the unit of democracy from the individual to the group. It is the
individual man who must feel himself the unit of city government, of
state government: he has not delegated his responsibility to his
neighborhood group; he has direct relation with larger wholes. I have no
medieval idea of mediate articulation, of individuals forming groups and
groups forming the nation. Mechanical federalism we have long outgrown.
The members of the nation are to be individuals, not groups. The
movement for neighborhood organization is from one point of view a
movement to give the individual political effectiveness—it is an
individualistic not a collectivistic movement, paradoxical as this may
seem to superficial thinking. But, as the whole structure of government
must rest on the individual, it must have its roots within that place
where you can get nearest to him, and where his latent powers can best
be freed and actualized—his local group.
What are we ultimately seeking through neighborhood organization? To
find the individual. But let no one think that the movement for
neighborhood organization is a new movement. Our neighborhood
organization, we are often told, had its origin in the New England
town-meeting. Yes, and far beyond that in the early institutions of our
English ancestors. That our national life must be grounded in the daily,
intimate life of all men is the teaching of the whole long stream of
English history.
We have seen that the increasing activity of the state, its social
policies and social legislation, demands the activity of every man. We
have seen in considering direct government that the activity of every
man is not enough if we mean merely his activity at the polling
booths. With the inclusion of all men and women (practically
accomplished) in the suffrage, with the rapidly increasing acceptance
of direct government, the _extensive_ work of the democratic impulse
has ended. Now the _intensive_ work of democracy must begin. The great
historic task of the Anglo-Saxon people has been to find wise and
reasoned forms for the expression of individual responsibility, has
been so to bulwark the rights of the individual as to provide at the
same time for the unity and stability of the state. They have done
this externally by making the machinery of representative government.
We want to-day to do it spiritually, to direct the spiritual currents
in their flow and interflow so that we have not only the external
interpenetration—choosing representatives etc.—but the deeper
interpenetration which shows the minds and needs and wants of all men.
We can satisfy our wants only by a genuine union and communion of all,
only in the friendly outpouring of heart to heart. We have come to the
time when we see that the machinery of government can be useful to us
only so far as it is a living thing: the souls of men are the stones of
Heaven, the life of every man must contribute fundamentally to the
growth of the state. So the world spirit seeks freedom and finds it in a
more and more perfect union of true individuals. _The relation of
neighbors one to another must be integrated into the substance of the
state._ Politics must take democracy from its external expression of
representation to the expression of that inner meaning hidden in the
intermingling of all men. This is our part to-day—thus shall we take our
place in the great task of our race. Our political life began in the
small group, but it has taken us long to evolve our relation to a
national life, and meanwhile much of the significance and richness of
the local life has been lost. Back now to the local unit we must go with
all that we have accumulated, to find in and through that our complete
realization. Back we must go to this small primary unit if we would
understand the meaning of democracy, if we would get the fruits of
democracy. As Voltaire said, “The spirit of France is the candle of
Europe,” so must the spirit of the neighborhood be the candle of the
nation.
-----
Footnote 90:
This point will be taken up in ch. XXXIII.
Footnote 91:
Or perhaps the Senate might represent the occupational group (see ch.
XXXIII). Or perhaps the experts mentioned above might be
representatives from occupational groups.
Footnote 92:
In North Carolina the recently organized State Bureau of Community
Service—made up of the administrators of the Department of
Agriculture, the Board of Health, the Normal and Industrial College
and the Farmers’ Union, with the State Superintendent of Public
Instruction as its central executive—is making its immediate work the
development of local community organization which shall be directly
articulated with a unified state organization.
Footnote 93:
The Community Council, however, is not to duplicate other
organizations but first to coördinate all existing agencies before
planning new activities.
Footnote 94:
And spontaneously many towns and villages turned to the schoolhouse as
the natural centre of its war services.
Footnote 95:
For the moment I ignore the occupational group to be considered later.
Footnote 96:
I have taken this account from the official report. I have been told
by New York people that these commissions have shown few signs of
life. This does not, however, seem to me to detract from the value of
the plan as a suggestion, or as indication of what is seen to be
advisable if not yet wholly practicable. The New York charter provides
for Local Improvement Boards as connecting links with the central
government, but these I am told have shown no life whatever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVIII
POLITICAL PLURALISM
--------------
ALL that I have written has been based on the assumption of the unifying
state. Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood organization as if it were
possible to take it for granted that the neighborhood group is to be the
basis of the new state. The truth of both these assumptions is denied by
some of our most able thinkers.
The unified state is now discredited in many quarters. Syndicalists,
guild socialists, some of the Liberals in England, some of the advocates
of occupational representation in America, and a growing school of
writers who might be called political pluralists are throwing the burden
of much proof upon the state, and are proposing group organization as
the next step in political method. To some the idea of the state is
abhorrent. One writer says, “The last hundred years marked in all
countries the beginning of the dissolution of the State and of the
resurrection of corporate life [trade unions etc.].... In the face of
this growth of syndicalism in every direction, ... it is no longer
venturesome to assert that the State is dead.”
Others like to keep the word “state” but differ much as to the position
it is to occupy in the new order: to some it seems to be merely a kind
of mucilage to keep the various groups together; with others the state
is to hold the ring while different groups fight out their differences.
Still other thinkers, while seeing the open door to scepticism in regard
to the state, are nevertheless not ready to pass through, but,
preserving the instinct and the reverence for the unity of the state,
propose as the most immediate object of our study how the unity can be
brought about, what is to be the true and perfect bond of union between
the multiple groups of our modern life. All these thinkers, differing
widely as they do, yet may be roughly classed together as the upholders
of a multiple group organization as the basis for a new state.
This movement is partly a reaction against an atomistic sovereignty, the
so-called theory of “subjective” rights, a “senseless” geographical
representation, a much berated parliamentary system, and partly the wish
to give industrial workers a larger share in the control of industry and
in government.
The opposition to “numerical representation” has been growing for some
time. We were told thirty years ago by Le Prins that vocational
representation is “the way out of the domination of the majority,” that
the vocational group is the “natural” group “spontaneously generated in
the womb of a nation.” Twenty-five years ago Benoist said that the state
must recognize private associations: universities, chambers of commerce,
professional associations, societies of agriculture, syndicates of
workmen—“en un mot tout ce qui a corps et vie dans la nation.” If the
state is to correspond to reality, it must recognize, Benoist insisted,
all this group life, all these interests, within it. Moreover, he urged,
with our present pulverized suffrage, with sovereignty divided among
millions, we are in a state of anarchy; only group representation will
save us from “la force stupide de nombre.” M. Léon Duguit has given us a
so-called “objective” theory of law which means for many people a new
conception of the state.
Many say that it is absurd for representation to be based on the mere
chance of residence as is the case when the geographical district is the
unit. The territorial principle is going, we are told, and that of
similar occupational interests will take its place. Again some people
are suggesting that both principles should be recognized in our
government: that one house in Parliament represent geographical areas,
the other occupations.[97] No one has yet, however, made any proposal of
this kind definite enough to serve as a basis of discussion.
Syndicalism demands the abolition of the “state” while—through its
organization of the syndicate of workers, the union of syndicates of the
same town or region and the federation of these unions—it erects a
system of its own controlled entirely by the workers. Syndicalism has
gained many adherents lately because of the present reaction against
socialism. People do not want the Servile State and, therefore, many
think they do not want any state.
In England a new school is arising which is equally opposed to
syndicalism and to the bureaucracy of state socialism. Or rather it
takes half of each. Guild socialism believes in state ownership of the
means of production, but that the control of each industry or
“guild”—appointment of officers, hours and conditions of work
etc.—should be vested in the membership of the industry. The
syndicalists throw over the state entirely, the guild socialists believe
in the “co-management” of the state. There are to be two sets of
machinery side by side but quite distinct: that based on the
occupational group will be concerned with economic considerations, the
other with “political” considerations, the first culminating in a
national Guild Congress, and the second in the State.[98]
“Guild Socialism,” edited by A. R. Orage, gives in some detail this
systematic plan already familiar to readers of the _New Age_. A later
book of the same school “Authority, Liberty and Function,” by Ramiro de
Maeztu, concerns itself less with detail and more with the philosophical
basis of the new order. The value of this book consists in its emphasis
on the functional principle.[99]
Mr. Ernest Barker of Oxford, although he formulates no definite system,
is a political pluralist.
John Neville Figgis makes an important contribution to pluralism,[100]
and although he has a case to plead for the church, he is equally
emphatic that all the local groups which really make our life should be
fostered and given an increased authority.
In America vocational representation has many distinguished advocates,
among them Professor Felix Adler and Professor H. A. Overstreet. Mr.
