Otto Kahn‐Freund and Collective Laissez‐Faire: An Edifice without a Keystone?

Abstract

This paper describes Otto Kahn‐Freund's advocacy of the British ‘collective laissez‐faire’ system of regulation of industrial relations, in which regulation proceeded autonomously of the state. It suggests that a weakness of collective laissez‐faire as a normative principle was its failure to make adequate provision for the furtherance of the public interest. It links this failure to a more general reluctance, on the part of Kahn‐Freund, to conceive of the state as representative of the public interest. And it seeks to explain this reluctance with reference to Kahn‐Freund's experiences of living and working as a labour court judge in the Weimar Republic, and of moving to the UK as a refugee from Nazism.