Harold Laski: A Life on the Left.

• Author: Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.

Harold Laski, the leftist British intellectual, knew Churchill, advised FDR, and dazzled Oliver Wendell Holmes. So why has posterity forgotten him?

Does anyone still remember Harold Laski? Sixty years ago he was a famous - in some circles notorious - figure. A professor of political science at the London School of Economics, he was known round the world as the evangelist of democratic socialism. In Britain, he regularly led the polls in the vote for the Labour Party's National Executive. In America, he was on close terms with Franklin Roosevelt and half a dozen Supreme Court justices. Leftists acclaimed him as the prophet of a golden tomorrow. Rightists denounced him as the evil genius behind the Labour Party and the New Deal. Anti-colonial nationalists in Africa and India looked to him for inspiration. His books were in demand, his articles appeared everywhere, his lectures were enthusiastically applauded, his energy seemed boundless, his influence was indisputable. And today? Rarely has so vivid a figure faded so fast. He is as forgotten as Ozymandias: "Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck.../The lone level sands stretch far away."

Laski's impact, while it lasted, was almost as great on America as on Britain. He burst on the United States in 1916, a 23-year-old prodigy out of Oxford who joined the Harvard faculty and proceeded to dazzle everyone he met - and he took care to meet everyone of importance. Those dazzled (some longer than others) included, in the older generation, Justices Holmes and Brandeis, Herbert Croly of The New Republic and the philosopher Morris Cohen; among his contemporaries, Felix Frankfurter, Roger Baldwin, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson, and Charles A. Beard. Anyone who doubts the youthful brilliance of this small, frail, chain-smoking Britisher should look at the two sparkling volumes of the Holmes-Laski Letters.

After a controversial intervention in the Boston police strike of 1919, Laski returned to England where, in addition to his LSE professorship, he lived a frantic life as a political and intellectual gadfly, pouring out books, pamphlets, and newspaper columns in an endless stream. He was active in the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Left Book Club and lectured regularly in America, where he picked up a new generation of friends, especially Max Lerner and Edward R. Murrow.

Even his critics concede that Laski played a very large role in bringing about the transformation of British opinion that...