Part + 

III + 

Group Organization Democracy’s Method + 

I + 

The Neighborhood Group + 

XXII + 

Neighborhood Needs the Basis of Politics + 

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? + 

We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those set apart for the purpose. The methods by which the party platform is constructed are not those which put into it the real issues before the public; the tendency is to put in what will elect candidates or to cover up the real issues by generalities. But just so long as we separate politics and our daily life, just so long shall we have all our present evils. Politics can no longer be an extra-activity of the American people, they must be a means of satisfying our actual wants. + 

We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life. A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics? He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads from hour to hour. When this is once understood no question in history will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?” Woman is in politics; no power under the sun can put her out. + 

Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs of the people. Further back we must go, down into the actual life from which all these needs spring, down into the daily, hourly living with all its innumerable cross currents, with all its longings and heartburnings, with its envies and jealousies perhaps, with its unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations, and its power, manifest or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment. The needs of the people are not now articulate: they loom out of the darkness, vague, big, portentously big, but dumb because of the separation of men. To open up this hinterland of our life the cross currents now burrowing under ground must come to the surface and be openly acknowledged. + 

We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one of whose life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent to a landlord whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet our home is our most precious possession; we have a doctor who is with us in the crucial moments of birth and death, but whom we ordinarily do not meet; we buy our food, our clothes, our fuel, of automatons for the selling of food, clothes and fuel. We know all these people in their occupational capacity, not as men like ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like ours, hopes like ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our lives, to whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think ourselves a little better than every other two or three, and this becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of antagonism. How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give. Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation. + 

But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we waste immeasurable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and let the winds of Heaven blow upon us⁠—we throw ourselves open to every breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital forces. + 

Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in a worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that people should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics, and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized political unit. + 

Let us consider some of the advantages of the neighborhood group. First, it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means fuller acquaintance and a more real understanding. The task of creation from electrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the only one who refuses this task? I do not know my next-door neighbor! One of the most unfortunate circumstances of our large towns is that we expect concerted action from people who are strangers to one another. So mere acquaintance is the first essential. This will lead inevitably to friendly feeling. The story is told of some American official who begged not to be introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate anyone with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more kindly to the people we actually see. It is what has been called “the pungent sense of effective reality.” Neighborhood organization will substitute confidence for suspicion⁠—a great gain. + 

Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for constant and regular intercourse. We are indeed far more interested in humanity than ever before. Look at what we are studying: social psychology, social economics, social medicine and hygiene, social ethics etc. But people must socialize their lives by practice, not by study. Until we begin to acquire the habit of a social life no theory of a social life will do us any good. It is a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity, brotherhood etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect. I learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience the obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my relation to society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding of life. + 

When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game⁠—the game of association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only we knew how to love! I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I shall offend against the law of love within an hour. The love of our fellow-men to be effective must be the love evolved from some actual group relation. We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist consciousness, think that all we have to do is to decide on fellowship as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what it really means. + 

Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole social process is that of association, individual with individual, group with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid and falsified this primary instinct of life. But this is rapidly changing. The most striking characteristic of the present day is that people are doing more things together: they are coming together as never before in labor organizations, in cooperative societies, in consumers’ leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men’s City Club, the Women’s City Club; professional societies are multiplying over night. The explanation sometimes given for this present tendency towards union is that we are beginning to see the material advantages of cooperation, but the root of the thing is far from utilitarian advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union. + 

I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts, and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to someone that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly separateness of our ordinary life.” + 

When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the natural way⁠—the way we shall all want to do things. + 

But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the technique of association. + 

A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a member of a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life than as a member of any other kind of a group we can find, no matter how big our city or how complex or comprehensive its interests. This statement sounds paradoxical⁠—it will seem to many like saying that the smaller is greater than the larger. Let us examine this statement therefore and see if perhaps in this case the smaller is not greater than the larger. Why is the neighborhood group better for us than the selected group? Why are provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if provincial people have taken advantage of their opportunities? Because cosmopolitan people are all alike⁠—that has been the aim of their existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows the “best” society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows life across but not down⁠—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different tastes and different standards. But this is just what we may have in a neighborhood group⁠—different education, different interests, different standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the factory, the organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister, the watchmaker, the schoolteacher, all living within a few blocks of one another. + 

On the other hand consider how different it is when we choose the constituents of our group⁠—then we choose those who are the same as ourselves in some particular. We have the authors’ club, the social workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc. The satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre personality. I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood club to meet men. It is just because my next door neighbor has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory girl’s point of view. + 

In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing effect of many different experiences and ideals. And in this infinite variety which touches you on every side, you have a life which enriches and enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil of human development⁠—just because you have here a natural and not an artificial group, the members find all that is necessary in order to grow into that whole which is true community living. + 

Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities that there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for, but often the larger our world the narrower we become, for we cannot face the vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people as nearly like ourselves as we can find. + 

In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some selective process, they are not so good for our purpose. The Italian colony or the Syrian colony does not give us the best material for group organization, neither does any occupational segregation like the stockyard district of Chicago. (This is an argument against the industrial colonies which are spreading.) In a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different nationalities or different classes come together easily and naturally on the ground of many common interests: the school, recreational opportunities, the placing of their children in industry, hygiene, housing etc. Race and class prejudices are broken down by working together for intimate objects. + 

Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends, those who disagree with me at once become violent on the subject. I have never understood why it inflames them more easily than other topics. They immediately take it for granted that I am proposing to shut them up tight in their neighborhoods and seal them hermetically; they assume that I mean to substitute the neighborhood for every other contact. They tell me of the pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to stories of neighborhood iniquities ranging from small gossip to determined boycotting. Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the neighborhood group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am not proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood. + 

We may like some selected group better than the company of our neighbors, but such a group is no “broader” necessarily, because it draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow interests as well as narrow spaces. Neighbors may, it is true, discuss the comings and goings of the family down the street, but I have heard people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial subjects. But supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less petty in the sense of less personal in their conversation, they are often also less real, and this is an important point. If I dress in my best clothes and go to another part of the city and take all my best class of conversation with me, I don’t know that it does me any good if I am the same person who in my everyday clothes goes in next door and talks slander. What I mean is that the only place in the world where we can change ourselves is on that level where we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who think neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own argument) it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods who are impersonal and noble in another part of the city. + 

Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would be well for us to analyze the cause⁠—there may be a worthy reason, there may not. Is it perhaps that one does not get as much consideration there as one thinks one’s due? Have we perhaps, led by our vanity, been drawn to those groups where we get the most consideration? My neighbors may not think much of me because I paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is dirty, but my artist friends who like my color do not know or care about my back yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a neighbor in trouble. + 

You may reply, “But this is not my case. I am one of the most esteemed people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the City Club, but I prefer the latter just because of that: there is room for me to aspire there, but where I am leading what is there for me to grow toward, how can I expand in such an atmosphere?” But I should say that this also might be a case of vanity: possibly these people prefer the City Club because they do not like to think they have found their place in life in what they consider an inferior group; it flatters them more to think that they belong to a superior group even if they occupy the lowest place there. But the final word to be said is I think that this kind of seeking implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place in a neighborhood group. + 

Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy most, as we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and down our spine. We may have a selected group feeling “good,” but that is not going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we nestle down into and in which we find all the comfort of a down pillow, does not provide the differences in which alone we can grow. We must know the finer enjoyment of recognized diversity. + 