Herbert Croly, who has given profound thought to the trend of democracy,
advocates giving increased power and legal recognition to the powerful
groups growing up within the state. Mr. Harold Laski is a pronounced
political pluralist, especially in his emphasis on the advantage of
multiple, varied and freely developing groups for the enrichment and
enhancement of our whole life. Mr. Laski’s book, “Studies in the Problem
of Sovereignty,” is one of the most thought-stimulating bits of modern
political writing: it does away with the fetich of the abstract state—it
is above all an attempt to look at things as they are rather than as we
imagine them to be; it shows that states are not supreme by striking
examples of organizations within the state claiming and winning the
right to refuse obedience to the state; it sees the strength and the
variety of our group life to-day as a significant fact for political
method; it is a recognition, to an extent, of the group principle—it
sees that sovereignty is not in people as a mass; it pleads for a
revivification of local life, and finally it shows us, implicitly, not
only that we need to-day a new state, but that the new state must be a
great moral force.[101]
Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the pluralists is their
clear showing that “a single unitary state with a single sovereignty” is
not true to the facts of life to-day. Mr. Barker says, “Every state is
something of a federal society and contains different national groups,
different churches, different economic organizations, each exercising
its measure of control over its members.” The following instances are
cited to show the present tendency of different groups to claim
autonomy:
1. Religious groups are claiming rights as groups. Many churchmen would
like to establish the autonomy of the church. It is impossible to have
undenominational instruction in the schools of England because of the
claims of the church.
2. There is a political movement towards the recognition of national
groups. The state in England is passing Home Rule Acts and Welsh
Disestablishment Acts to meet the claims of national groups. “All Europe
is convulsed with a struggle of which one object is a regrouping of men
in ways which will fulfil national ideals.”
3. “The Trade-Unions claim to be free groups.” “Trade-unions have
recovered from Parliament more than they have lost in the courts.”
Let us consider the arguments of the pluralist school, as they form the
most interesting, the most suggestive and the most important theory of
politics now before us. It seems to me that there are four weaknesses in
the pluralist school[102] which must be corrected before we can take
from them the torch to light us on our political way: (1) some of the
pluralists ostensibly found their books on pragmatic philosophy and yet
in their inability to reconcile the distributive and collective they do
not accept the latest teachings of pragmatism, for pragmatism does not
end with a distributive pluralism, (2) the movement is in part a
reaction to a misunderstood Hegelianism, (3) many of the pluralists are
professed followers of medieval doctrine, (4) their thinking is not
based on a scientific study of the group, which weakens the force of
their theories of “objective” rights and sovereignty, much as these
latter are an advance on our old theories of “subjective” rights and a
sovereignty based on an atomistic conception of society.
First, the underlying problem of pluralism and pragmatism is, as James
proclaims, the relation of “collective” and “distributive.” The problem
of to-day, we all agree, is the discovery of the kind of federalism
which will make the parts live fully in the whole, the whole live fully
in the parts. But this is the central problem of philosophy which has
stirred the ages. The heart of James’ difficulty was just this: how can
many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can the
same identical fact experience itself so diversely? How can you be the
absolute and the individual? It is the old, old struggle which has
enmeshed so many, which some of our philosophers have transcended by the
deeper intuitions, sure that life is a continuous flow and not spasmodic
appearance, disappearance and reappearance. James struggled long with
this problem, but the outcome was sure. His spirit could not be bound by
intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity. He was finally forced to
adopt a higher form of rationality. He gave up conceptualistic logic
“fairly, squarely and irrevocably,” and knew by deepest inner testimony
that “states of consciousness can separate and combine themselves freely
and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of
simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.” James always saw the
strung-along universe, but he also saw the unifying principle which is
working towards its goal. “That secret,” he tells us, “of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot
be a contradiction incarnate.... Our intelligence must keep on speaking
terms with the universe.”
When James found that the “all-form” and the “each-forms” are not
incompatible, he found the secret of federalism. It is our task to work
out in practical politics this speculative truth which the great
philosophers have presented to us. The words absolute and individual
veil it to us, but substitute state and individual and the problem comes
down to the plane of our actual working everyday life. It may be
interesting to read philosophy, but the thrilling thing for every man of
us to do is to make it come true. We may be heartened by our sojourns on
Sinai, but no man may live his life in the clouds. And what does
pragmatism mean if not just this? We can only, as James told us again
and again, understand the collective and distributive by living. Life is
the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when
the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own
being.
If we in our neighborhood group live James’ philosophy of the
compounding of consciousness, if we obey the true doctrine, that each
individual is not only himself but the state—for the fulness of life
overflows—then will the perfect form of federalism appear and express
itself, for then we have the spirit of federalism creating its own form.
Political philosophers talk of the state, but there is no state until we
make it. It is pure theory. We, every man and woman to-day, must create
his small group first, and then, through its compounding with other
groups, it ascends from stage to stage until the federal state appears.
Thus do we understand by actual living how collective experiences can
claim identity with their constituent parts, how “your experience and
mine can be members of a world-experience.” In our neighborhood groups
we claim identity with the whole collective will, at that point we are
the collective will.
Unless multiple sovereignty can mean ascending rather than parallel
groups it will leave out the deepest truth which philosophy has brought
us. But surely the political pluralists who are open admirers of James
will refuse with him to stay enmeshed in sterile intellectualism, in the
narrow and emasculated logic of identity. Confessedly disciples of
James, will they not carry their discipleship a step further? Have they
not with James a wish for a world that does not fall into “discontinuous
pieces,” for “a higher denomination than that distributed, strung-along
and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings [now] swim in”? Their
groups must be the state each at its separate point. When they see this
truth clearly, then the leadership to which their insight entitles them
will be theirs.
I have said that the political pluralists are fighting a misunderstood
Hegelianism. Do they adopt the crudely popular conception of the
Hegelian state as something “above and beyond” men, as a separate entity
virtually independent of men? Such a conception is fundamentally wrong
and wholly against the spirit of Hegel. As James found collective
experience not independent of distributive experience, as he reconciled
the two through the “compounding of consciousness,” so Hegel’s related
parts received their meaning only in the conception of total relativity.
The soul of Hegelianism is total relativity, but this is the essence of
the compounding of consciousness. As for James the related parts and
their relations appear simultaneously and with equal reality, so in
Hegel’s total relativity: the members of the state in their right
relation to one another appear in all the different degrees of reality
together as one whole total relativity—never sundered, never warring
against the true Self, the Whole.
But there is the real Hegel and the Hegel who misapplied his own
doctrine, who preached the absolutism of a Prussian State. Green and
Bosanquet in measure more or less full taught the true Hegelian
doctrine. But for a number of years the false leadings of Hegel have
been uppermost in people’s minds, and there has been a reaction to their
teaching due to the panic we all feel at the mere thought of an absolute
monarch and an irresponsible state. The present behavior of Prussia of
course tends to increase the panic, and the fashion of jeering at Hegel
and his “misguided” followers is wide-spread. But while many English
writers are raging against Hegelianism, at the same time the English are
pouring out in unstinted measure themselves and their substance to
establish on earth Hegel’s absolute in the actual form of an
International League!
The political pluralists whom we are now considering, believing that a
collective and distributive sovereignty cannot exist together, throw
overboard collective sovereignty. When they accept the compounding of
consciousness taught by their own master, James, then they will see that
true Hegelianism finds its actualized form in federalism.
Perhaps they would be able to do this sooner if they could rid
themselves of the Middle Ages! Many of the political pluralists
deliberately announce that they are accepting medieval doctrine.
In the Middle Ages the group was the political unit. The medieval man
was always the member of a group—of the guild in the town, of the manor
in the country. But this was followed by the theory of the individual
not as a member of a group but as a member of a nation, and we have
always considered this on the whole an advance step. When, therefore,
the separate groups are again proposed as the political units, we are
going back to a political theory which we have long outgrown and which
obviously cramps the individual. It is true that the individual as the
basis of government has remained an empty theory. The man with political
power has been the rich and strong man. There has been little chance for
the individual as an individual to become a force in the state. In
reaction against such selfish autocracy people propose a return to the
Middle Ages. This is not the solution. Now is the critical moment. If we
imitate the Middle Ages and adopt political pluralism we lose our chance
to invent our own forms for our larger ideas.
Again, balancing groups were loosely held together by what has been
called a federal bond. Therefore we are to look to the medieval empire
for inspiration in forming the modern state. But the union of church and
guild, boroughs and shires of the Middle Ages seems to me neither to
bear much resemblance to a modern federal state nor to approach the
ideal federal state. And if we learn anything from medieval
decentralization—guild and church and commune—it is that political and
economic power cannot be separated.
Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are
our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory,
it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large
influence on legal theory.[103] Also medieval theory struggled from
first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,[104] the
patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign
state. Our problem it is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages
hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was
good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to
all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds,
their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the
impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order
or to pursue successful outside relations.
