THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XVI
Democracy Not "Liberty" and "Equality":
Our Political Dualism

The purpose of this book is to indicate certain changes which must
be made in our political method in order that the group principle,
the most fruitful principle of association we have yet found, shall
have free play in our political life.  In Part III we shall devote
ourselves specifically to that purpose.  Here let us examine some
of our past notions of democracy and then trace the growth of true
democracy in America.

  Democracy has meant to many "natural" rights, "liberty" and
"equality."  The acceptance of the group principle defines for us
in truer fashion those watchwords of the past.  If my true self is
the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in
a group gives me.  The old idea of natural rights postulated the
particularist individual: we know now that no such person exists. 
The group and the individual come into existence simultaneously:
with this group-man appear group-rights.  Thus man can have no
rights apart from society or independent of society or against
society.  Particularist rights are ruled out as everything
particularist is ruled out.  When we accept fully the principle of
rights involved in the group theory of association, it will change
the decisions of our courts, our state constitutions, and all the
concrete machinery of government.  The truth of the whole matter is
that our only concern with "rights" is not to protect them but to
create them.  Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the
rights which Heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the
rights we shall ever have [1].

     1.  See ch. XXIX for the theory of "objective rights" now held
     by many as the basis of the new state.

  As an understanding of the group process abolishes "individual
rights," so it gives us a true definition of liberty.  We have seen
that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole.  I
have no liberty except as an essential member of a group.  The
particularist idea of liberty was either negative, depending on the
removal of barriers, or it was quantitative, something which I had
left over after the state had restrained me in every way it thought
necessary.  But liberty is not measured by the number of restraints
we do not have, but by the number of spontaneous activities we do
have.  Law and liberty are not like the two halves of this page,
mutually exclusive -- one is involved in the other.  One does not
decrease as the other increases.  Liberty and law go hand in hand
and increase together in the larger synthesis of life we are here
trying to make.

  We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of
which we are an integral part is to be free because we are then
obeying ourself.  Ideally, the state is such a group, actually it
is not, but it depends upon us to make it more and more so.  The
state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates
me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest
detail of life.  Expression, not restraint, is always the motive of
the ideal state.

  There has been long a kind of balance theory prevalent:
everything that seems to have to do with the one is put on one
side, everything that has to do with the many, on the other, and
one side is called individuality and freedom, and the other,
society, constraint, authority.  Then the balancing begins: how
much shall we give up on one side and how much on the other to keep
the beautiful equilibrium of our daily life?  How artificial such
balancing sounds!  We are beginning to know now that our freedom
depends not on the weakness but on the strength of our government,
our government being the expression of a united people.  We are
freer under our present sanitary laws than without them; we are
freer under compulsory education than without it.  A highly
organized state does not mean restriction of the individual but his
greater liberty.  The individual _is_ restricted in an unorganized
state.  A greater degree of social organization means a more
complex, a richer, broader life, means more opportunity for
individual effort and individual choice and individual initiative. 
The test of our liberty is not the number of limitations put upon
the powers of the state.  The state is not an extra-will.  If we
are the state we welcome Our liberty.

  But liberty on the popular tongue has always been coupled with
equality, and this expression too needs revaluation.  The group
process shows us that we are equal from two points of view: first,
I am equal to every one else as one of the necessary members of the
group; secondly, each of these essential parts is the tap from an
infinite supply -- in every man lives an infinite possibility.  But
we must remember that there are no mechanical, no quantitative
equalities.  Democracy in fact insists on what are usually thought
of as inequalities.  Of course I am not "as good as you" -- it
would be a pretty poor world if I were, that is if you were no
better than I am.  Democracy without humility is inconceivable. 
The hope of democracy is in its inequalities.  The only real
equality I can ever have is to fill my place in the whole at the
same time that every other man is filling his place in the whole.

  Much of our present class hatred comes from a distorted view of
equality.  This doctrine means to many that I have as much "right"
to things as any one else, and therefore if I see any one having
more things than I have, it is proper to feel resentment against
that person or class.  Much legislation, therefore, is directed to
lopping off here and there.  But such legislation is a negative and
therefore non-constructive interpretation of equality.  The trouble
with much of our reform is that it is based on the very errors
which have brought about the evils it is fighting.  The trade-
unionists say that the courts give special privileges to employers
and that they do not have equal rights.  But this is just the
complaint of the employers: that the unionists are doing them out
of their time-honored equal rights [1].

     1.  This is a hoary quarrel.  From the beginning of our
     government it was seen that the equal rights doctrine was a
     sword which could cut both ways.  Both Federalists and
     Republicans believed in equal rights: the Federalists,
     therefore, wanted to protect individuals with a strong
     government; the Republicans wanted a weak government so that
     individuals could be let alone in the exercise of their equal
     rights.

  Our distorted ideas of rights and liberty and equality have been
mixed up with our false conception of the state, with the monstrous
fallacy of man vs. the state.  But as we now see that the
individual and society are different aspects of the same process,
so we see that the citizen and the state are one, that their
interests are identical, that their aims are identical, that they
are absolutely bound up together.  Our old political dualism is now
disappearing.  The state does not exist for the individual or the
individual for the state: we do not exalt the state and subordinate
the individual or, on the other hand, apotheosize the individual
and give him the state as his "servant."  _The state is not the
servant of the people_.  The state must _be_ the people before it
can reach a high degree of effective accomplishment.  The state is
one of the collective aspects of the individual; the individual is
from one point of view the distributive aspect of the state.  The
non-existence of self-sufficing individuals gives us the whole of
our theory of democracy.  Those who govern and those who are
governed are merely two aspects of the common will.  When we have
a state truly representative of our collective citizenship, then
the fear of the state will disappear because the antithesis between
the individual and the state will have disappeared.

  To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not
something outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves
and control our social life.  But it must "control" our life by
expressing it.  The state is always the great Yes not the great No.
Liberty and restraint are not opposed, because ideally expression
of the social will in restraint _is_ our freedom.  The state has a
higher function than either restraining individuals or protecting
individuals.  It is to have a great forward policy which shall
follow the collective will of the people, a collective will which
embodied through our state, in our life, shall be the basis of a
progress yet undreamed of.  When we can give up the notion of
individual rights, we shall have taken the longest step forward in
our political development.  When we can give up the idea of
national rights -- but it is too soon to talk of that yet.
