The Burke that emerges from Professor Kramnick's sensitive reinterpretation--the troubled ambivalent bourgeois--is vastly more interesting and truly significant than the mythic defender of the old order that generations have worshipped and misunderstood.

1993 marked the centennial of the birth of Harold Laski, charismatic lecturer in political philosophy at the London School of Economics from 1920-1950, a founding father of the British Labour Party, architect of the 1945 defeat of Winston Churchill, and intellectual mentor to generations of the political and intellectual elite in America and the Third World, including one-time LSE student, John F. Kennedy. His tenure at LSE was preceded by a brief stint at Harvard, where his active involvement in the famous Boston police strike of 1919 led to his near-dismissal - and which resulted in lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter. This is his biography.