Chapter XIV: Part III: Group Organization Democracy’s Method (4)

The _droit_ evolved by a group is the _droit_ of that group. The _droit_ evolved by a state-group (we agree that there is no state-group yet, the state is evolving, the _droit_ is evolving, there is only an approximate state, an approximately genuine _droit_) is the _droit_ of the state. The contribution of the new psychology is that _le droit_ comes from relation and is always in relation. The warning of the new psychology to the advocates of vocational representation is that the _droit_ (either as law or right)[113] evolved by men of one occupation only will represent too little intermingling to express the “community” truth. We don’t want doctors’ ethics and lawyers’ ethics, and so on through the various groups. That is just the trouble at present. Employers and employees meet in conference. Watch those conferences. The difference of interest is not always the whole difficulty; there is also the difference of standard. Capitalist ethics and workman ethics are often opposed. We must accept _le droit_ as a social product, as a group product, but we must have groups which will unify interests and standards. Law and politics can be founded on nothing but vital modes of association.

Mr. Roscoe Pound’s exposition of modern law is just here a great help to political theory. The essential, the vital part of his teaching, is, not his theory of law based on interests, not his emphasis upon relation, but his bringing together of these two ideas. This takes us out of the vague, nebulous region of much of the older legal and political theory, and shows us the actual method of living our daily lives. All that he says of relation implies that we must seek and bring into use those modes of association which will reveal true interests, actual interests, yet not particularist interests but the interests discovered through group relations—employer and employed, master and servant, landlord and tenant, etc. But, and this is of great importance, these groups must be made into genuine groups. If law is to be a group-product, we must see that our groups are real groups, we must find the true principle of association. For this we need, as I must continually repeat, the study of group psychology. “Life,” “man,” “society,” are coming to have little meaning for us: it is your life and my life with which we are concerned, not “man” but the men we see around us, not “society” but the many societies in which we pass our lives. “Social” values? We want individual values, but individual values discovered through group relations.

To sum up this point: (1) law should be a group-product, (2) we should therefore have genuine groups, (3) political method must be such that the “law” of the group can become embodied in our legislation.

M. Duguit’s disregarding of the laws of that intermingling which is the basis of his _droit objectif_ leads to a partial understanding only of the vote. Voting is for him still in a way a particularist matter. To be sure he calls it a function and that marks a certain advance. Moreover he wishes us to consider the vote an “objective” power, an “objective” duty, not a “subjective” right. This is an alluring theory in a pragmatic age. And if you see it leading to syndicalism which you have already accepted beforehand, it is all the more alluring! But to call the vote a function is only half the story; as long as it is a particularist vote, it does not help us much to have it rest on function, or rather, it goes just half the way. It must rest on the intermingling of all my functions, it must rest on the intermingling of all my functions with all the functions of all the others; it must rest indeed on social solidarity, but a social solidarity in which every man interpenetrating with every other is thereby approaching a whole of which he is the whole at one point.

Duguit, full of Rousseau, does not think it possible to have a collective sovereignty without every one having an equal share of this collective sovereignty, and he most strenuously opposes _le suffrage universel égalitaire_. But _le suffrage universel égalitaire_ staring all the obvious _in_equalities of man in the face, Rousseau’s divided sovereignty based on an indivisible sovereignty—all these things no longer trouble you when you see the vote as the expression at one point of some approximate whole produced by the intermingling of men.

True sovereignty and true functionalism are not opposed; the vote resting on “subjective” right and the vote resting on “objective” power are not opposed, but the particularist vote and the genuinely individual vote are opposed. Any doctrine which contains a trace of particularism in any form cannot gain our allegiance.

Again Duguit’s ignoring of the psychology of the social process leads him to the separation of governors and governed. This separation is for him the essential fact of the state. Sovereignty is with those individuals who can impose their will upon others. He says no one can give orders to himself, but as a matter of fact no one can really give orders to any one but himself.[114] Here Duguit confuses present facts and future possibilities. Let us _be_ the state, let us be sovereign—over ourselves. As the problem in the life of each one of us is to find the way to unify the warring elements within us—as only thus do we gain sovereignty over ourselves—so the problem is the same for the state. Duguit is right in saying that the German theory of auto-limitation is unnecessary, but not in the reasons he gives for it. A psychic entity is subordinate to the _droit_ which itself evolves not by auto-limitation, but by the essential and intrinsic law of the group.

