THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Introduction

Our political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually
at war, the nations of Europe are at one another's throats--because
we have not yet learned how to live together.  The twentieth
century must find a new principle of association.  Crowd
philosophy, crowd government, crowd patriotism must go.  The herd
is no longer sufficient to enfold us.

  Group organization is to be the new method of politics, the basis
of our future industrial system, the foundation of international
order.  Group organization will create the new world we are now
blindly feeling after, for creative force comes from the group,
creative power is evolved through the activity of the group life.

  We talk about the evils of democracy.  We have not yet tried
democracy.  Party or "interests" govern us with some fiction of the
"consent of the governed" which we say means democracy.  We have
not even a conception of what democracy means.  That conception is
yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life.

  We talk about the tragedy of individualism.  The individual we do
not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the
individual.  Our particularism--our *laissez-faire*, our every-man-
for-his-own-interests--has little to do with true individualism,
that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the
life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his
all.

  Politics do not need to be "purified."  This thought is leading
us astray.  Politics must be vitalized by a new method. 
"Representative government," party organization, majority rule,
with all their excrescences, are dead-wood.  In their stead must
appear the organization of non-partisan groups for the begetting,
the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose and a
collective will.

  Government by the people must be more than the phrase.  We are
told--The people should do this, the people should do that, the
people must be given control of foreign policy, etc. etc.  But all
this is wholly useless unless we provide the procedure within which
the people can do this or that.  What does the "sovereign will" of
the people amount to unless it has some way of operating? Or have
we any "sovereign will?"  There is little yet that is practical in
"practical politics."

  But method must not connote mechanics to any mind.  Many of us
are more interested in the mechanisms of life than in anything
else.  We keep on putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in
seeing something come out at the other end.  All this must change. 
Machines, forms, images, moulds--all must be broken up and the way
prepared for our plastic life to find plastic expression.  The
principle of democracy may be the underlying unity of men, the
method of democracy must be that which allows the quickest response
of our daily life to the common faith of men.

  Are we capable of a new method?  Can the inventive faculty of the
American people be extended from mechanical things to political
organization?  There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in
our history.  Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments
which will largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise
enough to make the necessary political and social adjustments--that
is the crucial question which faces America to-day.

  Representative government has failed.  It has failed because it
was not a method by which men could govern themselves.  Direct
government is now being proposed.  But direct government will never
succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as
at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes
in all the ballot-boxes.  Ballot-box democracy is what this book is
written to oppose.

  No government will be successful, no government will endure, which
does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the 
individual.  Up to the present moment, we have never seen the 
individual.  Yet the search for him has been the whole long
striving of our Anglo-Saxon history.  We sought him through the
method of representation and failed to find him.  We sought to
reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every
woman and yet he eludes us.  Direct government now seeks the
individual; but as we have not found him by sending more men to the
ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending men more often to
the ballot-box.  Are our constitutional conventions to sit and
congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are
condemning us to a new form of the old particularism?  The ballot-
box!  How completely that has failed men, how completely it will
fail women.  Direct government as at present generally understood
is a mere phantom of democracy.  Democracy is not a sum in
addition.  Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of
true individuals.  The question before the American people to-day
is--How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true
individual to be discovered?  The party has always ignored him; it
wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes.  The early reform
associations had the same aim.  Both wanted voters not men.  It
makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the
good government associations, this is all herd life--"following the
herd"--democracy means a wholly different kind of existence.  To
follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force
in the world which can make the Perfect Society--democracy depends
upon the creative power of every man.

  We find the true man only through group organization.  The
potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they
are released by group life.  Man discovers his true nature, gains
his true freedom only through the group.  Group organization must
be the new method of politics because the modes by which the
individual are brought forth and made effective are the modes of
practical politics.

  But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the
individual we are to find within the group?  Every man to count as
one?  That was once our slogan.  Now we have relegated it to a
mechanical age.  To-day we see that every many must count for
infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a cog
in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point
of view the whole itself.  A man said to me the other day, "That is
not democracy, that is mysticism."  But why mysticism?  It is our
daily life as lived from hour to hour.  We join with one group of
men at work, with another at play, another in our civic committee,
another in our art club.  Man's life is one of manifold relatings. 
His vote at the polls must express not his particularist self, but
the whole complex of his related life, must express as much of the
whole as these multiple relations have brought into existence for
him, through him.  I find my expression of the whole-idea, the
whole-will, through my group life.  The group must always dictate
the modes of activity for the individual.  We must put clearly
before us the true individual with his infinite relations,
expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics, as
the meaning of democracy.  The first purpose of genuine politics is
to make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign
(sic) of outlook.  In every man is the potential of such
expression.  To call it forth is the aim of all training, the end
sought by all modes of real living.

  Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere
numbers.  Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be
understood except as a spiritual force.  Majority rule rests on
numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that
society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a
network of human relations.  Democracy is not worked out at the
polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective
will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of
his complex life, as one which every single being must express the
whole of at one point.  Thus the essence of democracy is creating. 
The technique of democracy is group organization.  Many men despise
politics because they see that politics manipulate, but make
nothing.  If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as
they should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.

