Introduction

Harold Laski admitted that many of the most formative influences in his life were American experiences and friendships. Aside from editorials that he wrote briefly for the London Daily Herald, his first real excusions into essay writing were for the American journals of liberal opinion, the Nation and the New Republic, and for American law journals. Laski's epitaphs for capitalism having been delivered over an empty casket in the 1930s, he became more strident in his calls for a socialist revolution during the war years. By the postwar years, Laski had returned to grace with some American liberals, particularly those at the Nation, who shared his anguish over American policies. When Edmund Wilson, a parlor Marxist of the 1930s, criticized Chase in the pages of the New Republic for his rejection of Marxism, he wrote that Chase and others should have followed their criticism of American capitalism to what he regarded as the logical conclusion.