Books: The Executioner Awaits

THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (785 pp.)—Harold J. Laski—Viking ($6.50).

Britain's bookish radical, Harold J. (for Joseph) Laski has spent most of his 54 years looking at the world through pink spectacles. Born in Manchester of Hungarian immigrant parents, he looks like a young Henry Van Dyke but often talks like poor Poll with elephantiasis of the ego.

Like many left-wingers, Laski has taken varying attitudes toward the U.S.S.R., ranging from piously articulate fellow-traveling to skeptical hostility (his Secret Battalion, published in 1946, was a blistering attack on the British Communist Party). But he has never for a moment lost his faith in the...