But Duguit has done us large service not only in his doctrine of a law, a right, born of our actual life, of our always evolving life, but also in his insistence on the individual which makes him one of the builders of the new individualism.[115] We see in the gradual transformation of the idea of natural law which took place among the French jurists of the end of the nineteenth century, the struggle of the old particularism with the feelings-out for the true individualism. That the French have been slow to give up individual rights, that many of them have not given them up for any collective theory, but, feeling the truth underneath the old doctrine, have sought (and found) a different interpretation, a different basis and a different use, has helped us all immeasurably.

* * * * *

Group psychology shows us the process of man creating social power, evolving his own “rights.” We now see that man’s only rights are group-rights. These are based on his activity in the group—you can call it function if you like, only unless you are careful that tends to become mechanical, and it tends to an organic functionalism in which lurk many dangers. But the main point for us to grasp is that we can never understand rights by an abstract discussion of “subjective” _vs._ “objective”—only by the closest study of the process by which these rights are evolved. The true basis of rights is neither a “mystical” idea of related personalities, nor is it to be found entirely in the relation of the associated to the object sought; a truly modern conception of law synthesizes these two ideas. “Function,” de Maeztu tells us “[is] a quality independent of the wills of men.” This is a meaningless sentence to the new psychology. At present the exposition of the “objective” theory of law is largely a polemic against the “subjective.” When we understand more of group psychology, and it can be put forth in a positive manner, it will win many more adherents.

Then as soon as the psychological foundation of law is clearly seen, the sovereignty of the state in its old meaning will be neither acclaimed nor denied. An understanding of the group process teaches us the true nature of sovereignty. We can agree with the pluralist school that the present state has no “right” to sovereignty;[116] we can go further and say that the state will never be more than ideally sovereign, further still and say that the whole idea of sovereignty must be recast and take a different place in political science. And yet, with the meaning given to it by present psychology, it is perhaps the most vital thought of the new politics. The sovereign is not the crowd, it is not millions of unrelated atoms, but men joining to form a real whole. The atomistic idea of sovereignty is dead, we all agree, but we may learn to define sovereignty differently.

Curiously enough, some of the pluralists are acknowledged followers of Gierke and Maitland, and base much of their doctrine on the “real personality” of the group. But the group can create its own personality only by the “compounding of consciousness,” by every member being at one and the same time an individual and the “real personality.” If it is possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a real personality. The imagination of the born pluralist stops with the group.[117]

But even in regard to the group the pluralists seem sometimes to fall into contradictions. Sovereignty, we are often told, must be decentralized and divided among the local units. But according to their own theory by whom is the sovereignty to be divided? The fact is that the local units must _grow_ sovereignty, that we want to revivify local life not for the purpose of breaking up sovereignty, but for the purpose of creating a real sovereignty.

The pluralists always tell us that the unified state proceeds from the One to the Many; that is why they discard the unified state. This is not true of the unify_ing_ state which I am trying to indicate. They think that the only alternative to pluralism is where you begin with the whole. That is, it is true, the classic monism, but we know now that authority is to proceed from the Many to the One, from the smallest neighborhood group up to the city, the state, the nation. This is the process of life, always a unifying through the interpenetration of the Many—Oneness an infinite goal.

This is expressed more accurately by saying, as I have elsewhere, that the One and the Many are constantly creating each other. The pluralists object to the One that comes before the Many. They are right, but we need not therefore give up oneness. When we say that there is the One which comes _from_ the Many, this does not mean that the One is _above_ the Many. The deepest truth of life is that the interrelating by which both are at the same time a-making is constant. This must be clearly understood in the building of the new state.

The essential error in the theory of distributed sovereignty is that each group has an isolated sovereignty. The truth is that each should represent the whole united sovereignty at one point as each individual is his whole group at one point. An understanding of this fact seems to me absolutely necessary to further development of political theory.[118] This does not mean that the state must come first, that the group gets its power from the state. This the pluralists rightfully resent. The power within the group is its own genetically and wholly. But the same force which forms a group may form a group of groups.

But the conclusion drawn by some pluralists from the theory of “real personality” is that the state is superfluous because a corporate personality has the right to assert autonomy over itself. They thus acknowledge that pluralism means for them group and group and group side by side. But here they are surely wrong. They ignore the implications of the psychological fact that power developed within the group does not cease with the formation of the group. That very same force which has bound the individuals together in the group (and which the theory of “real personality” recognizes) goes on working, you cannot stop it; it is the fundamental force of life, of all nature, of all humanity, the universal law of being—the out-reaching for the purpose of further unifying. If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what becomes of it? It must reach out to embrace other groups in order to repeat exactly the same process.

