THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter X
Society

We have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at
the same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the
individual is not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal
and centrifugal), and consequently society is not a collection of
units but a complex of radiating and converging, crossing and
recrossing energies.  In other words we are learning to think of
society as a psychic process.

  This conception must replace the old and wholly erroneous idea of
society as a collection of units, and the later and only less
misleading theory of society as an organism [1].
     1.  I speak off it as later because the biological analogy was
     different than the organism of mediaeval doctrine.

  The old individualism with all the political fallacies it
produced--social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, majority rule of the nineteenth, etc.--was based on the
idea of developed individuals first existing and then coming
together to form society.  But the basis of society is not numbers:
it is psychic power.

  The organic theory of society has so much to recommend it to
superficial thinking that we must examine it carefully to find its
fatal defects.  But let us first recognize its merits.

  Most obviously, an organic whole has a spatial and temporal
individuality of its own, and it is composed of parts each with its
individuality yet which could not exist apart from the whole.  An
organism means unity, each one has its own place, every one
dependent upon every one else.

  Next, this unity, this interrelating of parts is the essential
characteristic.  It is always in unstable equilibrium, always
shifting, varying, and thereby changing the individual at every
moment.  But it is always produced and maintained by the individual
himself.  No external force brings it forth.  The central life, the
total life, of this self-developing, self-perpetuating being is
involved in the process.  Hence biologists do not expect to
understand the body by a study of the separate cells as isolated
units: it is the organic connection which unites the separate
processes which they recognize as the fundamental fact.

  The interrelating holds good a society when we view it
externally.  Society too can be understood only by the study of its
flux of relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to
make the unifying.  Reciprocal ordering--subordinating,
superordinating, coordinating--purposeful self-unifying, best
describe the social process.  Led by James, who has shown us the
individual as a self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of
activity going on in society, in the social mind.  And this
interrelating, this unity as unity, is what gives to society its
authority and power.

  Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not
strict psychological accuracy.

  There is this world-wide difference between the self-
interrelatings of society and of the bodily organism: the social
bond is a psychic relation and we cannot express it in biological
terms or in any terms of physical force.  If we could, if
"functional combination" could mean a psychological relation as
well as a physiological, then the terms "functional" and "organic"
might be accepted.  But they denote a different universe from that
of thought.  For psychical self-unitings knit infinitely more
closely and in a wholly different way.  They are freed from the
limitations of time and space.  Minds can blend, yet in the
blending preserve each its own identity.  They transfuse one
another while being each its own essential and unique self.

  It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one
function, the individual may have manifold and multiform functions:
he enters with one function into a certain group of people this
morning and with another function into another group this
afternoon, because his free soul can freely knit itself with a new
group at any moment [citation omitted].

  This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual
saves us from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic
theory.  No man is forced to serve as the running foot or the
lifting hand.  Each at any moment can place himself where his
nature calls.  Certain continental sociologists are wholly
unjustified in building their hierarchy where one man or group of
men is the sensorium, others the brewers and carriers, etc.  It is
exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste from which the
true democracy frees man.  He follows the call of his spirit and
relates himself where he belongs to-day, and through this relating
gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now
belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.

  Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression
of the whole in a way impossible for the parts of a physical
organism [citation omitted].  When each part is itself potentially
the whole, when the whole can live completely in every member, then
we have a true society, and we must view it as a rushing of life--
onrush, outrush, inrush--as a mobile, elastic, incalculable,
Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself.  This ideal society
is the divine goal towards which life is an infinite progress. 
Such conception of society must be visibly before us to the
exclusion of all other theories when we ask ourselves later what
the vote means in the true democracy [1]
     1.  ... I have been told that the distinction between the
     organic and the psychic theory of society is merely academic. 
     But no one should frame amendments on the initiative and
     referendum without this distinction; no one without it can
     judge wisely the various schemes now being proposed for
     occupational representation--something every one of us will
     have soon to do.

