First Published in 1940, The American Presidency is the first full length study of the presidency in action in America to be written by an Englishman. It explains the working of the complicated system over which the President presides and particularly the vexed question of the dual control of foreign relations in the United States. Professor Laski offers a new theory of the place of the presidency in American life and, incidentally, throws light on the inner nature of the other gr...

First Published in 1950*, Trade Unions in the New Society* examines the changing significance of trade unionism and the place they occupy in the democratic world. Harold J. Laski contrasts their function in a capitalist or socialist society with what it became under Russian totalitarianism. This book explores the relation between trade unions and the public, trade unions and the law and trade unions and democracy to show the impact of developments such as mass production, social security a...

This volume distils the themes expounded in A Grammar of Politics for the non-specialist reader. It is the best outline of Laski’s views in his transitional period.

This volume is an expanded version of the Weil lectures given at the University of North Carolina in 1931 and is one of the two texts of Laski’s quasi Marxist period.

An excellent and entertaining essayist, Laski’s volume deals with the issues of politics and law in Europe and American during the 1920s and 30s. It is unified by the concpetion of democracy as a society of equals sharing in a common good.

This volume, originally published in 1938 can be read by anyone with an interest in the evolution of the institution of government in England and how the workings of some parts of it particularly relate to the problems of the first half of the twentieth century.

Updated to take into account the post-war political landscape, this book, consisting of some undelivered lectures originally dating from 1929, discusses the meaning and place of liberty and freedom in a global post-war context.

This is Laski’s most important book after A Grammar of Politics. It discusses, on a grand scale, every aspect of American public life. Laski surveys American traditions and the American spirit, political institutions, the entire educational, religious, economic and social scene, America as a world power, and Americanism as a principle of civilisation. Laski’s unsurpassed knowledge of American constitutional, social and cultural history is set in the perspective of his deep study o...

A valuable piece of intellectual history, readable in its own terms, this volume, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation, traces the growth of Liberal doctrine until the advent of the French Revolution. It shows the relation of Liberalism to the new economic system, and the impact of this upon science, philosophy and literature. The book explains how the same causes which produced the Liberal spirit also produced the reasons for the growth of Socialism.

This influential study, originally published in 1921, develops aspects of Laski's theory of the state, ideas he introduced in his first important publication, Authority in the Modern State (1919). According to Laski, the state is not a supreme entity; it is one association among many that must compete for the people's loyalty and obedience.

As a sequel to Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, this volume, originally published in 1919, expands Laski’s pluralist doctrine of the state, (using France as its reference) but covers rather broader ground, since its main object is to insist that the problem of sovereignty is only a special case of the problem of authority. The result is a positive, constructive analysis of politics and the theory of the state which examines the division and organisation of power, the limitat...

An influential study of political power, originally published in 1917. Laski's theoretical ideas are elaborated through examples drawn from political and religious movements, such as the Catholic Revival and the creation of the German Empire. He concludes that the state is not a supreme entity; it is one association among many that must compete for the people's loyalty and obedience.