ABSTRACT
In The American Democracy Harold Laski shrugged off American political theory and legal philosophy as largely sterile since the Civil War. Laski was particularly offended by newspaper columnists. Likening these "gangster-journalists" to Hitler's propagandists, Laski wrote that they believed, like Hitler, that "slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward". Laski praised American research facilities as the best in the world, its scholars—even in the social sciences and humanities—as receiving more support than those anywhere else in the world. A leading American historian, whom Laski had known from his Harvard days, Henry Steele Commager, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "It would be less than justice to say that Mr. Laski has merely a point of view. The Nation published Laski's article, "America, Good and Bad," in its June 25, 1949 issue.