When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely lost. It only makes a noise. Do we want this to happen to our groups? Are they to end only in disagreeable noises? In order that the group-force shall not be lost, we must provide means for it to go on working effectively after it is no longer needed within the group, so to speak. We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek new forms of unification. No “whole” can imprison us infinite beings. The centre of to-day is the circumference of to-morrow.

Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All. From living group to living group to the “real” state—such must be our line of evolution.

Sovereignty, it is true, is a fact, not a theory. Whoever can gain obedience has the sovereign power. But we must go beyond this and seek those political methods by which the command shall be with those who have evolved a genuine authority, that is, an authority evolved by what I have called the true social process. We must go beyond this and seek those methods by which a genuine authority _can_ be evolved, by which the true social process shall be everywhere possible. To repeat: first, the true social process must be given full opportunity and scope, then it must be made the basis of political method. Then shall we see emerging a genuine authority which we can all acclaim as sovereign. There is, I agree with the pluralists, a great advantage in that authority being multiple and varied, but a static pluralism, so to speak, would be as bad as a static monism. The groups are always reaching out _towards_ unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is that every fresh unity means (as I have tried to show in chapter III) the throwing out of myriad fresh differences—our safeguard is that the universe knows no static unity. Unification means sterilization; unifying means a perpetual generating. We do not want the unified sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group first, you get unify_ing_ sovereignty.[119]

-----

Footnote 105:

See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned
above.

Footnote 106:

See “Traité de Droit Constitutionnel” and “Études de Droit Public”: I,
L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L’État, Les
Gouvernants and Les Agents.

As in French _droit_ may be either law or _a_ right, Duguit, in order
to distinguish between these meanings, follows the German distinction
of _objektives Recht_ and _subjektives Recht_, and speaks of _le droit
objectif_ and _le droit subjectif_, thus meaning by _le droit
objectif_ merely law. But because he at the same time writes of power
as resting on function in contradistinction to the classical theory of
the abstract “rights” of man, rights apart from law and only declared
by law, political writers sometimes speak of Duguit’s “objective”
theory of law, as opposed to a “subjective” theory of law, when
jurists would tell us that law _is_ objective, and that subjective
right is always merely _a_ right, my right. This matter of terminology
must be made much clearer than it is at present.

Footnote 107:

Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French
and Roman law has been questioned.

Footnote 108:

I have just read in a work on sociology, “Men surrender their
individual wills to the collective will.” No, the true social process
is not when they _surrender_ but when they _contribute_ their wills to
the collective will. See chs. II-VI, “The Group Process.”

Footnote 109:

See p. 130.

Footnote 110:

De Maeztu tells us, “Rights do not arise from personality. This idea
is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of
the associated with the thing which associates them....” Authority,
Liberty, and Function, p. 250.

Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the
unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of
“murder in the air” when it is a question of the “competition of
ideas, not of real collective personalities.” (See “The Discredited
State,” in _The Political Quarterly_, February, 1915.) This seems a
curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a
twentieth-century writer. The article is, however, an interesting and
valuable one.

See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 472.

Footnote 111:

See “Underlying Principles of Legislation.”

Footnote 112:

The teleological school of sociology is interesting just here. While
it marked a long advance on older theories, the true place of
selection of ends is to-day more clearly seen. We were told: “Men have
wants, therefore they come together to seek means to satisfy those
wants.” When do men “come together”? When were they ever separated?
But it is not necessary to push this further.

Footnote 113:

I have tried not to jump the track from legal right to ethical right
but occasionally one can speak of them together, if it is understood
that one is not thereby merging them.

Footnote 114:

The old consent theory assumes that some make the laws and others obey
them. In the true democracy we shall obey the laws we have ourselves
made. To find the methods by which we can be approaching the true
democracy is now our task; we can never rest satisfied with “consent.”

Footnote 115:

Although I do not agree with the form individualism takes in his
doctrine.

Footnote 116:

Some of the pluralists are concerned, I recognize, with the fact
rather than the right of sovereignty.