The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be
related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more
powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages
it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you
from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status
was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must
avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in
the state.
Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own
problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our
intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the
embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages?
The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we
are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group
psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to
have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists
apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of
sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.
In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition
of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to
pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought to-day in philosophy, in
politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes
of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must
consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against.
-----
Footnote 97:
Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc.
Footnote 98:
The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of economics and
politics. First, the interests of citizenship and guild-membership are
not distinct; secondly, in any proper system of occupational
representation every one should be included—vocational representation
should not be trade representation; third, as long as you call the
affairs of the guilds “material,” and say that the politics of the
state should be purified of financial interests, you burn every bridge
which might make a unity of financial interests and sound state
policy. Guild socialism, however, because it is a carefully worked out
plan for the control of industry by those who take part in it, is one
of the most well worth considering of the proposals at present before
us.
Footnote 99:
See G. D. H. Cole, “The World of Labor,” for the relation of trade
unionism to guild socialism.
Footnote 100:
See especially “Churches in the Modern State” and “Studies in
Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius.”
Footnote 101:
See also Mr. Laski’s articles: “The Personality of Associations,”
Harv. Law Rev. 29, 404–426, and “Early History of the Corporation in
England,” Harv. Law Rev.: 30, 561–588. This is the kind of work which
is breaking the way for a new conception of politics.
Footnote 102:
It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all the
pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a school
although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience I am using the
word pluralist roughly and in a sense inaccurately to include all
those who are advocating a multiple group organization as the basis of
a new state. Most of these agree in making the group rather than the
individual the unit of politics, in their support of group “rights,”
the “consent” of the group, the “balance” of groups, and in their
belief that “rights” should be based on function. But syndicalists and
guild socialists are not strictly pluralists since they build up a
system based on the occupational group; yet the name is not wholly
inapplicable, for, since the guild socialists base their state on
balancing groups, that state cannot be called a unified state. It is
too early yet to speak of this school with entire accuracy, and in
fact there is no “school.”
Footnote 103:
From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German “fellowship.”
Footnote 104:
And the individual was certainly as prominent in medieval theory as
the community of individuals, a fact which the vigorous corporate life
of the Middle Ages may lead us to forget.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY
--------------
WHAT does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand
it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each
one giving up his sovereignty? Never. By some one from outside
presenting it with authority? No, although that is the basis of much of
our older legal theory. Real authority inheres in a genuine whole. The
individual is sovereign over himself as far as he unifies the
heterogeneous elements of his nature. Two people are sovereign over
themselves as far as they are capable of creating one out of two. A
group is sovereign over itself as far as it is capable of creating one
out of several or many. A state is sovereign only as it has the power of
creating one in which all are. Sovereignty is the power engendered by a
complete interdependence becoming conscious of itself. Sovereignty is
the imperative of a true collective will. It is not something academic,
it is produced by actual living with others—we learn it only through
group life. By the subtle process of interpenetration a collective
sovereignty is evolved from a distributed sovereignty. Just so can and
must, by the law of their being, groups unite to form larger groups,
these larger groups to form a world-group.
I have said that many of the pluralists are opposed to the monistic
state because they do not see that a collective and distributive
sovereignty can exist together. They talk of the Many and the One
without analyzing the process by which the Many and the One are creating
each other. We now see that the problem of the compounding of
consciousness, of the One and the Many, need not be left either to an
intellectualistic or to an intuitive metaphysics. It is to be solved
through a laboratory study of group psychology. When we have that, we
shall not have to argue any more about the One and the Many: we shall
actually see the Many and the One emerging at the same time; we can then
work out the laws of the relation of the One (the state) to the Many
(the individual), and of the Many (the individual) to the One (the
state), not as a metaphysical question but on a scientific basis. And
the process of the Many becoming One is the process by which sovereignty
is created. Our conceptions of sovereignty can no longer rest on mere
abstractions, theory, speculative thought. How absurdly inadequate such
processes are to explain the living, interweaving web of humanity. The
question of sovereignty concerns the organization of men (which
obviously must be fitted to their nature), hence it finds its answer
through the psychological analysis of man.
The seeking of the organs of society which are the immediate source of
legal sanctions, the seeking of the ultimate source of political
control—these are the quests of jurists and political philosophers. To
their search must be added a study of the process by which a genuine
sovereignty is created. The political pluralists are reacting against
the sovereignty which our legal theory postulates, for they see that
there is no such thing actually, but if sovereignty is at present a
legal fiction, the matter need not rest there—we must seek to find how a
genuine social and political control can be produced. The understanding
of self-government, of democracy, is bound up with the conception of
sovereignty as a psychological process.
The idea of sovereignty held by guild socialists[105] is based largely
on the so-called “objective” theory of _le droit_ expounded by M. Léon
Duguit of Bordeaux. This theory is accepted as the “juridical basis” of
a new state, what some call the functionarist state.[106] Man, Duguit
tells us, has no rights as man, but only as a member of the social
order. His rights are based on the fact of social interdependence—on his
relations and consequent obligations. In fact he has no rights, but
duties and powers. All power and all obligation is found in “social
solidarity,” in a constantly evolving social solidarity.[107]
The elaboration of this theory is Duguit’s large contribution to
political thought. His _droit_ is a dynamic law—it can never be captured
and fixed. The essential weakness of his doctrine is that he denies the
possibility of a collective will, which means that he ignores the
psychology of the social process. He and his followers reject the notion
of a collective will as “_concept de l’esprit dénué de toute réalité
positive_.” If this is their idea of a collective will, they are right
to reject it. I ask for its acceptance only so far as it can be proved
to have positive reality. There is only one way in the world by which
you can ever know whether there is a collective will, and that is by
actually trying to make one; you need not discuss a collective will as a
theory. If experiment proves to us that we cannot have a collective
will, we must accept the verdict. Duguit thinks that when we talk of the
sovereignty of the people we mean an abstract sovereignty; the new
psychology means by the sovereignty of the people that which they
actually create. It is true that we have none at present. Duguit is
perfectly right in opposing the old theory of the “sovereign state.”
But Duguit says that if there were a collective will there is no reason
why it should impose itself on the individual wills. “_L’affirmation que
la collectivité a le pouvoir légitime de commander force qu’elle est la
collectivité, est une affirmation d’ordre métaphysique oú
religieux...._” This in itself shows a misunderstanding of the evolution
of a collective will. This school does not seem to understand that every
one must contribute to the collective will; ideally it would have no
power unless this happened, actually we can only be constantly
approaching this ideal.[108] Duguit makes a thing-in-itself of _la
volonté nationale_—it is a most insidious fallacy which we all fall into
again and again. But we can never accept that kind of a collective will.
We believe in a collective will only so far as it is _really_ forming
from out our actual daily life of intermingling men and women. There is
nothing “metaphysical” or “religious” about this. Duguit says
metaphysics “_doit rester étranger à toute jurisprudence_....” We agree
to that and insist that jurisprudence must be founded on social
psychology.
Five people produce a collective idea, a collective will. That will
becomes at once an imperative upon those five people. It is not an
imperative upon any one else. On the other hand no one else can make
imperatives for those five people. It has been generated by the social
process which is a self-sufficing, all-inclusive process. The same
process which creates the collective will creates at the same time the
imperative of the collective will. It is absolutely impossible to give
self-government: no one has the right to give it; no one has the power
to give it. Group A _allows_ group B to govern itself? This is an empty
permission unless B has _learned how_ to govern itself. Self-government
must always be grown. Sovereignty is always a psychological process.
Many of Duguit’s errors come from a misconception of the social process.
Violently opposed to a collective will, he sees in the individual
thought and will the only genuine “_chose en soi_” (it is interesting to
notice that _la chose en soi_ finds a place in the thought of many
pluralists). Not admitting the process of “community” he asserts that
_la règle de droit_ is anterior and superior to the state; he does not
see the true relation of _le droit_ to _l’état_, that they evolve
together, that the same process which creates _le droit_ creates
_l’état_.[109] The will of the people, he insists, can not create _le
droit_. Here he does not see the unity of the social process. He
separates will and purpose and the activity of the reciprocal
interchange instead of seeing them as one. Certainly the will of the
people does not create _le droit_, but the social process in its entire
unity does. “Positive law must constantly follow _le droit objectif_.”
Of course. “_Le droit objectif_ is constantly evolving.” Certainly. But
how evolving? Here is where we disagree. The social process creates _le
droit objectif_, and will is an essential part of the social process.
Purpose is an essential part of the social process. Separate the parts
of the social process and you have a different idea of jurisprudence, of
democracy, of political institutions. Aim is all-important for Duguit.