It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of association⁠—trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies, local improvement leagues, cooperative societies, men’s clubs, women’s clubs etc.⁠—yet the hope is that it shall not be one more association merely, but that it shall be the means of coordinating and translating into community values other local groups. The neighborhood association might become a very mechanical affair if we were all to go there every evening and go nowhere else. It must not with its professed attempt to give a richer life cut off the variety and spontaneity we now have. + 

But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so much unutilized spontaneity. The small merchant of a neighborhood meets with the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes to church on Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge or club, but where and when does he consider any possible integration of these into channels for community life? At his political rally, to be sure, he meets his neighbors irrespective of business or church or social lines, but there he comes under party domination. A free, full community life lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond, lived for community ends, is almost unknown now. This will not come by substituting the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using it as a clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation and unofficial integration. + 

There should be as much spontaneous association as the vitality of the neighborhood makes possible, but other groups may perhaps find their significance and coordination through the neighborhood association. If a men’s or women’s club is of no use to the community it should not exist; if it is of use, it must find out of what use, how related to all other organizations, how through and with them related to the whole community. The lawyers’ club, the teachers’ club, the trade association or the union⁠—these can have little influence on their community until they discover their relation to the community through and in one another. I have seen many examples of this. If the neighborhood group is to be the political unit, it must learn how to gather up into significant community expression these more partial expressions of individual wants. + 

It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is lessening nowadays with the ease of communication, but this is true only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be paying the ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their homes, nor the more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-five cents it costs them to go to the city and back. The fluctuating population of neighborhoods may be an argument against getting all we should like out of the neighborhood bond, but at the same time it makes it all the more necessary that some organization should be ready at hand to assimilate the newcomers and give them an opportunity of sharing in civic life as an integral, responsible part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has common traditions and memories which persist and influence even although the personnel changes. + 

To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or whether we want to find the unities which will make for peace and order, for justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn back to the neighborhood group and there begin the A.B.C. of a constructive brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much congeniality makes for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not the ignoring, of our differences leads us to the truth. Neighborhood organization gives us the best opportunity we have yet discovered of finding the unity underneath all our differences, the real bond between them⁠—of living the consciously creative life. + 

We can never reform American politics from above, by reform associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political forms will have no vitality unless our political life is so organized that it shall be based primarily and fundamentally on spontaneous association. “Government is a social contact,” was found in the examination papers of a student in a nearby college. He was nearer the truth than he knew. Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall never know how to be one of a nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what better training for world organization can each man receive than for neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a true community, for no League of Nations will be successful which regards France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units of a world-union. + 

Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization; only those will be interested who think that it is far more important for us to find the right method of attacking all our problems than to solve any one. We who believe in neighborhood organization believe that the neighborhood group is a more significant unit to identify ourselves with than any we have hitherto known in cities. People have been getting together in churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to these partial groups communities are to get together as communities. + 

The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative forces there are within a community and taking these and building the future with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a protest against both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized humanity on the other. It consists of the process of building always with the best we have, and its chief problem is to discover the methods by which the best we have can be brought to the surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a method which will revolutionize politics. + 

XXIII + 

An Integrated Neighborhood + 

How can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then how can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? How can neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and national responsibility? + 

There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways: + 

By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional meetings for specific objects. + 

By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings. + 

By learning together⁠—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life. + 

By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the neighborhood. + 

By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. + 

The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration, it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood Associations⁠—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital need is finding expression. + 

Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use. In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums, gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres, in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages, where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red schoolhouse at the crossroads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical entertainments. + 

And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to help neighborhoods to organize themselves, much spontaneous initiative in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of concerted effort. Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes, men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some form of community art-expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these motives leads us to the schoolhouse or the community building, the result is always the same⁠—a closer forging of the neighborhood bond. Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre⁠—a parents’ association, a men’s civic club, a mothers’ club, a committee of citizens, the city council, the board of education⁠—the result is always the same, a closer forging of the community bond. + 

The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly. That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had letters in regard to the organization of Centres from as widely different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man came to me and said, “We want a School Centre in our district⁠—will you help us to get one⁠—what is a School Centre?” + 

In the year 1915⁠–⁠16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public school buildings after 6 p.m. in addition to evening school work. + 

But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the expression of that bond in communal action⁠—they also give the training necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfilment. We all need not merely opportunities to exercise democracy, but opportunity for a training in democracy. We are not going to take any kind of citizen for the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension, through actual practice in self government by the management of their own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy. + 

Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the School Centres, the so-called “East Boston Town-Meeting,” the “Charlestown Commonwealth,” etc. At such meetings neighborhood needs can be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training themselves to function with government and as government. The first advantage of such meetings is their regularity. + 

I am urging regular meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or two or three, and then when these are accomplished think that they need not meet again until there is another definite end to be gained. But in the meantime there should be the slow building up of the neighborhood consciousness. A mass-meeting will never do this. But this neighborhood consciousness is far more important than to get a municipal bathhouse for a certain district. If the bathhouse is considered the chief thing, and no effort made to get the neighborhood group together again until something else, a playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps not enough cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to secure the playground. The question, in neighborhood organization is⁠—Is our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness, methods which will above all educate for further concerted effort? If neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting things, then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to bring about a different mental life, if it will give us an open mind, a flexible mind, a cooperative mind, then it is the greatest movement of our time. For our object is not to get certain things, or to have certain things; our object is to evolve the kind of life, the way of thinking, within which these specific things will naturally have place. We shall make no real progress until we can do this. + 

Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off equally from the blessings of society and the blessings of solitude. We must see that our neighborhood associations are so organized that we do get the advantages of society. + 

The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by learning and practising a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion which shall evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group will of the neighborhood to bear directly on city problems. When I speak of discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is called out by a genuine group. The group idea, not the crowd idea, is to come from discussion. What is the remedy for a “ruthless majority”? What is the remedy for an “arrogant minority”? Group discussion. Group discussion will diminish suggestion as a social force and give place to interpermeation. + 

When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not advocating the extension of a method already in use. There is little discussion today. Talk to air our grievances or as a steam-valve for the hotheaded, the avowed intention sometimes in the organization of so-called “discussion” societies, is not discussion. People often speak of “self-expression” as if it were a letting off of steam, as if there were something inside us that must be let out before it explodes. But this is not the use to which we must put the powers of self-expression; we must release these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve, but to be used constructively for the good of society. To change the metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which cannot and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself. + 

Do we have discussion in debating societies? Never. Their influence is pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges, schools, settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations, or wherever found. In these societies the men as a rule take either side of the question allotted to them, but even if they choose their side the process of the debate is the same. The object is always to win, it is never to discover the truth. This is excellent training for our present party politics. It is wretched preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in America, because there is no attempt to think together. Some one to whom I said this replied, “But each side has to think together.” Not in the least: they simply pool their information and their arguments, they don’t think together. They don’t even think; that artificial mental process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by conviction is not thinking. In debating you are always trying to find the ideas and facts which will support your side; you do not look dispassionately at all ideas and all facts, and try to make out just where the truth lies. You do not try to see what ideas of your opponent will enrich your own point of view; you are bound to reject without examination his views, his ideas, almost I might say his facts. In a discussion you can be flexible, you can try experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but in a debate all this is impossible. + 

One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we are beginning to have discussion. + 

Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine discussion is truth-seeking. First, then, it presses every man to think clearly and appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to take his part worthily. What we need above everything else is clear thinking. This need has been covered over by the demand for “honest” men, but hardly anyone would say today, “Give the management of your city over to a group of the most honest men you can find.” A group of honest men⁠—what a disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men, thinking men, as well as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your morals will take care of themselves⁠—is a present which would have benefited certain reform campaigns. + 

The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to think clearly. I belong to a civic conference lunch club which meets once a month to discuss civic questions. On one occasion the program committee discovered a few days before the luncheon that on the question to be considered (a certain bill before the legislature), we were all of the same opinion, and so the discussion did not seem likely to be very lively. But it happened that our secretary knew someone who was on the other side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and present her point of view to us. She accepted with pleasure as she said she felt strongly on the matter. On the morning of the day of our meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily! + 

Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and economic system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary, it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet. + 

But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was much struck with the difference between the American and the English way of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them. + 

Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to truth. + 

The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. The value of the town-meeting is not in the fact that everyone goes, but in what everyone does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much indifference, much complacency. We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which separates men. + 

Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win. + 

Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse: we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a “good time” together. We need opportunity for bringing old and young together, parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion pictures, not the deadening watching of other people’s acting; we want the real recreation of active participation. The leisure time of men and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency, by machinery, and by scientific management. One of the most pressing needs of today is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond. + 

Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life, and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external relations change all its inner life, as the International League will change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their friends, “Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School Centre.” I know men and wives who never went out together until they found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that they should not go to the public dance-halls. + 

Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways in the Neighborhood Centre⁠—by cooking classes for women, by lectures for both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of the new feeding⁠—food conservation, that is, taught as a community problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of mothers. For if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the primary objects of neighborhood organization. + 

The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life in the setting of the broader life is continuously to interpret and explain one to the other. And if we have learned that sacred as our family life must always be, the significance of that sacredness is its power of contributing to the life around us, the life of our little neighborhood, then we are ready to understand that the nation too is real, that its tasks are mighty and that those tasks will not be performed unless every one of us can find self-expression through the nation’s needs. + 

We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of our daily life⁠—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with all⁠—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that government satisfy those needs⁠—the satisfaction also must be found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI. + 

The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state. + 

XXIV + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization I + 

The Will of the People + 

Many of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs today is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known. + 

Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political life. There is a widespread idea that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated couple. + 

Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most important are: to give a knockout blow to party organization, to make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of American political life. + 

An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people, (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party. + 

First, there is at present no real unity of the people. + 

It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his people⁠—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No “independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine. + 

The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives⁠—whether they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”⁠—is futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness. When we go up to the gates of another world and say, “I have been honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent”⁠—no guardian of those Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with the counter thrust: “How have you used those qualities for making blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity, personal honesty, personal growth?” + 

To make our “independence” effective, to vie successfully with party organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group. + 

We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will of the people. We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated. Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole. + 

We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation. + 

The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will⁠—the true will of the people. + 

Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people. The people are the integration of every development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box. + 

The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,” then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks, stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion “imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion today is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there is no real progress here. + 

Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women today, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at windmills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need today: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship⁠—a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever. + 

Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us this machinery. + 

Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion. + 

First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that they have nothing to do with us. + 

Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc. + 

Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long view: votes are not crudely bought⁠—always; the boy is found a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power. + 

We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In nonpartisan neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization⁠—it is true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money⁠—keeping its members together⁠—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you want. The reason more of our real wants have not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held together on many issues. + 

Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not have to ask, “How will the management of this affect the power and prestige of our party?” + 

Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue. + 

Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped, conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the will, it does away with personal responsibility. The party, as the crowd, blots out the individual. Mass suggestion is dominating our politics today. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life. + 

Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in partisan discussion you take one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our views. If we get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the condition of the full and free development of the race. + 

But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will. It is right for today but not for tomorrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands. Constitutional conventions are seeking the machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the springs which will reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts, but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed will our government be no longer directed by a “body of law,” but by the self-renewing appearing of the will of the people. + 

The chief need of society today is an enlightened, progressive and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion. When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified confidence in itself. Then the “people,” born of an associated life, will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America. + 

XXV + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization II + 

Leaders or Bosses? + 

Neighborhood organization will prove fatal to party organization not only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the bosses. + 

American democracy has always been afraid of leadership. Our constitutions of the eighteenth century provided no one department to lead, no one man in the legislature to lead. Therefore, as we must have leadership, there has been much undefined, irresponsible leadership. This has often meant corruption and abuse, bad enough, but worse still it has meant the creation of machinery for the perpetuation of corruption, the encouragement of abuse. Under machine politics we choose for our leaders the men who are most popular for the moment or who have worked out the most thorough system of patronage, or rather of course we do not choose at all. We have two kinds of leaders under our party system, both the wrong kind: we have our actual leaders, the bosses, and our official leaders who have tended to be men who could be managed by the party. Our officials in their campaign speeches say that they are the “servants of the people.” But we do not want “servants” any more than we want bosses; we want genuine leaders. Now that more and more direct power is being given to the people it is especially necessary that we should not be led by machine bosses, but that we should evolve the kind of leadership which will serve a true democracy, which will be the expression of a true democracy, and will guide it to democratic ends by democratic methods. + 

We hope through local group organization to evolve real leaders. There should be in a democracy some sort of regular and ceaseless process by which ability of all sorts should come to the top, and flexibility in our forms so that new ability can always find its greatest point of usefulness, and so that service which is no longer useful can be replaced by that which is. In neighborhood groups where we have different alignments on different questions, there will be a tendency for those to lead at any particular moment who are most competent to lead in the particular matter in hand. Thus a mechanical leadership will give place to a vital leadership. Suppose the subject is sanitation. The man who is most interested, who has the clearest view of the need and who is its most insistent champion, will naturally step forth as the leader in that. The man who knows most about educational matters will lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders are born. Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy. You have all the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit and to guide cooperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men. + 

No adequate statement can be made in regard to leadership until it is studied in relation to group psychology. The leadership of the British Premier, of President Wilson, will become interesting studies when we have a better understanding of this subject. Meanwhile let us look briefly at some of the qualities of leadership. + 

The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by the group, is always a part of the group. No one can truly lead except from within. One danger of conceiving the leader as outside is that then what ought to be group loyalty will become personal loyalty. When we have a leader within the group these two loyalties can merge. + 

The leader must have the instinct to trace every evil to its cause, but, equally valuable, he must be able to see the relative value of the cause to each one of his group⁠—in other words, to see the total relativity of the cause to the group. He must draw out all the varying needs of the neighborhood as related to the cause and reconcile them in the remedy. A baby is ill; is the milk perhaps too rich for babies? But probably the rest of the neighborhood demands rich milk. All the neighborhood needs in regard to milk must be elicited and reconciled in the remedy for the sick child. That is, the remedy cannot be thinner milk, but it may be a demand that the milkman have separate milk for babies. + 

In other words the leader of our neighborhood group must interpret our experience to us, must see all the different points of view which underlie our daily activities and also their connections, must adjust the varying and often conflicting needs, must lead the group to an understanding of its needs and to a unification of its purpose. He must give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers. + 

The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or casual acquaintances are calling upon someone. With some hostesses you all talk across at one another as entirely separate individuals, pleasantly and friendlily, to be sure, but still across unbridged chasms; while other hostesses have the power of making you all feel for the moment related, as if you were one little community for the time being. This is a subtle as well as a valuable gift. It is one that leaders of men must possess. It is thus that the collective will is evolved from out the chaos of varied personality and complex circumstance. + 

