THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter VII
The Individual

As the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose,
are born within the all-sufficing social process, so here to the
individual finds the wellspring of his life.  The visible form in
which this interplay of relations appears is society and the
individual.  A man is a point in the social process rather than a
unit in that process, a point where forming forces meet straightway
to disentangle themselves and stream forth again.  In the language
of the day man is at the same time a social factor and a social
product.

  People often talk of the social mind as if it were an abstract
conception, as if only the individual were real, concrete.  The two
are equally real.  Or rather the only reality is the relating of
one to the other which creates both.  Our sundering is as
artificial and late an act as the sundering of consciousness into
subject and object.  The only reality is the interpenetrating of
the two into experience.  Late intellectualism abstracts for
practical purposes the ego from the world, the individual from
society.

  But there is no way of separating individuals, they coalesce and
coalesce, they are "confluent," to use the expression of James, who
tells us that the chasm between men is an individualistic fiction,
that we are surrounded by fringes, that these overlap and that by
means of these I join with others.  It is as in Norway when the
colors of the sunset and the dawn are mingling, when to-day and to-
morrow are at the point of breaking, or of uniting, and one does
not know to which one belongs, to the yesterday which is fading or
the coming hour -- perhaps this is something like the relation of
one to another: to the onlookers from another planet our colors
might seem to mingle.

  The truth about the individual and society has been already
implied, but it may be justifiable to develop the idea further
because of the paramount importance for all our future development
of a clear understanding of the individual.  Our nineteenth-century
legal theory (individual rights, contract, "a man can do what he
likes with his own," etc.) was based on the conception of the
separate individual [1].

     1. See ch. XV, "From Contract to Community."

We can have no sound legal doctrine, and hence no social or
political progress, until the fallacy of this idea is fully
recognized.  The new state must rest on a true conception of the
individual.  Let us ask ourselves therefore for a further
definition of individuality than that already implied.

  The individual is the unification of a multiplied variety of
reactions.  But the individual does not react to society.  The
interplay constitutes both society on the one hand and
individuality on the other: individuality and society are evolving
together from this constant and complex action and reaction.  Or,
more accurately, the relation of the individual to society is not
action and reaction, but infinite interactions by which both
individual and society are forever a-making: we cannot say if we
would be exact that the individual acts upon and is acted upon,
because that way of expressing it implies that he is a definite,
given, finished entity, and would keep him apart merely as an agent
of the acting and being acted on.  We cannot put the individual on
one side and society on the other, we must understand the complete
interrelation of the two.  Each has no value, no existence without
the other.  The individual is created by the social process and is
daily nourished by that process.  There is no such thing as a self-
made man.  What we think we possess as individuals is what is
stored up from society, is the subsoil of social life.  We soak up
and soak up and soak up our environment all the time.

  Of what then does the individuality of a man consist?  Of his
relation to the whole, not (1) of his apartness nor (2) of his
difference alone.

  Of course the mistake which is often made in thinking of the
individual is that of confusing the physical with the real
individual.  The physical individual is seen to be apart and
therefore apartness is assumed of the psychic or real individual. 
We think of Edward Fitzgerald as a recluse, that he got his
development by being alone, that he was largely outside the
influences of society.  But imagine Fizgerald's life with his
books.  It undoubtedly did not suit his nature to mix freely with
other people in bodily presence, but what a constant and vivid
living with others his life really was.  How closely he was in
vital contact with the thoughts of men.

  We must bear in mind that the social spirit itself may impose
apartness on a man; the method of uniting with others is not always
that of visible, tangible groups.  The pioneer spirit is the
creative spirit even if it seems to take men apart to fulfil its
dictates.  On the other hand the solitary man is not necessarily
the man who lives alone; he may be one who lives constantly with
others in all the complexity of modern city life, but who is so
shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he makes no real union
with others.

  Individuality is the capacity for union.  The measure of
individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation.  I am an
individual not so far as I am apart from but as far as I am a part
of other men.  Evil is non-relation.  The source of our strength is
the central supply.  You man as well break a branch off the tree
and expect it to live.  Non-relation is death.

  I have said that individuality consists neither of the
separateness of one man from the other, nor of the differences of
one man from the other.  The second statement is challenged more
often than the first.  This comes from some confusion of ideas.  My
individuality is difference springing into view as relating itself
with other differences.  The act of relating is the creating act. 
It is vicious intellectualism to say, "Before you relate you must
have things to relate, therefore the differences are more
elemental: there are (1) differences which (2) unite, therefore
uniting is secondary."  The only fact, the only truth is the
creative activity which appears as the great complex we call
humanity.  The activity of creating is all.  It is only by _being_
this activity that we grasp it.  To view it from the outside, to
dissect it into its difference elements, to lay these elements on
the dissecting table as so many different individuals, is to kill
the life and feed the fancy with dead images, empty, sterile
concepts.  But let us set about relating ourselves to our community
in fruitful fashion, and we shall see that our individuality is
bodying itself forth in stronger and stronger fashion, our
difference shaping itself in exact conformity with the need of the
work we do.

  For we must remember when we say that the essence of
individuality is the relating of self to other difference, that
difference is not something static, something given, that it also
is involved in the world of becoming.  This is what experience
teaches me -- that society needs my difference, not as an absolute,
but just so much difference as will relate me.  Differences develop
within the social process and are united through the social
process.  Difference which is not capable of relation is
eccentricity.  Eccentricity, caprice, put me outside, bring
anarchy; true spontaneity, originality, belong not to chaos but to
system.  But spontaneity must be coordinated; irrelevancy produces
nothing, is insanity.  It is not my uniqueness which makes me of
value to the whole but my power of relating.  The nut and the screw
form a perfect combination not because they are different, but
because exactly fit into each other and together can perform a
function which neither could perform alone, or which could perform
half of alone or any part alone.  It is not that the significance
of the nut and screw is increased by their coming together, they
have no significance at all unless they do come together.  The fact
that they have to be different to enter any fruitful relation with
each other is a matter of derivative importance -- derived from the
work they do.