Footnote 117:

The trouble with the pluralists is that their emphasis is not on the
fact that the group creates its own personality, but on the fact that
the state does _not_ create it. When they change this emphasis, their
thinking will be unchained, I believe, and leap ahead to the
constructive work which we eagerly await and expect from them.

Footnote 118:

It is also necessary to an understanding of the new international law.
See ch. XXXV, “The World State.”

Footnote 119:

No one has yet given us a satisfactory account of the history of the
notion of sovereignty: just how and in what degree it has been
affected by history, by philosophy, by jurisprudence, etc., and how
all these have interacted. We have not only to disentangle many
strands to trace each to its source, but we have, moreover, just not
to disentangle them, but to understand the constant interweaving of
all. To watch the interplay of legal theory and political philosophy
from the Middle Ages down to the present day is one of the most
interesting parts of our reading, but perhaps nowhere is it more
fruitful than in the idea of sovereignty. We see the corporation long
ignored and the idea of legal partnership influencing the development
of the social contract theory, which in its turn reacted on legal
theory. We find the juristic conception of group personality, clearly
seen as early as Althusius (1557–1638), and revived and expanded by
Gierke, influencing the whole German school of “group sociologists.”
But to-day are not many of us agreed that however interesting such
historical tracing, our present notion of sovereignty must rest on
what we learn from group psychology?

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XXX

POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM

The Service State vs. the “Sovereign State”

--------------

THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the people who advocate vocational representation believe in what they call an organic democracy. This leads them to believe that the group not the individual should be the unit of government: a man in an industry is to vote not as an individual but as a department member because he is thus representing his function. But man has many functions and then there is something left over. It is just because our place in the whole can never be bounded by any one function that we cannot accept the organism of the Middle Ages, the organic society of certain sociologists, or the “organic democracy” of the upholders of occupational representation.

Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many functions. The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating—with his family, at school, at work, with his play group, with his art group: the carpenter may join the Arts and Crafts to find there an actualization of spirit for which he is fitted, and so on and so on. All the different sides of our nature develop by the process of compounding. If you shut a man up in his occupation, you refuse him the opportunity of full growth. The task has been given to humanity to “Know thyself,” but man cannot know himself without knowing the many sides of his self. His essential self is the possibility of the multiple expression of spirit.

We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we cannot do one thing well by doing one thing alone. The interrelations are so manifold that each of us does far more than he wishes, not because our tendency is a senseless ramifying, but because we cannot do our own job well unless we do many other things: we do not take on the extra activities as an _ex_tension of our life, but simply as an _in_tensification of our life at the point of our particular interest. Ideally one should fulfil all the functions of man in order to perform one function. No one ought to teach without being a parent! etc. etc. Man must identify himself with humanity. The great lesson which the pluralist school has to teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively but only actually, through his group relations. What it leaves out is that the task is manifold and infinite because man must identify himself with a manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced humanity.

Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all these various groups. There is a more subtle process going on—the interlocking of groups. And in these interlocking groups we have not only the same people taking up different activities, but actually representing different interests. In some groups I may be an employer, in others an employee. I can be a workman and a stockholder. Men have many loyalties. It is no longer true that I belong to such a class and must always identify myself with its interests. I may belong at the same time to the college club and the business women’s club, to the Players’ League (representing the actor’s point of view) and to the Drama Association (representing the playgoer’s point of view). I not only thus get opposite points of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite points of view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I may have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team, next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens’ league or neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross many times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable value in the development of society.

Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these groups may be working together for the satisfaction of some interest. This is recognized by law. A man can be a member of different corporations. Our possibility of association is not exhausted by contributing to the production of one legal person, we may help to create many different legal persons, each with an entirely different set of liabilities. Then there may be some sort of relation with a definite legal status existing between these bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation with myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere, this interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of the neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic social organization: not only in the sense of a flexible interaction between the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity which makes it possible for individuals to change constantly their relations, their groups, without destroying social cohesion. Vocational representation would tend to crystallize us into definite permanent groups.

The present advocacy of organic democracy or “functionalism” is obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to “individualism”: the functional group must be the unit because the individual is so feared. I agree with the denunciation of the individual if you mean the man who seeks only his own advantage. But have we not already seen that that is not the true individual? And do we not see now that man is a multiple being? Life is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity. Politics must be shaped for that. Our task is to make straight the paths for the coming of the Lord—the true Individual. Man is struggling for the freedom of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must have as many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man—this does away with “organic democracy.”

