Academic Career
In 1916, Laski was appointed as lecturer of modern history at McGill University and also started lecturing at Harvard University. He also lectured at Yale University during 1919–20. Laski's outspoken support of the Boston Police Strike of 1919 earned him severe criticism. After his brief involvement with the founding of The New School for Social Research in 1919, Laski returned to England in 1920 and took up a job at the London School of Economics (LSE). Six years later, he was made professor of political science at LSE, a post he held till his death in 1950. He also lectured regularly in America and wrote for The New Republic. During his years in Harvard, he became friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herbert Croly and Morris Raphael Cohen. Apart from his academic work at the LSE, Laski was an executive member of the socialist Fabian Society during 1922–1936. In 1936, he co-founded the Left Book Club along with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey. He was a prolific writer, producing a number of books and essays throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
While at the LSE in the 1930s, Laski developed a relationship with scholars from the Institute for Social Research, more commonly known today as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, with almost all the Institute's members by that time in exile due to Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Laski was among a number of British socialists, including Sidney Webb and R.H. Tawney, to arrange for the establishment of a London office for the Institute's use. After the Institute's move to Columbia University in 1934, Laski was one of its sponsored guest lecturers invited to New York. Laski also played a role in bringing Franz Neumann to join the Institute. After fleeing Germany almost immediately after Hitler's takeover, Neumann did graduate work in political science under Laski and Karl Mannheim at the LSE, writing his dissertation on rise and fall of the rule of law. It was on Laski's recommendation that Neumann was then invited to join the Institute in 1936.
As a lecturer, Laski was hugely popular amongst his students. Describing Laski's popularity, Kingsley Martin wrote:
| “ | 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. | ” |
Ralph Miliband, another student of Laski, praised his teaching as follows:
| “ | His lectures taught more, much more than political science. They taught a faith that ideas mattered, that knowledge was important and its pursuit exciting.... 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. | ” |
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