Relevance of Harold Laski

Harold Laski once said, "I really don't think there is anything to say about me except that I am honest and anxious to see a decent world before I die." Time magazine wrote an obituary for Laski titled "History's Revenge", saying "[s]ome people maintain that Manchester was the only place where Harold Laski could have been born. Manchester had nursed the industrial revolution and produced the "Manchester school" of laissez-faire liberals e.g., John Bright, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden. State Planner Harold Laski, the argument went, was History's revenge on the city of Manchester." Laski was professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics [LSE] and advocated Socialism. He greatly influenced a number of Indian leaders who studied in Britain, including Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's Constitution. "Political Science" is part of the Law Course at Madras Law College [as it was called then] and "Grammar of Politics" by Laski is prescribed for study. He continues to exert influence and probably has many answers to problems that would come in the future for those prepared to understand his thoughts. The book analyses the judicial process and according to Laski, "[w]hen we know how a nation-State dispenses justice, we know with some exactness the moral character to which it can pretend."

"The Art of the Advocate" by Richard Du Cann presents many tidbits from Laski v The Newark Advertiser Co. Ltd and Parlby.
The brief facts are that, on Saturday, 16th June, 1945, at the height of the General Election, Professor Harold Laski addressed a crowd of over five hundred people, in support of a Labour party candidate at Newark, and as he was about to leave, a journalist from the Newark Advertiser asked him why Laski "openly advocated revolution by violence". The "Newark Advertiser" reported Laski's reply as: "As for violence, he continued, if Labour could not obtain what it needed by general consent, 'We shall have to use violence even if it means revolution'." Laski sued "Newark Advertiser" along with Parly, its Editor and Managing Director, that the report was false and malicious, that, by innuendo, the report meant and was understood to mean that Laski had declared his intention to commit and to conspire with others to commit the crimes of treason, treason-felony, sedition, riot, and breach of the peace and that Laski had been thereby injured in his reputation. The defence claimed the report was fair and that the words did not mean what was alleged in the innuendo. The justification claimed on the basis of pamphlets and books, that Laski had been preaching 'revolution by violence' at Newark as he had throughout his active life. The trial is said to have lasted five days, and the jury decided in forty minutes that the report was fair and accurate. The action was dismissed with costs. They did not go on to decide whether Laski had habitually advocated violence as their decision was just that he used those words at Newark. Time magazine mentions in the above said article that, "Laski had to pay all the court costs of $52,000, including a thumping fee to the paper's lawyer, wealthy Sir Patrick Hastings."

The print media lives by generating heated controversies. Laski fed them with prime fodder.

Harold Laski wrote in 1925, in his "Grammar of Politics", "[e]very legal system involves, in its working, an unprofessional element, of which the jury is the most notable example", and said, "[i]t is, therefore, a matter of importance in any judicial system to confer powers of general jurisdiction only upon persons of trained competence in the law." His own trial two decades later only confirmed his theory.

Qualitative competence in the legal system is something Laski desired deeply. Babbage, Turing, Laski and many others suffered in some way or the other under the system over them. They painstakingly wrote defensively in support of welfare for the majority, but somehow they only got trampled by events in the end.

Time magazine concluded, "Jeffersonian-Marxist Harold Laski, for all his brilliance, had never made it quite clear what he considered a decent world to be." That only shows how widely "Grammar of Politics" was read. History hasn't stopped counting the days past and just started labeling its days as that of the "information era". Laski started his grammar book with the line: "No theory of the state is ever intelligible save in the context of its time." Ever increasing automation and space exploration needs set a new context for state theories. "History's Revenge" would come only when Laski is more widely understood and appreciated. Even if it never does come, it would cause no peril to the reputation of Laski.

References:
[1] "History's Revenge", Time article dated 3rd April, 1950 at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,934881,00.html
[2] "LSE-India past and present" at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEIndia/pastAndPresent.htm
[3] "A Grammar of Politics", Harold J. Laski.
[4] "The Art of the Advocate", Richard Du Cann

Liberties in Cyber Space

Cyber space teems with tumultuous arguments on liberties. "Declaration of Independence of Cyber Space" by John Perry Barlow at http://members.aye.net/~hippie/barlow/barlowci.htm
points to the futility of governing cyber space, not to speak of governing from it. He thunders, "You have no sovereignty where we gather." Marvin Minsky has the simplest argument against the libertarians: "Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!"