The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any number of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state demands the whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no one group can seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that having taken one-tenth there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not divisible into so many parts as a house into so many rooms. My group uses me and then the whole of me is still left to give to the whole. This is the constant social process. Thus my citizenship is something bigger than my membership in a vocational group. Vocational representation does not deal with men—it deals with masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of my personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what is left over—is that going to be lost? The whole of every man must go into his citizenship.

Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many “rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father is to be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.

As ideally every function should include every other, as every power of which I am capable should go into my work, occupational representation might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted for the limitations of man in 1918.

I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals, but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on. The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the particularist-individual, but the group-individual.

The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational representation—“Do you want representation of numbers or representation of interests?” They are opposed to the former, which they call democracy, because “democracy” means to them the “sovereignty of the people,” which means the reign of the crowd. Democracy and functionalism are supposed to be opposed. An industry is to be composed not of individuals but of departments; likewise the state is to be a union of industries or occupations. The present state is conceived as a crowd-state.[120] If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned to-day in many quarters. But I do not believe this is the alternative we are facing—the crowd-state or the group-state. We want the representation of individuals, but of true individuals, group-individuals.[121]

The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers with individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the individual at the centre of our political system, without an atomistic sovereignty, and yet by which we can get the whole of the individual. I am proposing for the moment the individual the unit, the group the method, but this alone does not cover all that is necessary. In the French syndicalist organization every syndicate, whatever its size, is represented by a single individual. In this way power is prevented from falling into the hands of a strong federation like the miners, but of course this often means minority rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be dominated by the five large trades, a state of things which has been much complained of there. But we must remember that while the syndicalists get rid of majority rule, that is, that the majority of individuals no longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority of groups. They have not given up the _principle_ of majority rule, they simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with new principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard to the individual and transferring them to the field of the group. I have tried to show in chapter XVII, “Democracy Not the Majority,” that the pressing matter in politics is not whether we want majority rule or not, but to decide upon those methods of association by which we get the greatest amount of integration. The syndicalists are right, we do not want a crowd, but I do not think most syndicalists have discovered the true use of the true group.

The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group method can be a regular part of our political system—its relation to the individual on the one hand and to the state on the other. No man should have a share in government as an isolated individual, but only as bound up with others: the individual must be the unit, but an individual capable of entering into genuine group relations and of using these for an expanding scale of social, political and international life.

The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the Service State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two meanings: (1) that the state is created by the actual services of every man, that every man will get his place in the state through the service rendered: (2) that the state itself is tested by the services it renders, both to its members and to the world-community.[122] The weakness of functionalism, as so far developed, is that it has provided no method for all the functions of man to be included in the state. The essence of democracy is the expression of every man in his multiple nature.

To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple nature. This is the blow to the theory of occupational representation. But also no number of groups can enfold me. This is the reason why the individual must always be the unit of politics, as group organization must be its method. We _find_ the individual through the group, we _use_ him always as the true individual—the undivided one—who, living link of living group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for every new possibility of a forever unfolding life.

-----

Footnote 120:

The French syndicalists avowedly do not want democracy because it
“mixes the classes,” because, as they say, interests and aims mingle
in one great mass in which all true significance is lost.

Footnote 121:

See p. 184.

Footnote 122:

This is the basis of Duguit’s international law—the place of a state
in an international league is to be determined directly by services
rendered.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XXXI

POLITICAL PLURALISM AND THE TRUE FEDERAL STATE

--------------

IN the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of life—the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1) Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the group—dependent on the principle of interpenetration. (2) Man joins many groups—in order to express his multiple nature. These two principles give us federalism.

Let us, before considering the conception of federalism in detail, sum up in a few sentences what has already been said of these two principles. The fundamental truth of life we have seen is self-perpetuating activity—activity so regnant, so omnipresent, so all-embracing, that it banishes even the conception of anything static from the world of being. Conscious evolution means that we must discover the essential principle of this activity and see that it is at work in the humblest of its modes, the smallest group or meeting of even two or three. The new psychology has brought to political science the recognition of interpenetration and the “compounding of consciousness” as the very condition of all life. Our political methods must conform to life’s methods. We must understand and follow the laws of association that the state may appear, that our own little purposes may be fulfilled. _Little_ purposes? Is there any great and small? The humblest man and the price of his daily loaf—is this a small matter—it hangs upon the whole world situation to-day. In order that the needs of the humblest shall be satisfied, or in order that world purposes shall be fulfilled—it matters not which—this principle of “compounding” must be fully recognized and embodied in our political methods. It is this vital intermingling which creates the real individual and knits men into the myriad relations of life. We win through life our individuality, it is not presented to us at the beginning to be exploited as we will. We win a multiple individuality through our manifold relations. In the workings of this dual law are rooted all of social and political progress, all the hope and the potency of human evolution.