The rule of _le droit_ is the rule of conscious ends: only the aim gives
a will its worth; if the aim is juridical (conformed to _la règle de
droit_), then the will is juridical. Thus Duguit’s pragmatism is one
which has not yet rid itself of absolute standards. It might be urged
that it has, because he finds his absolute standards in “social
solidarity.” But any one who believes that the individual will is a
_chose en soi_, and who separates the elements of the social process,
does not wholly admit the self-sufficing character of that process.
The modern tendency in many quarters, however, in regard to conceptions
of social practice, is to substitute ends for will.[110] This is a
perfectly comprehensible reaction, but future jurisprudence must
certainly unite these two ideas. Professor Jethro Brown says, “The
justification for governmental action is found not in consent but in the
purpose it serves.” Not in that alone. De Maeztu says, “The profound
secret of associations is not that men have need of one another, but
that they need the same thing.” These two ideas can merge. Professor
Brown makes the common good the basis of the new doctrine of natural
right.[111] But we must all remember, what I do not doubt this writer
does remember, that purpose can never be a _chose en soi_, and that, of
the utmost importance, the “new natural law” can be brought into
manifestation only by certain modes of association.
It is true, as Duguit says, that the state has the “right” to will
because of the thing willed, that it has no “subjective” right to will,
that its justification is in its purpose. (This is of course the truth
in regard to all our “rights”; they are justified only by the use we
make of them.) And yet there is a truth in the old idea of the “right”
of a collectivity to will. These two ideas must be synthesized. They
_are_ synthesized by the new psychology which sees the purpose forming
the will at the same time as the will forms the purpose, which finds no
separation anywhere in the social process. We can never think of purpose
as something in front which leads us on, as the carrot the donkey.
Purpose is never in front of us, it appears at every moment with the
appearance of will. Thus the new school of jurisprudence founded on
social psychology cannot be a teleological school alone, but must be
founded on all the elements which constitute the social process. Ideals
do not operate in a vacuum. This theorists seem sometimes to forget, but
those of us who have had tragic experience of this truth are likely to
give more emphasis to the interaction of purpose, will and activity,
past and present activity. The recognition that _le droit_ is the
product of a group process swallows up the question as to whether it is
“objective” or “subjective”; it is neither, it is both; we look at the
matter quite differently.[112]
To sum up this point. We must all, I think, agree with the “objective”
conception of law in its essence, but not in its dividing the social
process, a true unity, into separate parts. Rights arise from relation,
and purpose is bound up in the relation. The relation of men to one
another and to the object sought are part of the same process. Duguit
has rendered us invaluable service in his insistence that _le droit_
must be based on “_la vie actuelle_,” but he does not take the one step
further and see that _le droit_ is born within the _group_, that there
is an essential law of the group as different from other modes of
association, and that this has many implications.
The _droit_ evolved by a group is the _droit_ of that group. The _droit_
evolved by a state-group (we agree that there is no state-group yet, the
state is evolving, the _droit_ is evolving, there is only an approximate
state, an approximately genuine _droit_) is the _droit_ of the state.
The contribution of the new psychology is that _le droit_ comes from
relation and is always in relation. The warning of the new psychology to
the advocates of vocational representation is that the _droit_ (either
as law or right)[113] evolved by men of one occupation only will
represent too little intermingling to express the “community” truth. We
don’t want doctors’ ethics and lawyers’ ethics, and so on through the
various groups. That is just the trouble at present. Employers and
employees meet in conference. Watch those conferences. The difference of
interest is not always the whole difficulty; there is also the
difference of standard. Capitalist ethics and workman ethics are often
opposed. We must accept _le droit_ as a social product, as a group
product, but we must have groups which will unify interests and
standards. Law and politics can be founded on nothing but vital modes of
association.
Mr. Roscoe Pound’s exposition of modern law is just here a great help to
political theory. The essential, the vital part of his teaching, is, not
his theory of law based on interests, not his emphasis upon relation,
but his bringing together of these two ideas. This takes us out of the
vague, nebulous region of much of the older legal and political theory,
and shows us the actual method of living our daily lives. All that he
says of relation implies that we must seek and bring into use those
modes of association which will reveal true interests, actual interests,
yet not particularist interests but the interests discovered through
group relations—employer and employed, master and servant, landlord and
tenant, etc. But, and this is of great importance, these groups must be
made into genuine groups. If law is to be a group-product, we must see
that our groups are real groups, we must find the true principle of
association. For this we need, as I must continually repeat, the study
of group psychology. “Life,” “man,” “society,” are coming to have little
meaning for us: it is your life and my life with which we are concerned,
not “man” but the men we see around us, not “society” but the many
societies in which we pass our lives. “Social” values? We want
individual values, but individual values discovered through group
relations.
To sum up this point: (1) law should be a group-product, (2) we should
therefore have genuine groups, (3) political method must be such that
the “law” of the group can become embodied in our legislation.
M. Duguit’s disregarding of the laws of that intermingling which is the
basis of his _droit objectif_ leads to a partial understanding only of
the vote. Voting is for him still in a way a particularist matter. To be
sure he calls it a function and that marks a certain advance. Moreover
he wishes us to consider the vote an “objective” power, an “objective”
duty, not a “subjective” right. This is an alluring theory in a
pragmatic age. And if you see it leading to syndicalism which you have
already accepted beforehand, it is all the more alluring! But to call
the vote a function is only half the story; as long as it is a
particularist vote, it does not help us much to have it rest on
function, or rather, it goes just half the way. It must rest on the
intermingling of all my functions, it must rest on the intermingling of
all my functions with all the functions of all the others; it must rest
indeed on social solidarity, but a social solidarity in which every man
interpenetrating with every other is thereby approaching a whole of
which he is the whole at one point.
Duguit, full of Rousseau, does not think it possible to have a
collective sovereignty without every one having an equal share of this
collective sovereignty, and he most strenuously opposes _le suffrage
universel égalitaire_. But _le suffrage universel égalitaire_ staring
all the obvious _in_equalities of man in the face, Rousseau’s divided
sovereignty based on an indivisible sovereignty—all these things no
longer trouble you when you see the vote as the expression at one point
of some approximate whole produced by the intermingling of men.
True sovereignty and true functionalism are not opposed; the vote
resting on “subjective” right and the vote resting on “objective” power
are not opposed, but the particularist vote and the genuinely individual
vote are opposed. Any doctrine which contains a trace of particularism
in any form cannot gain our allegiance.
Again Duguit’s ignoring of the psychology of the social process leads
him to the separation of governors and governed. This separation is for
him the essential fact of the state. Sovereignty is with those
individuals who can impose their will upon others. He says no one can
give orders to himself, but as a matter of fact no one can really give
orders to any one but himself.[114] Here Duguit confuses present facts
and future possibilities. Let us _be_ the state, let us be
sovereign—over ourselves. As the problem in the life of each one of us
is to find the way to unify the warring elements within us—as only thus
do we gain sovereignty over ourselves—so the problem is the same for the
state. Duguit is right in saying that the German theory of
auto-limitation is unnecessary, but not in the reasons he gives for it.
A psychic entity is subordinate to the _droit_ which itself evolves not
by auto-limitation, but by the essential and intrinsic law of the group.
But Duguit has done us large service not only in his doctrine of a law,
a right, born of our actual life, of our always evolving life, but also
in his insistence on the individual which makes him one of the builders
of the new individualism.[115] We see in the gradual transformation of
the idea of natural law which took place among the French jurists of the
end of the nineteenth century, the struggle of the old particularism
with the feelings-out for the true individualism. That the French have
been slow to give up individual rights, that many of them have not given
them up for any collective theory, but, feeling the truth underneath the
old doctrine, have sought (and found) a different interpretation, a
different basis and a different use, has helped us all immeasurably.
* * * * *
Group psychology shows us the process of man creating social power,
evolving his own “rights.” We now see that man’s only rights are
group-rights. These are based on his activity in the group—you can call
it function if you like, only unless you are careful that tends to
become mechanical, and it tends to an organic functionalism in which
lurk many dangers. But the main point for us to grasp is that we can
never understand rights by an abstract discussion of “subjective” _vs._
“objective”—only by the closest study of the process by which these
rights are evolved. The true basis of rights is neither a “mystical”
idea of related personalities, nor is it to be found entirely in the
relation of the associated to the object sought; a truly modern
conception of law synthesizes these two ideas. “Function,” de Maeztu
tells us “[is] a quality independent of the wills of men.” This is a
meaningless sentence to the new psychology. At present the exposition of
the “objective” theory of law is largely a polemic against the
“subjective.” When we understand more of group psychology, and it can be
put forth in a positive manner, it will win many more adherents.