The skilful leader then does not rely on personal force; he controls his group not by dominating but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds. Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few have made me want to do something. Who ever has struck fire out of me, aroused me to action which I should not otherwise have taken, he has been my leader. The community leader is he who can liberate the greatest amount of energy in his community. + 

Then the neighborhood leader must be a practical politician. He must be able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others. He must know not only the need of every charwoman but how politics can answer her call. He must know the great movements of the present and their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements of our time. His duty is to shape politics continuously. As the satisfaction of one need, or the expression of one latent power, reveals many more, he must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher, the active spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community consciousness. His guiding, embracing and dominant thought is to make that community consciousness articulate in government. + 

The politician is not a group but a crowd leader. The leader of a crowd dominates because a crowd wants to be dominated. Politicians do not try to convince but to dazzle; they do not deal with facts but with formulae and vague generalizations, with the flag and the country. If our politicians and our representatives are not our most competent men, but those who have the greatest power of suggestion and are most adroit in using it, the proposal here is that we shall develop methods which will produce real leaders. We are aiming now in the reorganization of our state constitutions at responsible official leadership instead of the irresponsible party boss system which was necessary once because we had to have leaders of some sort. How far this new movement shall succeed, will depend on how far it has back of it, or can be made to have back of it, the kind of organization which will develop group not crowd leaders. + 

Through neighborhood organization we hope that real leaders instead of bosses will be evolved. Democracy does not tend to suppress leadership as is often stated; it is the only organization of society which will bring out leadership. As soon as we are given opportunities for the release of the energy there is in us, heroes and leaders will arise among us. These will draw their stimulus, their passion, their life from all, and then in their turn increase in all passion and power and creating force. + 

XXVI + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization III + 

A Responsible Neighborhood + 

We have said that neighborhood organization must replace party organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to take the place of our irresponsible party government. Let us now consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood responsibility. + 

Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike, are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the responsibility. The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided responsibility but shared responsibility⁠—a very different thing. + 

Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature. I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that “the people” want it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and one “political” considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course I recognize the humor of this statement: I ought never to try to get a bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but to replace party. + 

Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us⁠—do we want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr. Mitchell “to get nearer the people.” But it is not for government to “get nearer” the people; it must identify itself with the people. It isn’t enough for the “good” officials to explain to the people what they are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in regard to city officials “explaining” their plans in all parts of the city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to give. Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the practical workings of the Gary system. + 

Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial. What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good” government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government which seems to disregard them. + 

To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do; some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people⁠—that is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, as soon as the responsibility is put upon us, our whole attitude changes. Take the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed. + 

Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond; secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession⁠—my responsibilities⁠—for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose. + 

But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a cooperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should, in proper cooperation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all three⁠—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers⁠—the results will be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close followup will be possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life. + 

Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt; community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is administered by city or state, should always be joined to local initiative, effort and responsibility. + 

And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters, we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say, “This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.” These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate as government as well as with government, that the citizen functions through government and the government functions through the citizen. It is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself. + 

It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members; the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals, by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks, universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to build up its own life in schools, parks, universities etc. + 

The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government action should not take the form of how much or how little government action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life of the state. + 

When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united want⁠—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement⁠—and decided to meet this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and women of Boston, are the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government, government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and feet, yes and the head and heart of government. + 

A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or anyone else from outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve mothers⁠—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three American, one Polish, and one German⁠—are doing the work well. As a result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical examination of school children etc. Of course these community associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly see. + 

I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones. The necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress is seen by many people today. In New York there is a vigorous movement for “Neighborhood Associations”; there are four already in active working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and valuable part of the neighborhood movement. + 

The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of Boston feel that we are the city, directly responsible for everything concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the life around him, itself then increases and focuses this sense of responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not only becomes an integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious of his citizenship. + 

In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are not to influence politics through their local groups, they are to be politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them, they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will acknowledge their responsibility. + 

We see many signs around us today of an increased sense of responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an individual self-expression but community self-expression. Take the women’s clubs: in their first stage their object was personal development; in the second they wished to do something for their town; in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the more progressive clubs, through women’s municipal leagues etc., a more direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together they wish to express their community⁠—no, they wish to be their community. They are not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole and seeks to express the whole. + 

But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently, “Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote tomorrow,” or “I must show myself at that rally tonight.” But a nobler idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims, they find their greatest satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal transference of responsibility to an invisible and nonexistent “they” can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we, that mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson. + 

Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and know that there too the world has vital need of me, there too am I not only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far, creating, actually building, a new and fairer world. + 

This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization, for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that I serve my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service I become my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is being born today. The war is binding together class and class, alien and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing America’s task, am therefore America. This is the deeper thought of neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I am creating the soul of this great democracy. + 

Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the party means stultification, annihilation. But group politics, made of the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living, pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth. And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood, faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing⁠—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic. And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life. + 

Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs? The young David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith? + 

Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have become. But this is not the creed of men today: we believe in the sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common daily life of all men. + 

XXVII + 

From Neighborhood to Nation: The Unifying State + 

How can the will of the people be the sovereign power of the state? There must be two changes in our state: first, the state must be the actual integration of living, local groups, thereby finding ways of dealing directly with its individual members. Secondly, other groups than neighborhood groups must be represented in the state: the ever-increasing multiple group life of today must be recognized and given a responsible place in politics. + 

First, every neighborhood must be organized; the neighborhood groups must then be integrated, through larger intermediary groups, into a true state. Neither our cities nor our states can ever be properly administered until representatives from neighborhood groups meet to discuss and thereby to correlate the needs of all parts of the city, of all parts of the state. Social workers and medical experts have a conference on tuberculosis, social workers and educational experts have a conference on industrial education. We must now develop the methods by which the citizens also are represented at these conferences. We must go beyond this (for certain organizations, as the National Settlement Conference at least, do already have neighborhood representation), and develop the methods by which regular meetings of representatives from neighborhood organizations meet to discuss all city and state problems. Further still, we must give official recognition to such gatherings, we must make them a regular part of government. The neighborhood must be actually, not theoretically, an integral part of city, of state, of nation. + 

When Massachusetts is thus organized, the neighborhood groups and intermediary, or district, groups should send representatives to city council and state legislature. The Senate might be composed of experts⁠—experts in education, in housing, in sanitation etc. The neighborhood and district centres would receive reports from their representatives to city council and state legislature and take measures on these reports. They should also be required to send regular reports up to their representative bodies. We should have a definitely organized and strongly articulated network of personal interest and representative reporting. Then the state legislature must devise ways of dealing not only with the district group but with the neighborhood groups through the district group, and thus with every individual in the commonwealth. The nation too must have a real connection with every little neighborhood centre through state and district bodies. + 

America at war has found a way of getting word from Washington to the smallest local units. The Council of National Defense has a “Section of Cooperation with States.” This is connected with a State Council of Defense in every state. In most cases the State Council is connected with County Councils, and these often with councils in cities and towns. Beyond this the Council of National Defense has recently (February, 1918) recommended the extension of county organization by the creation of Community Councils in every school district. Its official statement opens with this sentence: “The first nine months of the war have shown the vital importance of developing an official nationwide organization reaching into the smallest communities to mobilize and make available the efforts of the whole people for the prosecution of the war.” And it goes on to say that the government must have such close contact with small units that personal relation with all the citizens is possible. + 

President Wilson in endorsing this step, said, + 

“[This is an] advance of vital significance. It will, I believe, result when thoroughly carried out in welding the nation together as no nation of great size has ever been welded before.⁠ ⁠… It is only by extending your organization to small communities that every citizen of the state can be reached.” + 

