BOOK REVIEW / The art of collective irresponsibility: Harold Laski - Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman: Hamish Hamilton, pounds 25

HERE IS an unexpected delight: a thumping great academic biography by an American professor and a Labour MP who once taught in a redbrick university. Their subject is a half-forgotten Marxist academic and Labour Party activist. Yet the book reads like a novel. If Harold Laski had not existed, he would have taken quite a bit of inventing.

Indeed Laski appeared under his own name as the now ludicrous 'utopian' in H G Wells's 1922 novel Men Like Gods. The libertarian Ayn Rand used him as model for the evil collectivist, Ellsworth Toohey, in The Fountainhead. He was denounced by George Orwell in the Forties for his tortured use of English, which supposedly reflected his moral contortions. He was hammered, along with Hitler, Stalin, the Webbs and Huxley, by William Buckley Jnr in God and Man at Yale, the book which launched the intellectual conservative counter-revolt in Fifties America.

Laski was a great tragi-comic Jewish figure, one of those obsessive, social-climbing outsiders who appear in panoramic novels and who reflect the idiocies of their age, rub shoulders with the rich and famous, and have walk-on parts in the major political crises without quite taking centre stage.

Somehow, the good-hearted little Marxist from the London School of Economics became one of the leading British intellectuals of his era, and an influential figure in the labour movement. For his simple funeral, appropriately held at Golders Green crematorium in March 1950, the Indian High Commissioner Risha Menon made available his official Rolls-Royce. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, turned up to deliver an uncharacteristically effuse eulogy, although he abhorred Laski's views and despaired of his utter lack of political judgement.

The occasion was, however, marred by the anti-Semitiism which had dogged his life. An obituary in the Statist, a magazine of the respectable Right, claimed that Laski's was 'an alien mind imbued and impregnated with an alien philosophy . . . a sinister personage to the normal Englishman'. Laski, born in 1893 into a rich Manchester Jewish business family was an atheist. He fell deeply in love with a non-Jew, whom he married, to the fury of his family. He embraced the fashionable cause of eugenics until it dawned on him that the physical, intellectual (and racial) purity its enthusiasts sought would not have included Jews.

At Oxford before the Great War he was excited by the concept of the New Woman. In a farcical incident which became known as The Oxted Station Outrage, in 1913 he bombed the men's lavatory at the Surrey village railway station as a gesture of solidarity with oppressed womankind. Later, under the influence of Bertrand and Dora Russell, he made cautious gestures in the direction of naturism, nudity and free love.

Later, at Harvard in the heady Twenties, he encouraged the Boston police strike and embraced anarchy and a form of political pluralism which suggested that the state was no more demanding of loyalty than the local golf club or, say, a trade union. In the collectivist Thirties, he developed a yearning for a quasi-Fascist corporate state and talked with relish of the beauty of this country's unwritten constitution which would enable a majority in the Commons to rule by decree or hand absolute power to the prime minister. (Hitler employed a similar logic.)

He was decent enough to recognise the horrors of Leninism-Stalinism in the Thirties, but still persuaded himself that the Soviet system provided economic efficiency, industrial democracy and cultural freedom. During the Second World War Laski indulged in ridiculous conspiracies to replace Attlee with people as diverse (and as right wing) as Bevin, Dalton and Morrison. At one point he ordered Attlee to resign, only to receive the laconic reply that his views had been 'noted'.

In his final years years, still an atheist, Laski finally embraced Zionism, largely out of a sense of rejection by this country and horror at what had happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Characteristically, he expected the Arabs to accept mass immigration and the creation of Israel because European Jewry was more progressive than Arab 'feudalism'. He was bitterly distressed when they refused to do so.