Then as soon as the psychological foundation of law is clearly seen, the
sovereignty of the state in its old meaning will be neither acclaimed
nor denied. An understanding of the group process teaches us the true
nature of sovereignty. We can agree with the pluralist school that the
present state has no “right” to sovereignty;[116] we can go further and
say that the state will never be more than ideally sovereign, further
still and say that the whole idea of sovereignty must be recast and take
a different place in political science. And yet, with the meaning given
to it by present psychology, it is perhaps the most vital thought of the
new politics. The sovereign is not the crowd, it is not millions of
unrelated atoms, but men joining to form a real whole. The atomistic
idea of sovereignty is dead, we all agree, but we may learn to define
sovereignty differently.
Curiously enough, some of the pluralists are acknowledged followers of
Gierke and Maitland, and base much of their doctrine on the “real
personality” of the group. But the group can create its own personality
only by the “compounding of consciousness,” by every member being at one
and the same time an individual and the “real personality.” If it is
possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a
common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not
in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real
not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through
group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a
real personality. The imagination of the born pluralist stops with the
group.[117]
But even in regard to the group the pluralists seem sometimes to fall
into contradictions. Sovereignty, we are often told, must be
decentralized and divided among the local units. But according to their
own theory by whom is the sovereignty to be divided? The fact is that
the local units must _grow_ sovereignty, that we want to revivify local
life not for the purpose of breaking up sovereignty, but for the purpose
of creating a real sovereignty.
The pluralists always tell us that the unified state proceeds from the
One to the Many; that is why they discard the unified state. This is not
true of the unify_ing_ state which I am trying to indicate. They think
that the only alternative to pluralism is where you begin with the
whole. That is, it is true, the classic monism, but we know now that
authority is to proceed from the Many to the One, from the smallest
neighborhood group up to the city, the state, the nation. This is the
process of life, always a unifying through the interpenetration of the
Many—Oneness an infinite goal.
This is expressed more accurately by saying, as I have elsewhere, that
the One and the Many are constantly creating each other. The pluralists
object to the One that comes before the Many. They are right, but we
need not therefore give up oneness. When we say that there is the One
which comes _from_ the Many, this does not mean that the One is _above_
the Many. The deepest truth of life is that the interrelating by which
both are at the same time a-making is constant. This must be clearly
understood in the building of the new state.
The essential error in the theory of distributed sovereignty is that
each group has an isolated sovereignty. The truth is that each should
represent the whole united sovereignty at one point as each individual
is his whole group at one point. An understanding of this fact seems to
me absolutely necessary to further development of political theory.[118]
This does not mean that the state must come first, that the group gets
its power from the state. This the pluralists rightfully resent. The
power within the group is its own genetically and wholly. But the same
force which forms a group may form a group of groups.
But the conclusion drawn by some pluralists from the theory of “real
personality” is that the state is superfluous because a corporate
personality has the right to assert autonomy over itself. They thus
acknowledge that pluralism means for them group and group and group side
by side. But here they are surely wrong. They ignore the implications of
the psychological fact that power developed within the group does not
cease with the formation of the group. That very same force which has
bound the individuals together in the group (and which the theory of
“real personality” recognizes) goes on working, you cannot stop it; it
is the fundamental force of life, of all nature, of all humanity, the
universal law of being—the out-reaching for the purpose of further
unifying. If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what
becomes of it? It must reach out to embrace other groups in order to
repeat exactly the same process.
When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power
which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely
lost. It only makes a noise. Do we want this to happen to our groups?
Are they to end only in disagreeable noises? In order that the
group-force shall not be lost, we must provide means for it to go on
working effectively after it is no longer needed within the group, so to
speak. We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of
other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek
new forms of unification. No “whole” can imprison us infinite beings.
The centre of to-day is the circumference of to-morrow.
Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the
natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective
mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All. From living group to
living group to the “real” state—such must be our line of evolution.
Sovereignty, it is true, is a fact, not a theory. Whoever can gain
obedience has the sovereign power. But we must go beyond this and seek
those political methods by which the command shall be with those who
have evolved a genuine authority, that is, an authority evolved by what
I have called the true social process. We must go beyond this and seek
those methods by which a genuine authority _can_ be evolved, by which
the true social process shall be everywhere possible. To repeat: first,
the true social process must be given full opportunity and scope, then
it must be made the basis of political method. Then shall we see
emerging a genuine authority which we can all acclaim as sovereign.
There is, I agree with the pluralists, a great advantage in that
authority being multiple and varied, but a static pluralism, so to
speak, would be as bad as a static monism. The groups are always
reaching out _towards_ unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is
that every fresh unity means (as I have tried to show in chapter III)
the throwing out of myriad fresh differences—our safeguard is that the
universe knows no static unity. Unification means sterilization;
unifying means a perpetual generating. We do not want the unified
sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group
first, you get unify_ing_ sovereignty.[119]
-----
Footnote 105:
See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned
above.
Footnote 106:
See “Traité de Droit Constitutionnel” and “Études de Droit Public”: I,
L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L’État, Les
Gouvernants and Les Agents.
As in French _droit_ may be either law or _a_ right, Duguit, in order
to distinguish between these meanings, follows the German distinction
of _objektives Recht_ and _subjektives Recht_, and speaks of _le droit
objectif_ and _le droit subjectif_, thus meaning by _le droit
objectif_ merely law. But because he at the same time writes of power
as resting on function in contradistinction to the classical theory of
the abstract “rights” of man, rights apart from law and only declared
by law, political writers sometimes speak of Duguit’s “objective”
theory of law, as opposed to a “subjective” theory of law, when
jurists would tell us that law _is_ objective, and that subjective
right is always merely _a_ right, my right. This matter of terminology
must be made much clearer than it is at present.
Footnote 107:
Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French
and Roman law has been questioned.
Footnote 108:
I have just read in a work on sociology, “Men surrender their
individual wills to the collective will.” No, the true social process
is not when they _surrender_ but when they _contribute_ their wills to
the collective will. See chs. II-VI, “The Group Process.”
Footnote 109:
See p. 130.
Footnote 110:
De Maeztu tells us, “Rights do not arise from personality. This idea
is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of
the associated with the thing which associates them....” Authority,
Liberty, and Function, p. 250.
Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the
unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of
“murder in the air” when it is a question of the “competition of
ideas, not of real collective personalities.” (See “The Discredited
State,” in _The Political Quarterly_, February, 1915.) This seems a
curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a
twentieth-century writer. The article is, however, an interesting and
valuable one.
See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 472.
Footnote 111:
See “Underlying Principles of Legislation.”
Footnote 112:
The teleological school of sociology is interesting just here. While
it marked a long advance on older theories, the true place of
selection of ends is to-day more clearly seen. We were told: “Men have
wants, therefore they come together to seek means to satisfy those
wants.” When do men “come together”? When were they ever separated?
But it is not necessary to push this further.
Footnote 113:
I have tried not to jump the track from legal right to ethical right
but occasionally one can speak of them together, if it is understood
that one is not thereby merging them.
Footnote 114:
The old consent theory assumes that some make the laws and others obey
them. In the true democracy we shall obey the laws we have ourselves
made. To find the methods by which we can be approaching the true
democracy is now our task; we can never rest satisfied with “consent.”
Footnote 115:
Although I do not agree with the form individualism takes in his
doctrine.
Footnote 116:
Some of the pluralists are concerned, I recognize, with the fact
rather than the right of sovereignty.
Footnote 117:
The trouble with the pluralists is that their emphasis is not on the
fact that the group creates its own personality, but on the fact that
the state does _not_ create it. When they change this emphasis, their
thinking will be unchained, I believe, and leap ahead to the
constructive work which we eagerly await and expect from them.
Footnote 118:
It is also necessary to an understanding of the new international law.
See ch. XXXV, “The World State.”
Footnote 119:
No one has yet given us a satisfactory account of the history of the
notion of sovereignty: just how and in what degree it has been
affected by history, by philosophy, by jurisprudence, etc., and how
all these have interacted. We have not only to disentangle many
strands to trace each to its source, but we have, moreover, just not
to disentangle them, but to understand the constant interweaving of
all. To watch the interplay of legal theory and political philosophy
from the Middle Ages down to the present day is one of the most
interesting parts of our reading, but perhaps nowhere is it more
fruitful than in the idea of sovereignty. We see the corporation long
ignored and the idea of legal partnership influencing the development
of the social contract theory, which in its turn reacted on legal
theory. We find the juristic conception of group personality, clearly
seen as early as Althusius (1557–1638), and revived and expanded by
Gierke, influencing the whole German school of “group sociologists.”