The compromise is that any society needs to settle down a few working rules. It is very interesting to use machines to help us in executing those rules. They raise many issues. An old note of mine, to provoke thought:

---

e-governance and e-transparency solutions are most welcome. But then,
the solution itself should also be free, open and transparent. ...
Law itself is public, free and open in nature. Our Supreme Court had the
occasion in Naresh v. State of Maharashtra [AIR 1967 SC 1] to consider
the merits of open and public trials for "healthy objective and fair
administration of justice," and quoted Bentham with approval as follows:

"In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest, and evil in every
shape, have full swing. ... Publicity is the very soul of justice.
It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards
against improbity. It keeps the Judge himself while trying under
trial in the sense that the security of securities is publicity."

The principles laid are equally true for governance. Without free
software, it is hard to even imagine a e-governance software.

But, I am personally wary of using the expression "e-governance software".

The law is the common background for all human activity. Besides
governance, law operates upon a large area. Governance is specially
grouped under the heading Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. We
have Law of Contracts, Torts, Law of Property, Family Law, Labour Law
etc. wherein "governance" is minimal or even totally absent. If an
application can handle Constitutional Law and Administrative Law, then
there are no reasons why it should not handle the Law of Contracts or
the other laws. We have people designing "banking software", "insurance
software", "billing software", as though the law has these water tight
compartments. We have ERP, CRM, B2B, B2C, G2G, G2B, etc. etc, with
others promising to integrate ERP with CRM, CRM with the rest in all
possible permutations and combinations. It makes business sense but no
legal sense.

Can any e-governance software check constitutionality of code? If they
can't, then they better not call themselves by such a name.

Besides, consider the following:

Suppose an e-governance application wants to assist litigants in filing
plaints. While automating preparation of plaints, some issues arise.
If more than one plaintiff sues, the script should use "plaintiffs"
otherwise, "plaintiff". In appeals, for the same reason it chooses
between "appellants" and "appellant". Soon, a function that would give
the plural for singular nouns like applicant, petitioner, claimant,
defendant, and respondent becomes necessary. This exercise soon takes
one to examining the rules of English grammar. If an application can
handle legal rules well, then it might handle rules of English grammar
as well. But the most singular difficulty would be in listing the rules
of English grammar. Tamil has Agathiam (the primary grammar text, but
no longer in vogue) > Tholkappiam (Secondary text, based on Agathiam),
and > finally the recent Nanool, where everything from how letters are
formed, classified, pronounced, to usage, root words, verbs,
concatanation, and every thing necessary to use the language are dealt
with thoroughly. Assuming that after consensus, acceptable rules of
English grammar for the present are available, we could write functions
such as:

    function get_plural($singlular){
        // returns plural for a given singular
        ....
    }

To write a perfect get_plural function, we need to know if the word
passed to the function is a noun or not. Now, we have to write

    function is_noun($word){
        // returns if word is a noun
        ....
    }

As you see, one thing leads to another, and soon we will have a large
library of functions that deal with many aspects of English grammar.
Then our scripts will write well, and may be read well too.

Once we write such a library, there is no reason why this should be
confined to just an "e-governance" application. We could use it even
better in the field of education or wherever English is used.

Consider another scenario.

Recently, an ONGC helicopter crashed into the sea near Mumbai, and an
Enquiry has been ordered into it. The survivor & eye witnesses reported
that the helicopter went into a spin before crashing into the sea. It
is well known that the tail propellor prevents a helicopter from
spinning. Did the tail propellor fail? We see that the enquiry soon
has to deal with the basic workings of an helicopter to arrive at the
truth for the cause of the accident. Though at the top level, things
look like "e-governance", as we go deep, we find ourselves into the
thick of rules of English grammar, the laws of aerodynamics, history, or
other fields of human knowledge.

Ancient sages dealt exhaustively on grammar, philosophy, ethics,
medicine, law, science and literature single handedly. Agathiar wrote
Agathiam creating a script for Tamil, codifing the rules of grammar, and
then dealt with medicine [Paripooranam 400], and initiated Girivalam, as
the simplest form of yoga, that could be practiced by one and all.
Agathiar is believed to have brought his first love, River Cauvery, to
Tamil Nadu. Well, then he might have organised the flow of the River
with the aid of the local kings. Patanjali wrote upon Sanskrit Grammar,
Ayurveda and Yoga, and though the works stand distinctively, a common
thread unites them. A unity at some point is required for scientific
progress and human prosperity.

Free software offers all the tools we can ask for. The next big step
would be when human knowlege is ported across so that software
applications abound with life, intelligence and wisdom.