  What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative
power?  The activity which produces the true individual is at the
same time interweaving him and others into a real whole.  A genuine
whole has creative force.  Does this seem "mystical?"  The power of
our corporations depends upon this capability of men to interknit
themselves into such genuine relations that a new personality is
thereby evolved.  This is the "real personality" of modern legal
theory.  Are our company directors and corporation lawyers usually
mystics?

  The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands
a new attitude and a new activity in man.  The fallacy of self-and-
others fades away and there is only self-in-and-through-others,
only others so firmly rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing
there that sundering is impossible.  We must now enter upon modes
of living commensurate with this thought.

  What American politics need to-day is positive principles.  We do
not want to "regulate" our trusts to "restrain" our bosses.  The
measure of our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. 
It may be necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile
of the dead branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of
the flourishing state of the garden.

  The group organization movement means the substitution of
intention for accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. 
It rests on the solid assumption that this is a man-made not a
machine-made world, that men and women are capable of constructing
their own life, and that not upon socialism or any rule or any
order or any plan or any utopia can we rest our hearts, but only on
the force of a united and creative citizenship.

  We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once
from the region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a
practical scheme of living.  We hear a good deal of academic talk
about "the functioning of the social mind"; what does it all amount
to?  We have no social mind yet, so we have no functioning of the
social mind.  We want the directive force of consciously integrated
thought and will.  All our ideas of conscious self-determination
lead us to a new method: it is not merely that we must be allowed
to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern ourselves; it is
not only that we must be given "free speech," we must learn a
speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights; it
is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will
expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will
created.

  Politics have one task only--to create.  To create?  But what are
politics to create?  The state?  The state is now discredited in
many quarters.  The extremists cry, "The state is dead. Down with
the state."  And it is by no means the extremists alone who are
saying that our present state has played us false and that
therefore we are justified in abolishing it.  An increasing number
of men are thinking what one writer has put into words, "We have
passed from the *regime* of the state to that of the groups."  We
must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to get
the advantage of the group.

  Many trickles have gone to feed the stream of reaction against
the state: (1) an economic and industrial progress which demands
political recognition, which demands that labor have a share in
political power, (2) the trend of philosophic thought towards
pluralism and the whole anti-intellectualistic tendency, (3) a
progressive legal theory of the "real personality" of groups, (4)
a growing antagonism to the state because it is supposed to embody
the crowd mind: our electorate is seen as a crowd hypnotized by the
party leaders, big words, vague ideas and loose generalizations,
(5) our life of rapidly increasing intercourse has made us see our
voluntary associations as real and intimate, the state as something
remote and foreign to us, and (6) the increasing alignment before
the war of interests across state lines.

  Every one of these reasons has force.  Almost any one of these
reasons is sufficient to turn political theory into new channels,
seeking new currents of political life.  Yet if our present state
is taken from us and we are left with our multiple group life, we
are at once confronted with many questions.  Shall the new state be
based on occupational groups or neighborhood groups?  Shall they
form a unifying or a plural state?  Shall the group or the
individual be the basis of politics?  The pluralist gives us the
group as the unit of politics, but most of the group theories of
politics are as entirely particularistic as the old
"individualistic" theories; our particularism is merely transferred
from the individual to the group.

  Pluralism is the most vital trend in political thought to-day,
but there are many dangers lurking in pluralism as at present
understood.  The pluralists apotheosize the group; the average
American, on the other hand, is afraid of the group because he
thinks of it chiefly in the form of corporation and trust.  Both
make the same mistake: both isolate the group.  The group *in
relation* must be the object of our study if that study is to be
fruitful for politics.  The pluralists have pointed out diversity
but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question to
which we must find an answer--What is to be done of this diversity?

  Some of the pluralists tend to lose the individual in the group;
others, to abandon the state for the group.  But the individual,
the group, the state--they are all there to be reckoned with--we
cannot ignore or minimize any one.  The relation of individual to
group, of group to group, of individual and group to state--the
part that labor is to have in the new state--these are the
questions to the consideration of which this book is directed.

  This book makes no attempt, however, to construct the new state,
only to offer certain suggestions.  But before the details of a new
order are even hinted at, we must look far enough within for our
practical suggestions to have value.  In Part I we shall try to
find the fundamental principles which must underlie the new state;
in Part II we shall see how far they are expressed in present
political forms; in Part III we shall consider how they can be
expressed.  When they are fully expressed, then we shall have the
true Federal State, then we shall see appearing the World State.

  To sum up this Introduction:  The immediate problem of political
science is to discover the method of self-government.  Industrial
democracy, the self-government of smaller nations, the
"sovereignty" of an International League, our own political power,-
-how are these to be attained?  Not by being "granted" or
"conferred."  Genuine control, power, authority are always a
growth.  Self-government is a psychological process.  It is with
that psychological process that this book is largely concerned.  To
free the way for that process is the task of practical politics.

  New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we
must open the way for their entrance and onflow.  To-day the
individual is submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy,
the herd theory.  Free him from these, release his energies, and he
with all other Freemen will work out quick, flexible, constantly
changing forms which shall respond sensitively to every need.

  Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary
because of changing social and economic conditions cannot be
brought about.  The first reform needed in our political practice
is to find some method by which the government shall continuously
represent the people.  No state can endure unless the political
bond is being forever forged anew.  The organization of men in
small local groups gives opportunity for this continuous political
activity which ceaselessly creates the state.  Our government forms
cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be sensitive, mobile
channels for the quick and quickening soul of the individual to
flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth the
state.  Thus every man *is* the state at every moment, whether in
daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself,
leading a myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in
its humblest citizen as in its supreme assembly.

  The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative
citizenship, must predominantly and preeminently body itself and be
acknowledged by every human being.  Then will "practical politics"
be for the first time practical.


  A few words of explanation seem necessary.  I have no
bibliography simply because any list of references which I could
give would necessarily be a partial one since much of this book has
come by wireless.  Besides all that is being written definitely of
a new state, the aim to-day is full of the tentative, the partial,
the fragmentary thought, the isolated flash of insight from some
genius, all of which is being turned to the solution of those
problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face us with their
urgent demand.  I am here trying to show the need of a wide and
systematic study of these problems not pretending to be able to
solve them.  Much inter-weaving of thought will be necessary before
the form of the new state appears to us.

  Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led
us to our present ideas.  That does not mean that I do not
recognize the slow building up of these ideas or all our
indebtedness to the thinkers of the past.  I speak of principles as
"new" which we all know were familiar to Aristotle or Kant and are
new to-day only in their application.

  The word new is so much used in the present day--New Freedom, New
Democracy, New Society, etc.--that it is, perhaps well for us to
remind ourselves what we mean by the word.  We are using the word
new partly in reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth
century, in reaction to a world which has culminated in this war,
but more especially in the sense of the live, the real, in contrast
to the inert, the dead.  It is not a time distinction--the "new"
(the vital) claims fellowship with all that is "new" (vital) in the
past.  When we speak of the "New" Freedom we mean all the reality
and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions of freedom
up to the present moment.  The "New" Society is the "Perfect
Society."  The "New" Life is the Vita Nuova, "when spring came to
the heart of Italy."

  It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of
the term "the new psychology," I am not referring to any definitely
formulated body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding
the new psychology as such.  By the "new psychology" I mean
something now in the making: I mean partly that group psychology
which is receiving more attention and gaining more influence every
day, and partly I mean simply that feeling out for a new conception
of *modes of association* which we see in law, economics, ethics,
politics, and indeed in every department of thought.  It is a short
way of saying that we are now looking at things not as entities but
in relation.  When our modern jurists speak of the growing emphasis
upon relation rather than upon contract--they are speaking of the
"new psychology."  There is, however, another and very important aspect of
contemporary psychology closely connected with this one of
relation.  We are to-day seeking to understand the sources of human
motives [1], and then to free their channels so that these 

     1. See William McDougall, Social Psychology

elementary springs of human activity (the fundamental instincts of
man) shall not be dammed but flow forth in normal fashion, for
normal man is constructive.  A few years ago, for instance, we were
satisfied merely to condemn sabotage and repudiation of law; now we
are trying to discover the cause of this deviation from the normal
in order to see if it can be removed.  This necessity for the
understanding of the nature and vital needs of men has not yet
reached full self-consciousness, but appears in diverse forms: as
the investigation of the I.W.W., as a study of "Human Nature in
Politics," an examination of "The Great Society," as child-study,
as Y.M.C.A. efforts to nourish all sides of men at the front, etc.
etc.  To-day the new psychology speaks to many voices.  Soon we may
hope for some unified formulation of all this, varied and scattered
utterance.  Soon we may hope also that the connection will be made
between this aspect of contemporary psychology and the group
psychology upon which this book is mainly founded.

  I wish to add my reasons for giving quotations from many writers
whose names I have not cited.  This has been chiefly because often
the sentence or phrase quoted taken away from all context does not
give a fair idea of the writer's complete thought, and I have used
it not in an attempt to refute these writers, but merely as
illustrating certain tendencies to which we are all more or less
subject at present.  Many of the writers with whom I have disagreed
in some particular have been in the main my teachers and guides.

  A certain amount of repetition has seemed necessary in order to
look at the same idea from a number of angles and to make different
applications of the same principle.

  From a few friends I have received much help.  My thanks are
especially due to my teacher and counsellor of many years, Miss
Anna Boynton Thompson, who went over the first copy of the
manuscript with me and gave to it the most careful consideration
and criticism, offering constantly invaluable suggestion and
advice; to her unflagging and most generous help the final form
owes more than I can quite express.  The inception of the book is
due to my friends and fellow-workers, Mrs. Louis Brandeis, Mrs.
Richard Cabot and Mr. Arthur Woodworth, as also much of its thought
to the stimulus of "group" discussion with them.  Mrs. Charles W.
Mixter, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor H.A. Overstreet,
Professor W. Ernest Hocking and Mr. Roscoe Pound have read the
manuscript in full or in part and have given me many valuable
suggestions.  I owe to my friend, Miss Isobel L. Briggs, daily
help, advice and encouragement in the development of the book, and
the revision of manuscript and proofs