Thus when the government found that it must provide means to its hands for keeping constantly in touch with the whole membership of the nation, it planned to do this by the encouragement and fostering of neighborhood organization. The nation is now seeking the individual through neighborhood groups. It is using the School Centres (it recommends the schoolhouse as the best centre for community organization) for the teaching of Food and Fuel Conservation, for Liberty Loan and Red Cross work, for recruiting for the army, for enlisting workers for war industries, for teaching the necessity and methods of increasing the food supply, for plans to relieve transportation by cooperative shipments and deliveries, for patriotic education etc. This “patriotic education” has an interesting side. In a country which is even nominally a democracy you cannot win a war without explaining your aims and your policy and carrying your people with you step by step. If beyond this the country wishes to be really a democracy, the neighborhood groups must have a share in forming the aims and the policy. + 

Of course one would always prefer this to be a movement from below up rather than from above down, but it is not impossible for the two movements to go on at the same time, as they are in fact doing now with the rapid development of spontaneous local organization. There were Community Councils in existence in fact if not in name before the recommendation of the Council of National Defense. + 

Through these nonpartisan councils not only national policy can be explained and spread throughout the country, but also what one locality thinks out that is good can be reported to Washington and thus handed on to other sections of the country. It is a plan for sending the news backwards and forwards from individual to nation, from nation to individual, and it is also a plan for correlating the problems of the local community with the problems of the nation and of cooperating nations. + 

But why should we be more efficiently organized for war than for peace? Is our proverbial carelessness to be pricked into effectiveness only by emergency calls? Is the only motive you can offer us for efficiency⁠—to win? Or, if that is an instinctive desire, can we not change the goal and be as eager to win other things as war? + 

I speak of the new state as resting upon integrated neighborhood groups. While the changes necessary to bring this about would have to be planned and authorized by constitutional conventions, its psychological basis would be: (1) the fact that we are ready for membership in a larger group only by experience first in the smaller group, and (2) the natural tendency for a real group to seek other groups. Let us look at this second point. + 

We have seen the process of the single group evolving. But contemporaneously a thousand other unities are a-making. Every group once become conscious of itself instinctively seeks other groups with which to unite to form a larger whole. Alone it cannot be effective. As individual progress depends upon the degree of interpenetration, so group progress depends upon the interpenetration of group and group. For convenience I speak of each group as a whole, but from a philosophical point of view there is no whole, only an infinite striving for wholeness, only the principle of wholeness forever leading us on. + 

This is the social law: the law which connects neighborhood with neighborhood. The reason we want neighborhood organization is not to keep people within their neighborhoods but to get them out. The movement for neighborhood organization is a deliberate effort to get people to identify themselves actually, not sentimentally, with a larger and larger collective unit than the neighborhood. We may be able through our neighborhood group to learn the social process, to learn to evolve the social will, but the question before us is whether we have enough political genius to apply this method to city organization, national organization, and international organization. City must join with city, state with state, actually, not through party. Finally nation must join with nation. + 

The recommendation of the Council of National Defense which has been mentioned above would repay careful reading for the indications which one finds in it of the double purpose of neighborhood organization. It is definitely stated that the importance of the Community Council is in: (1) initiating work to meet its own war needs; and (2) in making all its local resources available for the nation. And again it is stated that: (1) in a democracy local emergencies can best be met by local action; and (2) that each local district should feel the duty of bearing its full share of the national burden. + 

Thus our national government clearly sees and specifically states that neighborhood organization is both for the neighborhood and for the nation: that it looks in, it looks out. Thus that which we are coming to understand as the true social process receives practical recognition in government policy. + 

I have said that neighborhood must join with neighborhood to form the state. This joining of neighborhood and neighborhood can be done neither directly nor imaginatively. It cannot be done directly: representation is necessary not only because the numbers would be too great for all neighborhoods to meet together, but because even if it were physically possible we should have created a crowd not a society. Theoretically when you have large numbers you get a big, composite consciousness made up of infinite kinds of fitting together of infinite kinds of individuals, but practically this varied and multiplied fitting together is not possible beyond a certain number. There must be representatives from the smallest units to the larger and larger, up to the federal state. + 

Secondly, neighborhoods cannot join with neighborhoods through the imagination alone. Various people have asserted that now we have large cities and solidarity cannot come by actual acquaintance, it must be got by appropriate appeals to the imagination, by having, for instance, courses of lectures to tell one part of a city about another part. But this alone will never be successful. Real solidarity will never be accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small group with another. We are told too that the uneducated man cannot think beyond his particular section of the universe. We can teach him to think beyond his particular section of the universe by actually making him participate in other sections through connecting his section with others. We are capable of being faithful to large groups as well as small, to complex groups as well as simple, to our city, to our nation, but this can be effected only by a certain process, and that process, while it may begin by a stimulation of the imagination, must, if it is going to bring forth results in real life, be a matter of actual experience. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can the various and varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a responsible member of the state. + 

I have spoken of the psychological tendency for group to seek group. Moreover, it is not possible to isolate yourself in your local group because few local needs can be met without joining with other localities, which have these same needs, in order to secure city or state action. We cannot get municipal regulation for the dance-hall in our neighborhood without joining with other neighborhoods which want the same thing and securing municipal regulation for all city dance-halls. If we want better housing laws, grants for industrial education, we join with other groups who want these things and become the state. And even if some need seems purely local, the method of satisfying it ought not to be for the South End to pull as hard as it can for a new ward building, say, while the North End is also pulling as hard as it can for a new ward building, and the winner of such tug-of-war to get the appropriation. If the South End wants a new ward building it should understand how much money is available for ward buildings, and if only enough for one this year, consider where it is most needed. Probably, whatever the evidence, it will be decided that it is most needed in the South End, but a step will be taken towards a different kind of decision in the future. + 

And we join not only to secure city and state but also federal action. If we want a river or harbor appropriation, we go to Congress. And if such demands are supplied at present on the logrolling basis, we can only hope that this will not always be so. When group organization has vitalized our whole political life, there may then be some chance that logrolling will be repudiated. + 

And we do not stop even at Washington. Immigration is a national and international problem, but the immigrant may live next door to you, and thus the immigration question becomes one of nearest concern. This intricate interweaving of our life allows no man to live to himself or to his neighborhood. + 

Then when neighborhood joins with neighborhood all the lessons learned in the simple group must be practised in the complex one. As the group lesson includes not only my responsibility to my group but my responsibility for my group, so I learn not only my duty to my neighborhood but that I am responsible for my neighborhood. Also it is seen that as the individuals of a group are interdependent, so the various groups are interdependent, and the problem is to understand just in what way they are interdependent and how they can be adjusted to one another. The process of the joining of several groups into a larger whole is exactly the same as the joining of individuals to form a group⁠—a reciprocal interaction and correlation. + 

The usual notion is that our neighborhood association is to evolve an idea, a plan, and then when we go to represent it at a meeting of neighborhood associations from different parts of the city that we are to try to push through the plan of action decided on by our own local group. If we do not do this, we are not supposed to be loyal. But we are certainly to do nothing of the kind. We are to try to evolve the collective idea which shall represent the new group, that is, the various neighborhood associations all acting together. We are told that we must not sacrifice the interests of the particular group we represent. No, but also we must not try to make its interests prevail against those of others. Its real interests are the interests of the whole. + 