Only the federal state can express this dual principle of existence—the compounding and the multiple compounding. It is an incomplete understanding of this dual law which is responsible for the mistaken interpretation of federalism held by some of the pluralists: a conception which includes the false doctrines of division of power, the idea that the group not the individual should be the unit of the state, the old consent of governed theory, an almost discarded particularism (group rights), and the worn-out balance theory.

The distributive sovereignty school assumes that the essential, the basic part of federalism is the division of power between the central and separate parts: while the parts may be considered as ceding power to the central state, or the central state may be considered as granting power to the parts, yet in one form or another federalism means a divided sovereignty. Esmein says definitely, “_L’État fédératif ... fractionne la souveraineté...._”[123] No, it should unite sovereignty. There should be no absolute division of power or conferring of power. The activity of whole and parts should be one.

In spite of all our American doctrines of the end of the eighteenth century, in spite of our whole history of states-right theory and sentiment, the division of sovereignty is not the main fact of the United States government. From 1789 to 1861 the idea of a divided sovereignty—that the United States was a voluntary agreement between free, sovereign and independent states, that authority was “divided” between nation and states—dictated the history of the United States. The war of 1861 was fought (some of the pluralists seem not to know) to settle this question.[124] The two ideas of federalism came to a death grapple in our Civil War and the true doctrine triumphed. That war decided that the United States was not a delegated affair, that it had a “real” existence, and that it was sovereign, yet not sovereign over the states as an external party, for it is composed of the states, but sovereign over itself, merely over itself. You have not to be a mystic to understand this but only an American. Those who see in a federal union a mere league with rights and powers granted to a central government, those who see in a federal union a balancing of sovereign powers, do not understand true federalism. When we enumerate the powers of the states as distinct from the powers of our national government, some people regard this distinction as a dividing line between nation and states, but the true “federalist” is always seeing the relation of these powers to those of the central government. There are no absolute divisions in a true federal union.

Do we then want a central government which shall override the parts until they become practically non-existent? The moment federalism attempts to transcend the parts it has become vitiated. Our Civil War was not, as some writers assert, the blow to states-rights and the victory of centralization. We shall yet, I believe, show that it was a victory for true federalism.[125] The United States is neither to ignore the states, transcend the states, nor to balance the states, it is to _be_ the states in their united capacity.

Of course it is true that many Americans do think of our government as a division of powers between central and local authority, therefore there is as a matter of fact much balancing of interests. But as far as we are doing this at Washington it is exactly what we must get rid of. The first lesson for every member of a federal government to learn is that the interests of the different parts, or the interests of the whole and the interests of the parts, are never to be pitted against each other. As far as the United States represents an interpenetration of thought and feeling and interest and will, it is carrying out the aims of federalism.

We have not indeed a true federalism in the United States to-day; we are now learning the lesson of federalism. Some one must analyze for us the difference between centralization and true federalism, which is neither nationalization, states-rights, nor balance, and then we must work for true federalism. For the federal government to attempt to do that which the states should do, or perhaps even are doing, means loss of force, and loss of education-by-experience for the states. On the other hand, not to see when federal action means at the same time local development and national strength, means a serious retarding of our growth. It is equally true that when the states attempt what the federal government alone should undertake, the consequence is general muddle.

And it is by no means a question only of what the federal government should do and what it should not do. It is a question of the _way_ of doing. It is a question of guiding, where necessary, without losing local initiative or local responsibility. It is a question of so framing measures that true federation, not centralization, be obtained. Recently, even before the war, the tendency has been towards increased federal action and federal control, as seen, for instance, in the control of railroad transportation, of vocational education etc. The latter is an excellent example of the possibility of central action being true federal and not nationalized action. The federal government upon application from a state grants to that state an amount for vocational education equal to what the state itself will appropriate. The administration of the fund rests with the state. The federal government thus makes no assumptions. It _recognizes existing facts_. And it does not impose something from without. The state must understand its needs, must know how those needs can best be satisfied; it must take responsibility. The experience of one state joins with the experience of other states to form a collective experience.

