THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter VIII
Who is the Free Man?

The idea of liberty long current was that the solitary man was the
free man, that the man outside society possessed freedom but that
in society he had to sacrifice as much as his liberty as interfered
with the liberty of others.  Rousseau's effort was to find a form
of society in which all should be as free as "before."  According
to some of our contemporary thinkers liberty is what belongs to the
individual or variation-giving-one.  But this tells only half the
tale.  Freedom is the harmonious, unimpeded working of the law of
one's own nature.  The true nature of every man is found only in
the whole.  A man is ideally free only so far as he is
interpermeated by every other human being; he gains his freedom
through a perfect and complete relationship because thereby he
achieves his whole nature.

  Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a
momentary desire.  On the contrary freedom means exactly the
liberation from the tyranny of such particularist impulses.  When
the whole-will has supreme dominion in the heart of man, then there
is freedom.  The mandate of our real Self is our liberty.  The
essence of freedom is not irrelevant spontaneity but the fullness
of relation.  We do not curtail our liberty by joining with others;
we find it and increase all our capacity for life through the
interweaving of willings.  It is only in a complex state of society
that any large degree of freedom is possible, because nothing else
can supply the many opportunities necessary to work out freedom. 
The social process is a completely Self-sufficing process.  Free-
will is one of its implications.  I am free for two reasons: (1) I
am not dominated by the whole because I *am* the whole; (2) I am
not dominated by "others" because we have the genuine social
process only when I do not control others or they me, but all
intermingle to produce the collective thought and the collective
will.  I am free when I am functioning here in time and space as
the creative will.

  There is no extra-Will: that is the vital lesson for us to learn. 
There is no Will except as we act.  Let us be the Will.  Thereby do
we become the Free-Will.

  Perhaps the most superficial of all views is that free-will
consists in choice when an alternative is presented.  But freedom
by our definition is obedience to the law of one's nature.  My
nature is of the whole: I am free, therefore, only when I choose
that term in the alternative, which the whole commands.  I am not
free when I am making choices, I am not free when my acts are not
"determined," for in a sense they always are determined (freedom
and determinism have not this kind of opposition).  I am free when
I am creating.  I am determined *through* my will, not in spite of
it.

  Freedom then is the identifying of the individual will with the
whole will--the supreme activity of life.  Free the spirit of man
and then we can trust the spirit of man, and is not the very
essence of this freeing of the spirit of man the process of taking
him from the self-I to the group-I?  That we are free only through
the social order, only as fast as we identify ourselves with the
whole, implies practically that to gain our freedom we must take
part in all the life around us: join groups, enter into many social
relations, and begin to win freedom for ourselves.  When we are the
group in feeling, thought and will, we are free: it does what it
wishes through us--that is our liberty.  In a democracy the
training of every child from the cradle--in nursery, school, at
play--must be a training in group consciousness.

  Then we shall have the spontaneous activity of freedom.  Let us
not be martyrs.  Let us not give up bread and coal that the ends of
the Great War may be won, with the feeling of a restricted life,
but with the feeling that we have gained thereby a fuller life. 
Let us joyously do the work of the world because we are the world. 
Such is the *elan de vie*, the joy of high activity, which leaps
forward with force, in freedom.

  We have to begin to-day to live the life which will give us
freedom.  Savants and plain men have affirmed the freedom of the
will, but at the same time most of us, even while loudly claiming
our freedom, have felt bound.  While determinism has many
theoretical adherents, it has many more practical ones; we have
considered ourselves bound in thousands of ways--by tradition, by
religion, by natural law, by inertia and ignorance, etc. etc.  We
have said God is free but man is not free.  That we are not free
has been the most deadening fallacy to which man has ever
submitted.  No outside power indeed can make us free.  No document
of our forefathers can "declare" us "independent."  No one can ever
give us freedom, but we can win it for ourselves.

  It is often thought that when some restraint is taken away from
us we are freer than before, but this is childish.  Some women-
suffragists talk of women as "enslaved" and advocate their
emancipation by the method of giving them the vote.  But the vote
will not make women free.  Freedom is always a thing to be
attained.  And we must remember too that freedom is not a static
condition.  As it is not something possessed "originally," and as
it is not something which can be given to us, so also it is not
something won once for all.  It is in our power to win our freedom,
but it must be won anew at every moment, literally every moment. 
People think of themselves as not free because they think of
themselves as obeying some external law, but the truth is *we* are
the law-makers.  My freedom is my share in creating, my part in the
creative responsibility.  The heart of our freedom is the impelling
power of the will of the whole.

  Who then are free?  Those who *win* their freedom through
fellowship.


