Harold Laski was just back from Harvard, where he had been much abused as a 'Red' because he had supported the Boston police strike. He was still in his late twenties and looked like a schoolboy. His lectures on the history of political ideas were brilliant, eloquent, and delivered without a note; he often referred to current controversies, even when the subject was Hobbes's theory of sovereignty. His lectures amounted to little in substance if one tried to write them down, but they made every student excited about the subject.

I now saw H. G. Wells frequently. After dinner friends arrived, among Professor Laski, who was still young-looking. Harold was a most brilliant orator. I heard him speak to the American Bar Association in California, and he talked unhesitatingly and brilliantly for an hour without a note. At H. G.'s flat that night, Harold told me of the amazing innovations in the philosophy of socialism. He said that the slightest acceleration in speed translates into terrific social differences.

His lectures taught more, much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting. I like to remember him in the early days of the war, when the School was in Cambridge. He would arrive every week from London and come straight to School from the station. The winter was bitter and train carriages unheated. He would appear in his blue overcoat and grotesquely shaped black hat, his cheeks blue with cold, teeth chattering, and queue up with the rest of us for a cup of foul but hot coffee, go up to the seminar room, crack a joke at the gathering of students who were waiting for him, sit down, light a cigarette and plunge into controversy and argument; and a dreary stuffy room would come to life and there would only be a group of people bent on the elucidation of ideas: We did not feel overwhelmed by his knowledge and learning, and we did not feel so because he did not know the meaning of condescension. We never felt compelled to agree with him, because it was so obvious that he loved a good fight and did not hide behind his years and experience. He was not impatient or bored or superciliously amused... His seminars taught tolerance, the willingness to listen although one disagreed, the values of ideas being confronted. And it was all immense fun, an exciting game that had meaning, and it was also a sieve of ideas, a gymnastics of the mind carried on with vigour and directed unobtrusively with superb craftsmanship.

I think I know now why he gave himself so freely. Partly it was because he was human and warm and that he was so interested in people. But mainly it was because he loved students, and he loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager and enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave world in which he so passionately believed.

He (Laski) did not underestimate how heavily the legacy of the past must affect any attempt to reach understanding with the Soviet Union. Nor did he fail to see how much Russian policies increased the difficulties of such an understanding. But he also believed that, when all possible emphasis had been laid on Russia's share of responsibility for the tragic climate of the post-war era, it remained true that one of the essential causes of the postwar tensions was the determination of the West to pursue its ancient and futile crusade against the idea which Russia had come to embody. And it was one of his most bitter disappointments that a Labour Government should have been willing to pursue foreign policies which only had meaning in terms of an acceptance of the values implicit in such a crusade. The first duty of a Labour Government, he insisted, was to come to terms, despite all difficulties, with the Communist world. Nothing that has happened since he died suggests that duty to be less imperative or less urgent.

In the midst of the (1945) campaign came the Laski incident. Laski - I always liked him - the new chairman of the National Executive, made a speech in which he suggested that Attlee's presence at Potsdam with Churchill was just a gesture; whatever was decided would not necessarily be confirmed by a future Labour Government because the Executive Committee would have to be consulted.

Nevertheless, I must confess that Laski's speech had been ill-advised. We in the Party had grown used to his views expressed in speech of a formal character. Laski had considerable influence over the years in Labour policy and planning. His work at the London School of Economics justified much confidence in his views. He could always see the other side of an argument. If he had lived I think he would have found his real place in the House of Lords. He told me that if he was offered a peerage he would gladly accept. I urged the idea on Attlee, for although I often disagreed with Laski I respected him as a man, his ability and sincerity.

Attlee, however, turned the idea down. He did not like Laski, a factor which made the latter's ill-advised speech on the eve of Potsdam more annoying in Attlee's eyes than the words of it warranted.

When Ralph Miliband had been Laski's student he had been very critical of aspects of his political stance despite his affection for him. He, like many of the Communist students, had believed that Laski had been far too committed to the Labour Party and the parliamentary system. But, apart from his debt of gratitude, two factors led him to re-appraise his former mentor after his death. First, Miliband's increasing distance from the Soviet Union and the Communist movement drew him towards Laski as another figure who was, to an extent, an independent Marxist. Secondly, while he might once have regarded him as too "moderate" politically, after his death it became clear that Laski represented a form of socialism which was now regarded as dangerously extreme by most of the Labour leadership and the academic establishment. He therefore saw it as quite crucial to maintain Laski's legacy both inside and outside LSE. When Kingsley Martin's biography and the Holmes-Laski letters were published, he took the opportunity to write a very sympathetic article about him, and when Herbert Deane savaged Laski's reputation as a political theorist, Miliband leaped to his defence. And it may well have been his fury about the Deane book which now led him to undertake a full study of the work of his former professor.

His object, he explained, was to examine Laski's main ideas on socialism, but the interest here is that his judgments provide a very clear insight into his own thinking at the time. First, he suggested that, although the growing intensity of the social and economic crisis from the mid-1920s had led Laski to become progressively more favourable to Marx's diagnosis, his Marxism "involved much less than the acceptance as scientifically true of that vast, all-embracing structure known as dialectical materialism". He was not "a convert to a new secular faith" for "historical materialism to him was a supremely useful tool of analysis, not a mental straight-jacket". Miliband clearly endorsed this attitude.

Secondly, Laski feared that propertied interests would do everything they possibly could to subvert a Labour government elected on a socialist programme and, in such circumstances, fundamental conflict would make impossible the continuation of the normal processes of constitutional government. He never believed that this was inevitable, but thought the likelihood was extremely high, and that Labour could not afford to disregard such fears. Miliband maintained that this position was still valid, although he thought that there was some encouragement to be drawn from the experience of the post-war years because Labour's power and influence were far greater than had been the case in the 1930s. Thirdly, although Laski had proclaimed himself a Marxist from the 1930s, he was never a Leninist, refusing to
accept Lenin's assertion of the inevitability of violent revolution or his insistence that the most imperative duty of socialists was to hasten its occurrence. Laski saw Lenin's strategy as the outcome of the circumstances in a non-democratic society, and consistently condemned the attempts of the Third International to bind all working-class parties to Bolshevik theory and practice. He was insistent that socialism would not necessarily be reached by the same road in countries in which there was a liberal tradition. This, Miliband suggested, made Laski's writings seem more contradictory and ambiguous than would have been the case had he adhered consistently either to the Leninist or to the gradualist viewpoint. But he would then also have been a much less interesting thinker.