Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Wednesday, July 8, 2015

"Fair" Elections Act, Laski and Hayek

… the right … to the franchise is essential to liberty; and a citizen excluded from it is unfree.[1]

Harold J. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State, 1930.

Here Laski is quoted by Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). It is worth noting that Harper (with Thatcher) is a devoted follower of Hayek’s neo-liberalism which won him a shared Noel Prize in Economics in 1974.   Laski (associating with Frankfurt School and British Labour Party – and a teacher of Pierre Trudeau) taught at the London School of Economics from 1920 to 1950; and Hayek taught there, as well, from 1931 to 1950.  Perhaps these two intellectual icons, with very different political leanings, would be in agreement over Harper’s “Fair” Elections Act.




[1][1] Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty. Definitive Edition, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), p. 62. n. 11. 

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