And then when we have learned to be truly citizens of Boston, we must discover how Boston and other cities, how cities and the rural communities can join. And so on and so on. At last the “real” state appears. We are pragmatists because we do not want to unite with the state imaginatively, we want to be the state; we want to actualize and feel our way every moment, let every group open the way for a larger group, let every circumference become the centre of a new circumference. My neighborhood group opens the path to the State. + 

But neighborhoods cooperating actively with the city government is not today a dream. Marcus M. Marks, President of the Borough of Manhattan, New York City, in 1914 divided Manhattan into sixteen neighborhoods, and appointed for each a neighborhood commission composed of business men, professional men, mechanics, clerks etc.⁠—a thoroughly representative body chosen irrespective of party lines. Mr. Marks’ avowed object was to obtain a knowledge of the needs of his constituents, to form connecting links between neighborhoods and the city government. And these bodies need not exist dormant until their advice is asked. Sections 1 and 2 of the Rules and Regulations read: + 

The Commissions shall recommend, or suggest, to the Borough President, for his consideration and advice, matters which, in their opinion will be of benefit to their districts and to the City. + 

The Commissions shall receive from the Borough President suggestions or recommendations for their consideration as to matters affecting their districts, and report back their conclusions with respect thereto. + 

Moreover, beyond the recommendations of the Commission, the cooperation of the whole neighborhood is sought. “Whenever the commissions are in doubt as to the policy they desire to advocate and wish to further sound the sentiment of their localities, meetings similar to town-meetings are held, usually in the local schoolhouse.” The “neighborhoods” of Manhattan have cooperated with the city government in such matters as bus franchise, markets, location of tracks, floating baths, pavement construction, sewerage etc. One of the results of this plan, Mr. Marks tells us, is that many types of improvement which were formerly opposed, such as sewerage construction by the owners of abutting property, now receive the support of the citizens because there is opportunity for them to understand fully the needs of the situation and even to employ their own expert if they wish. + 

The chairmen of the twelve Neighborhood Commissions form a body called the Manhattan Commission. This meets to confer with the President on matters affecting the interests of the entire borough. + 

This plan, while not yet ideal, particularly in so far as the commissions are appointed from above, is most interesting to all those who are looking towards neighborhood organization as the basis of the new state. + 

To summarize: neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the city⁠—then only shall we understand what it is to be the city; neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the state⁠—then only shall we understand what it is to be the state. We do not begin with a unified state which delegates authority; we begin with the neighborhood group and create the state ourselves. Thus is the state built up through the intimate intertwining of all. + 

But this is not a crude and external federalism. We have not transferred 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 today 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 today⁠—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. + 

II + 

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. 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. + 

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. + 

Mr. Ernest Barker of Oxford, although he formulates no definite system, is a political pluralist. + 

John Neville Figgis makes an important contribution to pluralism, 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 fetish 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 today 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 today a new state, but that the new state must be a great moral force. + 

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 today. 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: + 

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. + 

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.” + 

“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 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 today, 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 heartbeat 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 fullness 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 today, 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 widespread. 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. Also medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom, the patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it is true is the same today, 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 today 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. + 

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 someone 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 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. 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. + 

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 ou religieux.⁠ ⁠…” This in itself shows a misunderstanding of the evolution of a collective will. This school does not seem to understand that everyone must contribute to the collective will; ideally it would have no power unless this happened, actually we can only be constantly approaching this ideal. 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 anyone 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. 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 anyone 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. 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. 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. + 

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) 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 everyone 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 inequalities 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 anyone but himself. 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. 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; 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. + 

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 unifying 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. 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 today is the circumference of tomorrow. + 

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 unifying sovereignty. + 

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 extension of our life, but simply as an intensification 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 basketball 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 shoemaker is also a father and a ratepayer. 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. If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned today 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. + 

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. 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. + 

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 today. 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.⁠ ⁠…” 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. 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 nonexistent? 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. 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 today; we are now learning the lesson of federalism. Someone 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 today⁠—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” 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 unifying 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 forever 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.” 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. + 

I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community. 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. + 

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. 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, coordinated 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 cornerstone 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.” + 

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 today. 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 someone 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 anyone 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 today, 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. + 

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). 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 unifying 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. + 

The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It must take our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore uninteresting life if I could not unify them, Life would be “just one damned thing after another.” The true state has my devotion because it gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to self-realization. If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home. The home of my soul is in the state. + 

But the true state does not “demand” my allegiance. It is the spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple interests. And as it does not “demand” allegiance, so also it does not “compete” with trade-unions etc., as the present state often does, for my allegiance. We have been recently told that the tendency of the state is to be intolerant of “any competing interest or faith or hope,” but if it is, the cure is not to make it tolerant, but to make it recognize that the very substance of its life is all these interests and faiths and hopes. Every group which we join must increase our loyalty to the state because the state must recognize fully every legitimate interest. Our political machinery must not be such that I get what I need by pitting the group which most clearly embodies my need against the state; it must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my loyalty to the state. + 

When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action, decide between these loyalties. But my duty to either group or state is not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted against the state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can become a constituent part of the interests of the state. + 

I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but that is something very different from an “undivided” allegiance. It is, to use James’ phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. “Multiple allegiance” leaves us with the abnormal idea of competing groups. “Supplementary allegiance” gives us too fragmentary an existence. “Cooperative allegiance” comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps imagine a cooperative or unified allegiance, all these various and varying allegiances actually living in and through the other? + 

We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all the separate community sense and community loyalty and community responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and loyalty and control. + 

One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state. We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves today, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change tomorrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will change through our initiative. The true state is neither an external force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives, in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most pliant, the “absolutism” of the true state depends always upon our activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations, existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must obey; but the truth is that the state must be in perfect flux and that it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual growth. + 

But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought. + 

First, they prick the bubble of the present state’s right to supremacy. They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle Ages with its pretences and unfulfilled claims has not won either our regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state obedience? “[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves.” With the latter we are all beginning to agree. + 

Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but in the sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an actual psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the implicit warning of the pluralists that to attain this power is an infinite task. Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political forms must keep closely in touch with the specific stage of that growth. In rendering the state obedience, we assume that the state has genuine power (because the consequences of an opposite assumption would be too disastrous) while we are trying to approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski’s book is in its implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make one. Political theory will not create sovereignty, acts of Parliament cannot confer sovereignty, only living the life will turn us, subjects indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny. + 

Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use the phrase cooperative sovereignty which seems happily to be taking them away from their earlier “strung-along” sovereignty. If they press along this path, we shall all be eager to follow. + 

Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that the variety of our group life today has a significance which must be immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they repudiate the idea that the groups are given authority by the state. An able political writer recently said, “All other societies rest on the authority given by the state. The state itself stands self-sufficient, self-directing.⁠ ⁠…” It is this school of thought which the pluralists are combating and thereby rendering invaluable service to political theory. + 

Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for a revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state has failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the state. To the former, the group is to be the substitute for the repudiated state. As for the latter, the Fabians have long felt that local units should be vitalized and educated and interested, for they thought that socialism would begin with the city and other local units. Neighborhood education and neighborhood organization is then the pressing problem of 1918. All those who are looking towards a real democracy, not the pretence of one which we have now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the awakening and invigorating, the educating and organizing of the local unit. All those who in the humblest way, in settlement or community centre, are working for this, are working at the greatest political problem of the twentieth century. + 

In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the state is not now always identical with the interests of its parts. It is to the interest of England to win this war, they say, but England has yet to prove that it is also for the interest of her working people. + 

