THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter V
The Group Process: The Collective Will

>From the group process arise social understanding and true
sympathy.  At the same moment appears the social will which is the
creative will.  Many writers are laying stress on the
_possibilities_ of the collective will; what I wish to emphasize is
the necessity of _creating_ the collective will.  Many people talk
as if the collective will were lying round loose to be caught up
whenever we like, but the fact is we must go to our group and see
that it is brought into existence.

  Moreover, we go to our group to learn the process.  We sometimes
hear the advantages of collective planning spoken of as if an act
of Congress or Parliament could substitute collective for
individual planning!  But it is only by doing the deed that we
shall learn this doctrine.  We learn how to create the common will
in our groups, and we learn here not only the process but its
value.  When I can see that agreement with my neighbor for larger
ends than either of us is pursuing alone is of the same essence as
capital and labor learning to think together, as Germany and the
Allies evolving a common will, then I am ready to become a part of
the world process.  To learn how to evolve the social will day by
day with my neighbors and fellow-workers is what the world is
demanding of me to-day.  This is getting into the inner workshop of
democracy.

  Until we learn this lesson war cannot stop, no constructive work
can be done.  The very essence and substance of democracy is the
creating of the collective will.  Without this activity the forms
of democracy are useless, and the aims of democracy are always
unfulfilled.  Without this activity both political and industrial
democracy must be a chaotic, stagnating, self-stultifying
assemblage.  Many of the solutions offered to-day for our social
problems are vitiated by their mechanical nature, by assuming that
if society were given a new form, the socialistic for instance,
what we desire would follow.  But this assumption is not true.  The
deeper truth, perhaps the deepest, is that _the will to will the
common will_ is the core, the germinating centre of that larger,
still larger, ever larger life which we are coming to call the true
democracy. 
