SOURCE: "Harold J. Laski: The American Experience," in American Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 53-67.

In the following essay, Ekirch assesses Laski 's impact on American politics, in part through his relations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other prominent Americans.

A generation after his death in 1950, Harold Laski, the eminent political scientist, socialist and British Labour Party leader, is now little remembered by students outside his own fields of government and political theory. Yet Laski remains an important figure in both British and American Studies. In an obituary assessment of his fellow political scientist, the distinguished Oxford don Max Beloff called the modern period "The Age of Laski." In intellectual history, Beloff believed, Laski had played a catalytic role much like that of John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century.¹

Along with his career as a practical politician, Laski was also an intellectual and an idealist. Most...