the problems of their times because they heard or read Laski.

Miliband went on, in the same essay to argue that

"The Grammar of Politics" is one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made by an English Socialist to give concrete meaning to the ideals of the Labour Party. Sidney Webb, who was not given to exuberant praise, called it a 'great book'.4 The modem reader is unlikely to go quite so far, not least because so many of the ideas of the Grammar have now been accepted as part of the common currency of contemporary thought. But there can be no doubt that it remains one of the few fundamental 'texts' of English Socialism.

Laski was, by all accounts, an inspiring lecturer (many of his students later becoming leaders of newly-independent nations) and I particularly enjoyed his own admission that he owed that to his early experience of lecturing to soldiers during the Great War. I know from my own experience in the late 1960s how valuable it is to have your academic language knocked out of you by no-nonsense citizens.

Although he became a Labour activist when he returned to the UK, he turned down an offer of a parliamentary seat and one in the House of Lords in the early 1920s and became a left-wing critic (not averse to using revolutionary language) - chairing the Labour Party Conference in 1944 and becoming its chair 1945-46 where he earned the stern rebuke from Atlee that “a period of silence from you would be most welcome”