But to-day are not many of us agreed that however interesting such
historical tracing, our present notion of sovereignty must rest on
what we learn from group psychology?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM
The Service State vs. the “Sovereign State”
--------------
THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it
many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the
people who advocate vocational representation believe in what they call
an organic democracy. This leads them to believe that the group not the
individual should be the unit of government: a man in an industry is to
vote not as an individual but as a department member because he is thus
representing his function. But man has many functions and then there is
something left over. It is just because our place in the whole can never
be bounded by any one function that we cannot accept the organism of the
Middle Ages, the organic society of certain sociologists, or the
“organic democracy” of the upholders of occupational representation.
Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many functions.
The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating—with his family, at
school, at work, with his play group, with his art group: the carpenter
may join the Arts and Crafts to find there an actualization of spirit
for which he is fitted, and so on and so on. All the different sides of
our nature develop by the process of compounding. If you shut a man up
in his occupation, you refuse him the opportunity of full growth. The
task has been given to humanity to “Know thyself,” but man cannot know
himself without knowing the many sides of his self. His essential self
is the possibility of the multiple expression of spirit.
We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we cannot do
one thing well by doing one thing alone. The interrelations are so
manifold that each of us does far more than he wishes, not because our
tendency is a senseless ramifying, but because we cannot do our own job
well unless we do many other things: we do not take on the extra
activities as an _ex_tension of our life, but simply as an
_in_tensification of our life at the point of our particular interest.
Ideally one should fulfil all the functions of man in order to perform
one function. No one ought to teach without being a parent! etc. etc.
Man must identify himself with humanity. The great lesson which the
pluralist school has to teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively
but only actually, through his group relations. What it leaves out is
that the task is manifold and infinite because man must identify himself
with a manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced
humanity.
Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all these
various groups. There is a more subtle process going on—the interlocking
of groups. And in these interlocking groups we have not only the same
people taking up different activities, but actually representing
different interests. In some groups I may be an employer, in others an
employee. I can be a workman and a stockholder. Men have many loyalties.
It is no longer true that I belong to such a class and must always
identify myself with its interests. I may belong at the same time to the
college club and the business women’s club, to the Players’ League
(representing the actor’s point of view) and to the Drama Association
(representing the playgoer’s point of view). I not only thus get
opposite points of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite
points of view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I
may have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team,
next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens’ league or
neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross many
times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable value in the
development of society.
Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these groups
may be working together for the satisfaction of some interest. This is
recognized by law. A man can be a member of different corporations. Our
possibility of association is not exhausted by contributing to the
production of one legal person, we may help to create many different
legal persons, each with an entirely different set of liabilities. Then
there may be some sort of relation with a definite legal status existing
between these bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation
with myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the
case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere, this
interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of the
neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating
occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic social
organization: not only in the sense of a flexible interaction between
the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity which makes it possible
for individuals to change constantly their relations, their groups,
without destroying social cohesion. Vocational representation would tend
to crystallize us into definite permanent groups.
The present advocacy of organic democracy or “functionalism” is
obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to “individualism”:
the functional group must be the unit because the individual is so
feared. I agree with the denunciation of the individual if you mean the
man who seeks only his own advantage. But have we not already seen that
that is not the true individual? And do we not see now that man is a
multiple being? Life is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity.
Politics must be shaped for that. Our task is to make straight the paths
for the coming of the Lord—the true Individual. Man is struggling for
the freedom of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must
have as many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man—this
does away with “organic democracy.”
The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any number
of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state demands the
whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no one group can
seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that having taken one-tenth
there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not divisible into so many
parts as a house into so many rooms. My group uses me and then the whole
of me is still left to give to the whole. This is the constant social
process. Thus my citizenship is something bigger than my membership in a
vocational group. Vocational representation does not deal with men—it
deals with masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of
my personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what is
left over—is that going to be lost? The whole of every man must go into
his citizenship.
Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many
“rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a
rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political
recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father is to
be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get
the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is
not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a
business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at
every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any
time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever
business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need
men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.
As ideally every function should include every other, as every power of
which I am capable should go into my work, occupational representation
might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted for the limitations of
man in 1918.
I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the
political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual
and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same
time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals,
but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the
indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The
individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a
crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on.
The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I
go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have
created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and
that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my
relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method
merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the
state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into
being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated
nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the
particularist-individual, but the group-individual.
The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational
representation—“Do you want representation of numbers or representation
of interests?” They are opposed to the former, which they call
democracy, because “democracy” means to them the “sovereignty of the
people,” which means the reign of the crowd. Democracy and functionalism
are supposed to be opposed. An industry is to be composed not of
individuals but of departments; likewise the state is to be a union of
industries or occupations. The present state is conceived as a
crowd-state.[120] If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no
wonder it is being condemned to-day in many quarters. But I do not
believe this is the alternative we are facing—the crowd-state or the
group-state. We want the representation of individuals, but of true
individuals, group-individuals.[121]
The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the
domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers with
individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the individual at
the centre of our political system, without an atomistic sovereignty,
and yet by which we can get the whole of the individual. I am proposing
for the moment the individual the unit, the group the method, but this
alone does not cover all that is necessary. In the French syndicalist
organization every syndicate, whatever its size, is represented by a
single individual. In this way power is prevented from falling into the
hands of a strong federation like the miners, but of course this often
means minority rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be
dominated by the five large trades, a state of things which has been
much complained of there. But we must remember that while the
syndicalists get rid of majority rule, that is, that the majority of
individuals no longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority
of groups. They have not given up the _principle_ of majority rule, they
simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist
thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with new
principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard to the
individual and transferring them to the field of the group. I have tried
to show in chapter XVII, “Democracy Not the Majority,” that the pressing
matter in politics is not whether we want majority rule or not, but to
decide upon those methods of association by which we get the greatest
amount of integration. The syndicalists are right, we do not want a
crowd, but I do not think most syndicalists have discovered the true use
of the true group.
The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group method
can be a regular part of our political system—its relation to the
individual on the one hand and to the state on the other. No man should
have a share in government as an isolated individual, but only as bound
up with others: the individual must be the unit, but an individual
capable of entering into genuine group relations and of using these for
an expanding scale of social, political and international life.
The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the Service
State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two meanings:
(1) that the state is created by the actual services of every man, that
every man will get his place in the state through the service rendered:
(2) that the state itself is tested by the services it renders, both to
its members and to the world-community.[122] The weakness of
functionalism, as so far developed, is that it has provided no method
for all the functions of man to be included in the state. The essence of
democracy is the expression of every man in his multiple nature.
To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple nature.
This is the blow to the theory of occupational representation. But also
no number of groups can enfold me. This is the reason why the individual
must always be the unit of politics, as group organization must be its
method. We _find_ the individual through the group, we _use_ him always
as the true individual—the undivided one—who, living link of living
group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for every
new possibility of a forever unfolding life.
-----
Footnote 120:
The French syndicalists avowedly do not want democracy because it
“mixes the classes,” because, as they say, interests and aims mingle
in one great mass in which all true significance is lost.
Footnote 121:
See p. 184.
Footnote 122:
This is the basis of Duguit’s international law—the place of a state
in an international league is to be determined directly by services
rendered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXI
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND THE TRUE FEDERAL STATE
--------------
IN the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of
life—the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1)
Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the
group—dependent on the principle of interpenetration. (2) Man joins many
groups—in order to express his multiple nature. These two principles
give us federalism.
Let us, before considering the conception of federalism in detail, sum
up in a few sentences what has already been said of these two
principles. The fundamental truth of life we have seen is
self-perpetuating activity—activity so regnant, so omnipresent, so
all-embracing, that it banishes even the conception of anything static
from the world of being. Conscious evolution means that we must discover
the essential principle of this activity and see that it is at work in
the humblest of its modes, the smallest group or meeting of even two or
three. The new psychology has brought to political science the
recognition of interpenetration and the “compounding of consciousness”
as the very condition of all life. Our political methods must conform to
life’s methods. We must understand and follow the laws of association
that the state may appear, that our own little purposes may be
fulfilled. _Little_ purposes? Is there any great and small? The humblest
man and the price of his daily loaf—is this a small matter—it hangs upon
the whole world situation to-day. In order that the needs of the
humblest shall be satisfied, or in order that world purposes shall be
fulfilled—it matters not which—this principle of “compounding” must be
fully recognized and embodied in our political methods. It is this vital
intermingling which creates the real individual and knits men into the
myriad relations of life. We win through life our individuality, it is
not presented to us at the beginning to be exploited as we will. We win
a multiple individuality through our manifold relations. In the workings
of this dual law are rooted all of social and political progress, all
the hope and the potency of human evolution.
