SOURCE: "The Nature of the State and Political Power," in The Political Ideas of Harold J. Laski, Columbia University Press, 1955, pp. 13-33.

In the following excerpt, Deane explores Laski's changing views on the state and the legitimacy of its political power.

Laski's earliest political writings are a constant polemic against what he terms "mystic monism"¹ in political thought—the conception that the state is to political theory what the Absolute is to metaphysics, that it is mysteriously One above all other human groupings, and that, because of its superior position and higher purpose, it is entitled to the undivided allegiance of each of its citizens. Laski believes that the main prop of this monistic theory of the state is the concept of state sovereignty, elaborated by Bodin and Hobbes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and given modern form in John Austin's definition of the legal sovereign as...