In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning of the disappearance of the crowd. Many people advocate vocational representation because they see in it a method of getting away from our present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation. They see our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and manipulated by “interests,” and propose the occupational group as a substitute for the crowd. New political experiments must indeed be along this line. We must guard only (1) that the “group” itself shall not be a crowd, (2) that the union of groups shall not be a numerical union. + 

Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future because it has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of identity, of association, of federalism, as the central problem of politics as it is the central problem of life. The force of the pluralist school is that it is not academic; it is considering a question which every thoughtful person is asking himself. We are faced today with a variety of group interests, with many objects demanding our enthusiasm and devotion; our duty itself shines, not a single light showing a single path, but shedding a larger radiance on a life which is most gloriously not a path at all. Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my church, my union? With the complexity of interests increasing every day on the outside, inside with the power of the soul to “belong” expanding every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less than the American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism and the political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this yet the soul of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential nature. How is this to be obtained? Social evolution is in the hands of those who can solve this problem. + 

What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the law of gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of interpenetration and of multiples. I am the multiple man and the multiple man is the germ of the unified state. If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or church or trade-union or any other special group. The miracle of spirit is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read only in the different instalments of my different groups. We do not give a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes its classifications and this is what some of the writers on group organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit is the power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies each individual. We have thought that federal government consisted of mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the spirit which liveth and giveth life. + 

Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer tell us that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry their pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only by actual living that we can understand an undivided allegiance. James tells us that “Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life⁠—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.” This is the way we must understand an undivided allegiance. I live forever the undivided life. As an individual I am the undivided one, as the group-I, I am again the undivided one, as the state-I, I am the undivided one⁠—I am always and forever the undivided one, mounting from height to height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting. + 

XXXIII + 

Increasing Recognition of the Occupational Group + 

From the confessedly embryonic stage of thinking in which the movement for group organization still is, two principal questions have emerged: (1) shall the groups form a pluralistic or a unifying state, (2) shall the economic group be the sole basis of representation? The first question I have tried to answer, the second offers greater difficulties with our present amount of experience. Men often discuss the occupational vs. the neighborhood group on the pivotal question⁠—which of these is nearest a man? Benoist’s plea for the occupational group was that politics must represent la vie. But, agreed as to that, we still question whether the occupational group is the most complete embodiment of la vie. + 

It is not, however, necessary to balance the advantages of neighborhood and occupational group, for I am not proposing that the neighborhood group take the place of the occupational. We may perhaps come to wish for an integration of neighborhood and industrial groups⁠—and other groups too as their importance and usefulness demand⁠—as their “objective” value appears. In our neighborhood group we shall find that we can correct many partial points of view which we get from our more specialized groups. A director of a corporation will be more valuable to his state and even to his corporation if he is at the same time the member of a neighborhood group. It may be that we shall work out some machinery by which the neighborhood group can include the occupational group. All our functions must be expressed, but somewhere must come that coordination which will give them their real effectiveness. We are not yet ready to say what the machinery will be, only to recognize some of the principles which should guide us in constructing that machinery. The power of an individual is his power to live a vital group life. The more your society is diversified in group life, the higher the stage of civilization. Perhaps the destiny of the neighborhood group is to interpret and correlate, to give full significance and value to, all the spontaneous association which our increasingly fuller and more varied life is constantly creating. It may be that the neighborhood group is not so much to include the others as to make each see its relation through every other to every other. The possible solution, mentioned above, of the two houses of our legislatures and parliaments dividing neighborhood and occupational representation, seems a little crude now to our further analysis unless some practical integration is being worked out at the same time in the local unit. But all this must be a matter of experiment and experience, of patient trial and open-minded observation. + 

The salient fact, however, is that neighborhood and occupational groups, either independently or one through the other, must both find representation in the state. But we must remember that it is industry which must be included in the state, not labor, but labor and capital. This war certainly shows us the importance of the great organizations of industry. Let them be integrated openly with the state on the side of their public service, rather than allow a backstairs connection on the side of their “interests.” And let them be integrated in such manner that labor itself is at last included in our political organization. This will not be easy; as a matter of fact we have no more difficult, as we have no more important, problem before us than the relation within the state of one powerful organized body to another and of these bodies to the state. The average American is against the growth of corporate bodies. But this prejudice must go: we need strong corporate bodies not to compete with the state but to minister to the state. Individualism and concentrated authority have been struggling for supremacy with us since the beginning of our government. From the beginning of our government we have been seeking the synthesis of the two. That synthesis is to be found in the recognition of organized groups, but not, I believe, by taking away power from the state and giving to the group. Some of the pluralists, in their reaction to the present fear of powerful groups, advocate that groups should be given more and more power. I agree with them so far, but their implication is that we shall thereby have shorn the Samson locks of the state. This I do not believe we want to do. + 

Everyone sees the necessity today of the increase of state control as a war measure, but some tell us that we should guard against its dangers by giving to certain organizations within the state enough power to “balance” the state. I insist that balance can never be the aim of sound political method. We must first change our conception of the state⁠—substitute the Service State for the Sovereign State⁠—then methods must be devised within which such new conception can operate. We should, indeed, give more and more power to the groups, or rather, because we can never “give” power, we should recognize all the power which springs up spontaneously within the state, and seek merely those methods by which that self-generating power shall tend immediately to become part of the strength of the state. + 

How absurd our logic has been. We knew that it took strong men to make a strong state; we did not realize that those groups which represent the whole industry and business of the country need not be rivals of the state, but must be made to contribute to the state, must be the means by which the state becomes great and powerful at the same time that it uses that power for the well-being and growth of all. Our timidity has been but the reflection of our ignorance. A larger understanding is what we need today. There is no need to condemn the state, as do the pluralists; there is no need to condemn our great corporate bodies, as do their opponents. But full of distrust we shall surely be, on one side or the other, until we come truly to understand a state and to create a state which ministers continuously to its parts, while its parts from hour to hour serve only the enhancement of its life, and through it, the enhancement of the life of its humblest member. + 

The tendency to which we have long been subject, to do away with everything which stood between man and the state, must go, but that does not mean that we must fly to the other extreme and do away with either the individual or the state. One of the chief weaknesses of political pluralism is that it has so many of the earmarks of a reaction⁠—the truth is that we have groups and man and the state, all to deal with. + 

Neighborhood groups, economic groups, unifying groups, these have been my themes, and yet the point which I wish to emphasize is not the kind of group, but that the group whatever its nature shall be a genuine group, that we can have no genuine state at all which does not rest on genuine groups. Few trade-unionists in demanding that their organization shall be the basis of the new state examine that organization to see what right it has to make this demand. Most trade-unionists are satisfied in their own organizations with a centralized government or an outworn representative system. Labor can never have its full share in the control of industry until it has learnt the secrets of the group process. Collective bargaining must first be the result of a genuine collective will before it can successfully pass on to directorate representation, to complete joint control. + 

It is significant that the guild socialists, in considering how acrimonious disputes between guilds are to be avoided, say that “the labor and brains of each Guild naturally [will evolve] a hierarchy to which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be referred,” and “at the back of this hierarchy and finally dominating it, is the Guild democracy.⁠ ⁠…” But then guild socialism is to have no different psychological basis from our present system. This is exactly what we rely on now so patiently, so unsuccessfully⁠—the lead of the few, the following of the crowd, with the fiction that, as our government is based on numbers, the crowd can always have what it wants; therefore, at any moment what we have is what we have chosen⁠—Tammany rule for instance. We need a new method: the group process must be applied to industrial groups as well as to neighborhood groups, to business groups, to professional societies⁠—to every form of human association. If the labor question is to be solved by a system of economic control based on economic representation instead of upon vital modes of association, “industrial democracy” will fail exactly as so-called political democracy has failed. + 