As we watch federalism being worked out in actual practice at Washington, we see in that practice the necessity of a distinction which has been emphasized throughout this book as the contribution of contemporary psychology to politics: nationalization is the Hegelian reconciliation, true federalism is the integration of present psychology. This means a genuine integration of the interests of all the parts. If our present tendency is towards nationalization, we must learn the difference between that and federalism and change it into the latter. We need a new order of statesmen in the world to-day—for our nation, for our international league—those who understand federalism.

But I have been talking of federalism as the integration of parts (the states). We should remember also, and this is of the greatest importance, that the United States is not only to be the _states_ in their united capacity, but it is to be all the men and women of the United States in _their_ united capacity. This it seems difficult for many Europeans to understand; it breaks across their traditional conception of federalism which has been a league, a confederation of “sovereign” parts, not a true federal state. We of Massachusetts feel ourselves not first children of Massachusetts and then through Massachusetts of the United States. We belong directly to the United States not merely through Massachusetts. True federalism means that the individual, not the group, is the unit. A true federal government acts directly on its citizens, not merely through the groups.

America has not led the world in democracy through methods of representation, social legislation, ballot laws or industrial organization. She has been surpassed by other countries in all of these. She leads the world in democracy because through federalism she is working out the secret of the universe actively. Multiple citizenship in its spontaneous unifying is the foundation of the new state. Federalism and democracy go together, you do not decide to have one or the other as your fancy may be. We did not establish federalism in the United States, we are growing federalism. Cohesion imposed upon us externally will lack in significance and duration. Federalism must live through: (1) the reality of the group, (2) the expanding group, (3) the ascending group or unifying process.

The federal state is the unifying state. The political pluralists, following James, use the “trailing and”[126] argument to prove that we can never have a unified state, that there is always something which never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have a unify_ing_ state, that this “and” is the very unifying principle. The “trailing and” is the deepest truth of psychology. It is because of this “and” that our goal must always be the unified state—the unified state to be attained through the federal form. Our spirit it is true is by nature federal, but this means not infinite unrelation but infinite possibility of relation, not infinite strung-alongness but infinite seeking for the unifying of the strung-alongness. I forever discover undeveloped powers. This is the glory of our exhaustless nature. We are the expression of the principle of endless growth, of endless appearing, and democracy must, therefore, so shape its forms as to allow for the manifestation of each new appearing. I grow possibilities; new opportunities should always be arising to meet these new possibilities.

Then through group and group and ascending group I actualize more and more. The “trailing and” is man’s task for ever and ever—to drag in more spirit, more knowledge, more harmony. Federalism is the only possible form for the state because it leaves room for the new forces which are coming through these spiritual “ands,” for the myriad centres of life which must be forever springing up, group after group, within a vital state. Our impulse is at one and the same time to develop self and to transcend self. It is this ever transcending self which needs the federal state. The federal state is not a unified state, I agree, but it is a unifying state, not a “strung-along” state.

Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental principles of life—the compounding of consciousness and the endless appearings of new forces.

I have said that the pluralists’ mistaken interpretation of federalism includes the particularist notions of “consent” and “rights” and “balance,” and that all these come from a false conception of sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of “consent”? Power is generated within the true group not by one or several assuming authority and the others “consenting,” but solely by the process of intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.

If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that, what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora, a “larger life”? The pluralists open the gates to too much. They wish to throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals. Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate task, but let us ponder well the method.

The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority over “other groups.”[127] But as he who expresses the unity of my group has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups—that is, the state—should have no authority _as a separate group_, but only so far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of the other groups as “coextensive” or “complementary” to the state—the state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they and all individuals are the constituents of the state.[128]

I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.[129] This those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves with all particularists.[130]

Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the “inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a compact.[131] The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals. As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs._ the State but The Group _vs._ the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think it progress to write Group _vs._ the State? If the principle of individual _vs._ the state is wrong, what difference does it make whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in so far as we can talk of group _vs._ the state, we are held in the thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty, that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem to realize.

Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of group and state can be approaching coincidence.

As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole. Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks in to its own integrated, coördinated activity, (2) it sees that activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.

Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice. Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our particularism while changing its name from individual to group.

The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory, perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists’ doctrine. The pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. “The dilemma which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”[132]

But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your conclusion.