The Harold Laski Letters

Item No. 6.

Harold Laski

J-P Mayer met Harold Laski (1893-1950) shortly after he fled Nazi Germany to settle in England in 1936. By 1938, they were working together on a plan to publish a series of classics of political thought. In 1943, Laski helped Mayer secure a temporary post at the LSE, where Laski was head of the Department of Government. During his stint at the school, Mayer conducted research on British political parties while also teaching a weekly seminar on the British Constitution in Laski’s department. Not long before his death, Laski wrote an introduction to Mayer’s French edition of Democracy in America (1951) published by Gallimard.

Eighteen letters from Laski to Mayer were found among Mayer’s papers. In the first of the two posted here, Laski offers a pithy summary of French political thought since 1789. The background to the second letter is the long-standing campaign by Irene Curzon, the 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, to secure the right of women peers to sit in the House of Lords. Curzon (1896-1966), a socialite and welfare worker, had inherited the title of Barony of Ravensdale when her father, Lord Curzon, died in 1925, but women at the time were excluded from the House. Mayer, who was a good friend of Baroness Ravensdale, sought to help her in her fight to change this by lobbying some of his political contacts. In 1958, Curzon was finally permitted to sit in the House when she was made one of the first four female life peers. But it was not until the passage of the Peerage Act of 1963 that suo jure hereditary women peers were allowed to enter the House of Lords in their own right.