Criticism
Laski has been criticised by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as "incorrigible teller of tales that exaggerated – sometimes fabricated – his own accomplishments, charms, and triumphs". According to Schlesinger:
| “ | gave the highest value to individual freedom but never explained how it could survive without diversification of ownership. His fatal fluency enabled him to glide over the hard questions. His besetting sin was the substitution of rhetoric for thought. | ” |
Ayn Rand, in a collection of her essays, The Art of Fiction, remarks that after hearing a talk by Laski in the 1930s, he became for her the personification of the villain Ellsworth Toohey in her novel, The Fountainhead. In her words,
"It is true that he was not particularly liberal—that is, he was the most vicious liberal I have ever heard in public, but not blatantly so. He was very subtle and gracious, he rambled on a great deal about nothing in particular—and then he made crucial, vicious points once in a while I thought, "There was my character." Years later, I learned that career was in fact somewhat like Toohey's: he was always the man behind the scenes, much more influential than anybody knew publicly, pulling the strings behind the governments of several countries. Finally he was proved to be a communist, which he did not announce himself as or blatantly sound like."
In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell used a section from Laski's book, Essay in Freedom of Expression, as an example of writing which demonstrated the "mental vices" suffered by English speakers.
Read more about this topic: Harold Laski
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)