SOURCE: "Mr. Laski Proceeds," in The Nation, Vol. 140, March 30, 1935, pp. 338-9.

In the following essay, Niebuhr reviews Laski's The State in Theory and Practice.

No contemporary political scientist has analyzed the problems of sovereignty and the state with greater clarity and precision and with a finer sense for the actualities of political history than Harold Laski. In his most recent volume [The State in Theory and Practice] he does justice to his earlier philosophical and historical interest in the character of the state by a rather final and telling refutation of the metaphysical theory of the state as held by Hegel and Bosanquet. Thereupon he proceeds to elaborate his theory of the state in more consistently Marxian terms than in any previous volume.

In a sense this new book is a further development of the thesis presented in his "Democracy in Crisis." In that volume he contended that...