Perhaps this warning is particularly necessary at the present moment because “group” control of industry seems imminent. Through the pressure of the war guild socialism has made practical as well as theoretical headway in England. There are two movements going on side by side, both due it is true to the emergency of war, but neither of which will be wholly lost when the war is over; it is the opinion of many, on the contrary, that these movements are destined to shape a new state for England. First, the government has assumed a certain amount of control over munition plants, railroads, mines, breweries, flour mills and factories of various kinds, and it has undertaken the regulation of wages and prices, control of markets and food consumption, taxation of profits etc. + 

Secondly, at the same time that the state is assuming a larger control of industry, it is inviting the workmen themselves to take part in the control of industry. “The Whitley Report, adopted by the Reconstruction Committee of the Cabinet, proposes not only a Joint Standing Industrial Council for each great national industry, for the regular consideration of matters affecting the progress and well-being of the trade, but District Councils and Works Committees within each business upon which capital and labor shall be equally represented.” These bodies will take up “questions of standard wages, hours, overtime, apprenticeship, shop discipline,⁠ ⁠… technical training, industrial research and invention, the adoption of improved machinery and processes, and all those matters which are included under ‘scientific management.’ ” + 

This is a step which goes far beyond arbitration and conciliation boards. It gives to labor a positive share in the control of industry. “Although it is not at present proposed to give any legal recognition to this new machinery of economic government or any legal enforcement of its decision,⁠ ⁠… it may reasonably be expected that [these national industrial councils] will soon become the effective legislature of the industry.” + 

Most noteworthy is the general acceptance of this plan. “All classes appear to be willing and even anxious to apply the principle of representative self-government not only to the conduct of the great trades but to their constituent businesses.” Undoubtedly the English laborer has an increasing fear of bureaucracy and this is turning him from state socialism: his practical experience during the war of “tyrannical” bureaucracy in the government controlled industries has lost state socialism many supporters. + 

The establishment of the Standing Industrial Councils is a step towards guild socialism although (1) the determination of lines of production, the buying and selling processes, questions of finance, everything in fact outside shop-management, is at present left to the employers, and (2) the capitalist is left in possession of his capital. But this movement taken together with the one mentioned above, that is, the trend towards state-ownership or joint ownership or partial control, has large significance: the state to own the means of production, the producers to control the conditions of production, seems like the next step in industrial development, in government form⁠—the fact that these two go together, that government form is to follow industrial development, gives us large hope for the future. + 

The British Labor Party in 1917 formulated a careful plan for reorganization with a declared object of common ownership of means of production and “a steadily increasing participation of the organized workers in the management.” This wording is significant. + 

In America also the pressure of war has led to the recognition of labor in the control of industry. Adjustment boards containing labor representatives have been required of almost all private employers signing contracts with the War and Navy Departments. The policy of the administration is to recognize collective bargaining. And the President’s Mediation Commission, which imposed collective agreements on the copper industry of Arizona, stated in its official report, “The leaders of industry must⁠ ⁠… [enable] labor to take its place as a cooperator in the industrial enterprise.” Moreover, the workman is gaining recognition not only in the management of the industry in which he is engaged, but also at Washington. On most of the important government boards which deal with matters affecting labor, labor is represented. The work of the War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board mark our advance in the treatment of labor questions. + 

The “National Party,” inaugurated in Chicago in October, 1917, composed largely of socialists, had for one plank in its platform, “The chief industries should be controlled by administrative boards upon which the workers, the managers and the government should all be represented.” Thus the old state socialism is passing. + 

In France long before the war we see the beginnings of syndicalism in the steps taken to give to the actual teaching force of universities a share in the administration of the department of education. In 1896⁠–⁠1897 university councils were established, composed of deans and two delegates elected by each university faculty. While these councils are under ministerial control, this is hailed as the beginning of functionarist decentralization in France. In 1910 was organized the representation of all the personnel of the service of post, telephone and telegraph in regional and central councils of discipline, and also advisory representation to the heads of the service. + 

The best part of syndicalism is its recognition that every department of our life must be controlled by those who know most about that department, by those who have most to do with that department. Teachers should share both in the legislation and the administration affecting education. Factory laws should not be made by a Parliament in which factory managers and employees are not, or are only partially, represented. + 

One movement toward syndicalism we see everywhere: the forming of professional groups⁠—commercial, literary, scientific, artistic⁠—is as marked as the forming of industrial groups. Any analysis of society today must study its groupings faithfully. We are told too that in France these professional groups are beginning to have political power, as was seen in several large towns in the municipal elections before the war. Similar instances are not wanting in England and America. + 

In Germany there are three strong “interest” organizations which have a large influence on politics: the “Landlords’ League” which represents the conservatives, the “Social Democrats” who represent labor, and the “Hanseatic League for Manufactures, Trade and Industry” founded in 1909 with the express object of bringing forward its members as candidates for the Reichstag and Landtags. + 

We have an interesting instance in the United States of political organization on occupational lines from which we may learn much⁠—I refer to the Nonpartisan league of North Dakota composed of farmers which, inaugurated in 1915, in 1916⁠–⁠7 carried the state elections of North Dakota, electing a farmer-governor, and putting their candidates in three of the supreme court judgeships, and gaining 105 out of the 138 seats in the state legislature. The first object of the league was the redress of economic injustice suffered by the farmer. They saw that this must be done through concerted control of the political machinery. Of the legislation they wished, they secured: (1) a new office of State Inspector of Grains, Weights and Measures, (2) partial exemption of farm improvements from taxation, (3) a new cooperative corporation law, and (4) a law to prevent railroads from discriminating, in supplying freight-cars, against elevators owned by farmers’ cooperative societies. + 

In 1917 a Farmers’ Nonpartisan League of the state of New York was organized. In September, 1917, the North Dakota League became the “National Nonpartisan League,” the organization spreading to several of the neighboring states: Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, etc. At the North Dakota state primaries held in the summer of 1918, nearly all the League’s candidates were nominated, thus insuring the continuance of its control of the state government. + 

In Denmark we are told the battle rages between the agrarian party and the labor party. More and more the struggle in Parliamentary countries is becoming a struggle between interests rather than between parties based on abstract principles. This must be fully taken into account in the new state. + 

The hoped-for relation of industry to the state might be summed up thus: we want a state which shall include industry without on the one hand abdicating to industry, or on the other controlling industry bureaucratically. The present plans for guild socialism or syndicate control, while they point to a possible future development, and while they may be a step on the way, as a scheme of political organization have many weak points. Such experiments as the Industrial Councils of England are interesting, but until further technique is worked out we shall find that individual selfishness merely gives way to group selfishness. From such experiments we shall learn much, but the new ship of state cannot ride on such turbulent waters. + 

The part labor will take in the new state depends now largely upon labor itself. Labor must see that it cannot reiterate its old cries, that it need no longer demand “rights.” It is a question of a new conception of the state and labor seeing its place within it. For a new state is coming⁠—we cannot be blind to the signs on every side, we cannot be deaf to the voices within. Labor needs leaders today who are alive not to the needs of labor, but to the needs of the whole state: then it will be seen as a corollary how labor fits in, what the state needs from labor, what labor needs from the state, what part labor is to have in the state. + 