Only the federal state can express this dual principle of existence—the
compounding and the multiple compounding. It is an incomplete
understanding of this dual law which is responsible for the mistaken
interpretation of federalism held by some of the pluralists: a
conception which includes the false doctrines of division of power, the
idea that the group not the individual should be the unit of the state,
the old consent of governed theory, an almost discarded particularism
(group rights), and the worn-out balance theory.
The distributive sovereignty school assumes that the essential, the
basic part of federalism is the division of power between the central
and separate parts: while the parts may be considered as ceding power to
the central state, or the central state may be considered as granting
power to the parts, yet in one form or another federalism means a
divided sovereignty. Esmein says definitely, “_L’État fédératif ...
fractionne la souveraineté...._”[123] No, it should unite sovereignty.
There should be no absolute division of power or conferring of power.
The activity of whole and parts should be one.
In spite of all our American doctrines of the end of the eighteenth
century, in spite of our whole history of states-right theory and
sentiment, the division of sovereignty is not the main fact of the
United States government. From 1789 to 1861 the idea of a divided
sovereignty—that the United States was a voluntary agreement between
free, sovereign and independent states, that authority was “divided”
between nation and states—dictated the history of the United States. The
war of 1861 was fought (some of the pluralists seem not to know) to
settle this question.[124] The two ideas of federalism came to a death
grapple in our Civil War and the true doctrine triumphed. That war
decided that the United States was not a delegated affair, that it had a
“real” existence, and that it was sovereign, yet not sovereign over the
states as an external party, for it is composed of the states, but
sovereign over itself, merely over itself. You have not to be a mystic
to understand this but only an American. Those who see in a federal
union a mere league with rights and powers granted to a central
government, those who see in a federal union a balancing of sovereign
powers, do not understand true federalism. When we enumerate the powers
of the states as distinct from the powers of our national government,
some people regard this distinction as a dividing line between nation
and states, but the true “federalist” is always seeing the relation of
these powers to those of the central government. There are no absolute
divisions in a true federal union.
Do we then want a central government which shall override the parts
until they become practically non-existent? The moment federalism
attempts to transcend the parts it has become vitiated. Our Civil War
was not, as some writers assert, the blow to states-rights and the
victory of centralization. We shall yet, I believe, show that it was a
victory for true federalism.[125] The United States is neither to ignore
the states, transcend the states, nor to balance the states, it is to
_be_ the states in their united capacity.
Of course it is true that many Americans do think of our government as a
division of powers between central and local authority, therefore there
is as a matter of fact much balancing of interests. But as far as we are
doing this at Washington it is exactly what we must get rid of. The
first lesson for every member of a federal government to learn is that
the interests of the different parts, or the interests of the whole and
the interests of the parts, are never to be pitted against each other.
As far as the United States represents an interpenetration of thought
and feeling and interest and will, it is carrying out the aims of
federalism.
We have not indeed a true federalism in the United States to-day; we are
now learning the lesson of federalism. Some one must analyze for us the
difference between centralization and true federalism, which is neither
nationalization, states-rights, nor balance, and then we must work for
true federalism. For the federal government to attempt to do that which
the states should do, or perhaps even are doing, means loss of force,
and loss of education-by-experience for the states. On the other hand,
not to see when federal action means at the same time local development
and national strength, means a serious retarding of our growth. It is
equally true that when the states attempt what the federal government
alone should undertake, the consequence is general muddle.
And it is by no means a question only of what the federal government
should do and what it should not do. It is a question of the _way_ of
doing. It is a question of guiding, where necessary, without losing
local initiative or local responsibility. It is a question of so framing
measures that true federation, not centralization, be obtained.
Recently, even before the war, the tendency has been towards increased
federal action and federal control, as seen, for instance, in the
control of railroad transportation, of vocational education etc. The
latter is an excellent example of the possibility of central action
being true federal and not nationalized action. The federal government
upon application from a state grants to that state an amount for
vocational education equal to what the state itself will appropriate.
The administration of the fund rests with the state. The federal
government thus makes no assumptions. It _recognizes existing facts_.
And it does not impose something from without. The state must understand
its needs, must know how those needs can best be satisfied; it must take
responsibility. The experience of one state joins with the experience of
other states to form a collective experience.
As we watch federalism being worked out in actual practice at
Washington, we see in that practice the necessity of a distinction which
has been emphasized throughout this book as the contribution of
contemporary psychology to politics: nationalization is the Hegelian
reconciliation, true federalism is the integration of present
psychology. This means a genuine integration of the interests of all the
parts. If our present tendency is towards nationalization, we must learn
the difference between that and federalism and change it into the
latter. We need a new order of statesmen in the world to-day—for our
nation, for our international league—those who understand federalism.
But I have been talking of federalism as the integration of parts (the
states). We should remember also, and this is of the greatest
importance, that the United States is not only to be the _states_ in
their united capacity, but it is to be all the men and women of the
United States in _their_ united capacity. This it seems difficult for
many Europeans to understand; it breaks across their traditional
conception of federalism which has been a league, a confederation of
“sovereign” parts, not a true federal state. We of Massachusetts feel
ourselves not first children of Massachusetts and then through
Massachusetts of the United States. We belong directly to the United
States not merely through Massachusetts. True federalism means that the
individual, not the group, is the unit. A true federal government acts
directly on its citizens, not merely through the groups.
America has not led the world in democracy through methods of
representation, social legislation, ballot laws or industrial
organization. She has been surpassed by other countries in all of these.
She leads the world in democracy because through federalism she is
working out the secret of the universe actively. Multiple citizenship in
its spontaneous unifying is the foundation of the new state. Federalism
and democracy go together, you do not decide to have one or the other as
your fancy may be. We did not establish federalism in the United States,
we are growing federalism. Cohesion imposed upon us externally will lack
in significance and duration. Federalism must live through: (1) the
reality of the group, (2) the expanding group, (3) the ascending group
or unifying process.
The federal state is the unifying state. The political pluralists,
following James, use the “trailing and”[126] argument to prove that we
can never have a unified state, that there is always something which
never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have
a unify_ing_ state, that this “and” is the very unifying principle. The
“trailing and” is the deepest truth of psychology. It is because of this
“and” that our goal must always be the unified state—the unified state
to be attained through the federal form. Our spirit it is true is by
nature federal, but this means not infinite unrelation but infinite
possibility of relation, not infinite strung-alongness but infinite
seeking for the unifying of the strung-alongness. I forever discover
undeveloped powers. This is the glory of our exhaustless nature. We are
the expression of the principle of endless growth, of endless appearing,
and democracy must, therefore, so shape its forms as to allow for the
manifestation of each new appearing. I grow possibilities; new
opportunities should always be arising to meet these new possibilities.
Then through group and group and ascending group I actualize more and
more. The “trailing and” is man’s task for ever and ever—to drag in more
spirit, more knowledge, more harmony. Federalism is the only possible
form for the state because it leaves room for the new forces which are
coming through these spiritual “ands,” for the myriad centres of life
which must be forever springing up, group after group, within a vital
state. Our impulse is at one and the same time to develop self and to
transcend self. It is this ever transcending self which needs the
federal state. The federal state is not a unified state, I agree, but it
is a unifying state, not a “strung-along” state.
Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental
principles of life—the compounding of consciousness and the endless
appearings of new forces.
I have said that the pluralists’ mistaken interpretation of federalism
includes the particularist notions of “consent” and “rights” and
“balance,” and that all these come from a false conception of
sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of “consent”? Power
is generated within the true group not by one or several assuming
authority and the others “consenting,” but solely by the process of
intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.
If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that,
what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility
be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of
Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora,
a “larger life”? The pluralists open the gates to too much. They wish to
throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let
them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals.
Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate
task, but let us ponder well the method.
The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority
over “other groups.”[127] But as he who expresses the unity of my group
has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the
group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups—that is,
the state—should have no authority _as a separate group_, but only so
far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent
groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders
of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of
the other groups as “coextensive” or “complementary” to the state—the
state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they
and all individuals are the constituents of the state.[128]
I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.[129] This
those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part
of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the
contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves
with all particularists.[130]
Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist
doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of
group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical
bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the
“inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a
compact.[131] The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an
aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a
numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals.
As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are
to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as
jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for
the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent
rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless
says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists.
Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs._ the
State but The Group _vs._ the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think
it progress to write Group _vs._ the State? If the principle of
individual _vs._ the state is wrong, what difference does it make
whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these
rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in
so far as we can talk of group _vs._ the state, we are held in the
thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists
themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty,
that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups
as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem
to realize.
Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of
the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many
pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the
old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on
“Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are
never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our
present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of
group and state can be approaching coincidence.
As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the
old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love
of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of
the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have
all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of
others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant
recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole.
Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks
in to its own integrated, coördinated activity, (2) it sees that
activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole
of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates
into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to
society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of
social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just
as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.
Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice.
Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our
particularism while changing its name from individual to group.
The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory,
perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists’ doctrine. The
pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their
life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word
most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of
power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. “The dilemma
which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There
is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not
merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”[132]
But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your
conclusion.
The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument
has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three
years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations,
that little further criticism is needed here. Unity must be our aim
to-day. When you have not unity, you have balance or struggle or
domination—of one over others. The nations of Europe refuse domination,
aim at balance, and war is the result.
It seems curious that these two movements should be going on side by
side: that we are giving up the idea of the balance of nations, that we
are refusing to think any longer in terms of “sovereign” nations, and
yet at the same time an increasing number of men should be advocating
balancing, “sovereign” groups within nations. The pluralists object to
unity, but unity and plurality are surely not incompatible. The true
monistic state is merely the multiple state working out its own unity
from infinite diversity. But the unifying state shows us what to do with
that diversity. What advantage is that diversity if it is to be always
“competing,” “fighting,” “balancing?” Only in the unifying state do we
get the full advantage of diversity where it is gathered up into
significance and pointed action.
The practical outcome of the balance theory will be first antagonistic
interests, then jealous interests, then competing interests, then
dominating interests—a fatal climax.
The trouble with the balance theory is that by the time the
representatives of the balancing groups meet, it is too late to expect
agreement. The chief objection to pluralism is, perhaps, that it is
usually merely a scheme of representation, that its advocates are
usually talking of the kind of roof they want before they have laid the
foundation stones. No theory of the state can have vitality which is
merely a plan of representation. The new state must rest on a new
conception of living, on a true understanding of the vital modes of
association. The reason why occupational representation must bring
balance and competition is because the integrating of differences, the
essential social process, does not take place far enough back in our
life. If Parliaments are composed of various groups or interests, the
unification of those interests has to take place in Parliament. But then
it is too late. The ideas of the different groups must mingle earlier
than Parliament. We must go further back than our legislatures for the
necessary unifying. We do not want legislatures full of opposing
interests. The ideas of the groups become too crystallized by the time
their representatives get to the Parliament, in fact they have often
hardened into prejudices. Moreover, the representatives could not go
against their constituencies, they would be pledged to specific
measures. The different groups would come together each to try to
prevail, not to go through the only genuine democratic process, that of
trying to integrate their ideas and interests.
When the desire to prevail is once keenly upon us, we behave very
differently than when our object is the seeking of truth. Suppose I am
the representative in Congress of a group or a party. A bill is under
consideration. I see a weakness in that bill; if I point it out some one
else may see a remedy for it and the bill may be immensely improved. But
do I do this? Certainly not. I am so afraid of the bill being lost if I
show any weakness in it that I keep this insight to myself and my
country loses just so much. I cannot believe that occupational
representation will foster truth seeking or truth speaking. It seems to
me quite a case of the frying pan into the fire. Compromise and swapping
will be the order in Parliaments based solely on the vocational
principle. The different interests must fight it out in Parliament. This
is fundamentally against democracy because it is against the
psychological foundation of democracy, the fundamental law of
association. Democracy depends on the blending, not the balancing, of
interests and thoughts and wills. Occupational representation assumes
that you secure the interests of the whole by securing the interests of
every class, the old particularist fallacy transferred to the group.
Moreover, it is often assumed that because the occupational group is
composed of men of similar interests we shall have agreement in the
occupational group; it is taken for granted that in these economic
groups the agreement of opinion necessary for voting will be automatic.
But do poets or carpenters or photographers think alike on more than a
very few questions? What we must do is to get behind these electoral
methods to some fundamental method which shall _produce_ agreement.
Moreover, if the Cabinet were made up of these warring elements,
administration would be almost impossible. Lloyd-George’s Cabinet at
present is hampered by too much “difference.” I have throughout, to be
sure, been advocating the compounding of difference as the secret of
politics, but the compounding must begin further back in our life than
Parliaments or Cabinets.
And if you had group representation in England would not the Cabinet be
made up of the most powerful of the groups, and would not a fear of
defeat at any particular time mean overtures to enough of the other
groups to make success in the Cabinet? And would not an entirely
improper amount of power drift to the Premier under these circumstances?
Have we any leaders who would, could any one trust himself to, guide the
British Cabinet for the best interests of Great Britain under such
conditions as these?
To sum up: a true federalism cannot rest on balance or group-rights or
consent. Authority, obedience, liberty, can never be understood without
an understanding of the group process. Some of the advocates of guild
socialism oppose function to authority and liberty, but we can have
function _and_ liberty _and_ authority: authority of the whole through
the liberty of all by means of the functions of each. These three are
inescapably united. A genuine group, a small or large group, association
or state, has the right to the obedience of its members. No group should
be sovereign over another group. The only right the state has to
authority over “other” groups is as far as those groups are constituent
parts of the state. All groups are not constituent parts of the state
to-day, as the pluralists clearly see. Possibly or probably all groups
never will be, but such perpetually self-actualizing unity should be the
process. Groups are sovereign over themselves, but in their relation to
the state they are interdependent groups, each recognizing the claims of
every other. Our multiple group life is the fact we have to reckon with;
unity is the aim of all our seeking. And with this unity will appear a
sovereignty spontaneously and joyfully acknowledged. In true federalism,
voided of division and balance, lies such sovereignty.
-----
Footnote 123:
Quoted by Duguit.
Footnote 124:
It must be remembered, however, that while in the Civil War we
definitely gave up the compact theory held by us since the Mayflower
compact, yet we did not adopt the organism theory. The federal state
we have tried and are trying to work out in America is based on the
principles of psychic unity described in chapter X. The giving up of
the “consent” theory does not bring us necessarily to the organic
theory of society.
Footnote 125:
Duguit says that the United States confers the rights of a state on a
territory. No, it recognizes that which already exists.
Footnote 126:
“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always
escapes.... The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic
than like an empire or a kingdom.” “A Pluralistic Universe,” 321–322.
Footnote 127:
When they say that the passion for unity is the urge for a dominant
One, they think of the dominant One as outside.
Footnote 128:
One of the pluralists says, “I cannot see that ... sovereignty is the
unique property of any one association.” No, not sovereignty over
“others,” but sovereignty always belongs to any genuine group; as
groups join to form another real group, the sovereignty of the more
inclusive group is evolved—that is the only kind of state sovereignty
which we can recognize as legitimate. (See ch. XXIX on “Political
Pluralism and Sovereignty.”)
Footnote 129:
See ch. XV.
Footnote 130:
Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on “consent.” When he speaks
of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying
the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find
in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows
that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on
consent. I do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the
present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction
between the “sovereignty” of the present end the sovereignty which I
hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski’s book,
but it is lacking in much of the writing on the “consent of the
governed.”
Footnote 131:
Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent
as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the
state is an arbitrary creation of men. Group organization to-day must
give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely
and fully on its legitimate psychological basis.
Footnote 132:
This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that
competition is the mode of progress.
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XXXII
POLITICAL PLURALISM (CONCLUDED)
--------------
I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things
as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political
science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logical argument
against a sovereign state to say that we have not one at present, or
that our present particularistic states are not successful. Proof of
actual plural sovereignty does not constitute an argument against the
ideal of unified or rather a unifying sovereignty. The question is do we
want a unifying state? And if so, how can we set about getting it?
The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the state
absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a unified state
when they conceive it as a monster which has swallowed up everything
within sight. It reminds one of the nursery rhyme of one’s childhood:
Algy met a bear
The bear was bulgy
The bulge was Algy.
The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members. (This
is a word used by many writers).[133] But the ideal unified state is not
all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive—a very different matter: we are not,
individual or group, to be absorbed into a whole, we are to be
constituent members of the whole. I am speaking throughout of the ideal
unified state, which I call a unify_ing_ state.
The failure to understand a unifying state is responsible for the dread
on the one hand of a state which will “demand” our allegiance, and on
the other of our being left to the clash of “divided” allegiances. Both
these bugbears will disappear only through an understanding of how each
allegiance can minister to every other, and also through a realization
that no single group can embrace my life. It is true that the state as
state no more than family or trade-union or church can “capture my
soul.” But this does not mean that I must divide my allegiance; I must
find how I can by being loyal to each be loyal to all, to the whole. I
am an American with all my heart and soul and at the same time I can
work daily for Boston and Massachusetts. I can work for my nation
through local machinery of city or neighborhood. My work at office or
factory enriches my family life; my duty to my family is my most
pressing incentive to do my best work. There is no competing here, but
an infinite number of filaments cross and recross and connect all my
various allegiances. We should not be obliged to choose between our
different groups. Competition is not the soul of true federalism but the
interlocking of all interests and all activities.