  Another illustration is that of the specialist.  It is not a
knowledge of his specialty which makes an expert of service to
society, but his insight into the relation of his specialty to the
whole.  Thus it implies not less but more relation, because the
entire value of that specialization is that it is part of
something.  Instead of isolating him and giving him a narrower
life, it gives him at once a broader life because it binds him more
irrevocably to the whole.  But the whole works both ways: the
specialist not only contributes to the whole, but all his relations
to the whole are embodied in his own particular work.

  Thus difference is only a part of the life process.  To
exaggerate this part led to the excessive and arrogant
individualism of the nineteenth century.  It behooves us children
of the twentieth century to search diligently after the law of
unity that we may effectively marshal and range under its
dominating sway all the varying diversities of life.

  Our definition of individuality must now be "finding my place in
the whole": "my place" gives you the individual, "the whole" gives
you society, but by connecting them, by saying "my place in the
whole," we get a fruitful synthesis.  I have tried hard to get away
from any mechanical system and yet it is difficult to find words
which do not seem to bind.  I am now afraid of this expression --
my place in the whole.  It has a rigid, unyielding sound, as if I
were a cog in a machine.  But my place is not a definite portion of
space and time.  The people who believe in their "place" in this
sense can always photograph their "places."  But my place is a
matter of individual relation, and of infinitely changing relation
so that it can never be captured.  It is neither the anarchy of
particularism nor the rigidity of the German machine.  To know my
place is not to know my niche, not to know whether I am cog no. 3
or cog no. 4; it is to be alive at every instant at every finger
tip to every contact and to be conscious of those contacts.

  We see now that the individual both seeks the whole and is the
whole.

  First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete,
completeness spells death; social psychology is beginning to show
us that man advances toward completeness not by further
aggregations to himself, but by further and further relatings of
self to other men.  We are always reaching forth for union; most,
perhaps all our desires have this motive.  The spirit craves
totality, this is the motor of social progress; the process of
getting it is not by adding more and more to ourselves, but by
offering more and more of ourselves.  Not appropriation but
contribution is the law of growth.  What our special contribution
is, it is for us to discover.  More and more to release the
potentialities of the individual means the more and more
progressive organization of society if at the same time we are
learning how to coordinate all the variations.  The individual in
wishing for more wholeness does not ask for a chaotic mass, but for
the orderly wholeness which we call unity.  The test of our
vitality is our power of synthesis, of life synthesis.

  But although we say that the individual is never complete, it is
also true that the individual is a being who, because his function
is relating and his relatings are infinite, is in himself the whole
of society.  It is not that the whole is divided up into pieces;
the individual is the whole at one point.  This is the incarnation:
it is the whole flowing into me, transfusing, suffusing me.  The
fulness, bigness of my life is not measured by the amount I do, nor
the number of people I meet, but how far the whole is expressed
through me.  This is the reason why unifying gives me a sense of
life and more unifying gives me a sense of more life -- there is
more of the whole and of me.  My worth to society is not how
valuable a part I am.   I am not unique in the world because I am
different from any one else, but because I am a whole seen from a
special point of view [1].

     1.  This is the principle of the vote in a democracy (see ch.
     XXI).  This must not, however, be confused with the old
     Hegelianism (see ch. XXIX on "Sovereignty").

  That the relation of each to the whole is dynamic and not static
is perhaps the most profound truth which recent years have brought
us [2].

     2.  In art this is what impressionism has meant.  In the era
     before impressionism art was in a static phase, that is,
     artists were working at fixed relations.  The "balance" of
     modern artists does not suggest fixedness, but relation
     subject directly to the laws of the whole.

We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my
share, such are the infinite complexities, the fulness and
fruitfulness of the interrelatings.  I contribute to society my
mite, and then society contains not just that much more
nourishment, but as much more as the loaves and fishes which fed
the multitude outnumbered the original seven and two.  My
contribution meets some particular need not because it can be
measured off against that need, but because my contribution by
means of all the cross currents of life always has so much more
than itself to offer.  When I withhold my contribution, therefore,
I am withholding far more than my personal share.  When I fail some
one or some cause, I have not failed just that person, just that
cause, but the whole world is thereby crippled. This thought gives
an added solemnity to the sense of personal responsibility.

  To sum up: individuality is a matter primarily neither of
apartness nor of difference, but of each finding his own activity
in the whole.  In the many times each day that we think of
ourselves it is not one time in a thousand that we think of our
eccentricities, we are thinking indirectly of those qualities which
join us to others; we think of the work we are doing with others
and what is expected of us, the people we are going to play with
when work is over and the part we are going to take in that play,
the committee-meeting we are going to attend and what we are going
to do there.  Every distinct act of the ego is an affirmation of
that amount of separateness which makes for perfect union.  Every
affirmation of the ego establishes my relation with all the rest of
the universe.  It is one and the same act which establishes my
individuality and gives me my place in society.  Thus an individual
is one who is being created _by_ society, whose daily breath is
drawn _from_ society, whose life is spent _for_ society.  When we
recognize society as self-unfolding, self-unifying activity, we
shall hold ourselves open to its influence, letting the Light
stream into us, not from an outside source, but from the whole of
which we are a living part.  It is eternally due us that that whole
should feed and nourish and sustain us at every moment, but it
cannot do this unless at every moment we are creating it.  This
perfect interplay is Life.  To speak of the "limitations of the
individual" is blasphemy and suicide.  The spirit of the whole is
incarnate in every part.  "For I am persuaded that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate" -- the individual from
society.

