THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XVII
Democracy Not the Majority: Our Political Fallacy

If many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights,
others have defined it as "the ascendancy of numbers," as "majority
rule."  Both these definitions are particularistic.  Democracy
means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not
necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or
three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is
democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated
will.  We have seen that the adding of similarities does not
produce the social consciousness; in the same way the adding of
similar votes does not give us political will.  We have seen that
society is not an aggregation of units, of men considered one by
one; therefore we understand that the will of the state is not
discovered by counting [1].

     1.  This view of democracy was well satirized by some one, I
     think Lord Morley, who said, "I do not care who does the
     voting as long as I do the counting."

This means a new conception of politics: it means that the
organization of men in small groups must be the next form which
democracy takes.  Here the need and will of every man and woman can
appear and mingle with the needs and wills of all to produce an
all-will.  Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.

  A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people
realize their power they can have what they want, since their
numbers being so great, they can outvote other classes.  But the
reason the working-people have not already learned something so
very obvious is because it is not true -- _we are never to be ruled
by numbers alone_.

  Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very
nature it abolishes itself.  Majority rule must inevitably become
minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it
organizes itself into committees -- Committee of Fifty, Fifteen,
Three -- which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of
one, and behold -- the full-fledged era of bosses is at hand, with
the "consent of the governed" simply because the governed are
physically helpless to govern themselves.  Many men want majority
rule so that they can be this committee of one; some of our most
worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give us
their best -- tyranny.

  Many working-men are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet
we know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many
becomes the rule of the few.  If "industrial democracy" is to mean
majority rule, let us be warned by our experience of it in politics
-- it will rend whoever dallies with it.
  Yet it will be objected, "But what other means under the sun is
there of finding the common will except by counting votes?"  We see
already here and there signs of a new method.  In many committees,
boards, and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action
until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it
long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is
also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our
work will be vastly more effective in consequence.  How different
from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough
on our side to carry the meeting with us.  Some one has said, "We
count heads to save breaking them."  We are beginning to see now
that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise
ways of getting at the genuine collective thought.  We have to
assume that we have this while we try to approximate it.  We are
not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the
majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.

  This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. 
Is this the way diplomats meet?  Is this the way competing
industrial interests adjust differences?  Not yet, but it must be. 
And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of
the idea that we ever meet to get votes.  The corruption in city
councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of
the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting. 
The present barter in votes would not take place if the
unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.

  Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute
force of numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of
unifying; it has real power directly in proportion to the amount of
unifying.  The composition of a political majority depends at
present partly on inheritance and environment (which includes
sentiment and prejudice), partly on the mass-induced idea (the
spread of thought and feeling throughout a community by
suggestion), and partly on some degree of integration of the
different ideas and the different forces of that particular
society.  Its power is in proportion to the amount of this
integration.  When we use the expression "artificial majority" we
mean chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all
seen how quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the
artificial stimulus of especially magnetic leadership or of an
especially catchy and jingoistic idea is withdrawn.  Moreover a
majority meaning a preponderance of votes can easily be controlled
by a party or an "interest"; majorities which represent unities are
not so easily managed.  Group organization is, above everything
else perhaps, to prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.

  But "helpless majority" may sound amusing to those who are
telling us of the tyranny of majorities.  From one point of view
indeed majority rule tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not
want a majority in either case, either as a tyrant or as an inert
mass.  But those who talk of the tyranny of majorities are usually
those who are advocating the "rights of minorities."  If it is
necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is equally necessary
to show that the present worship of minorities in certain quarters
is also unsound.  There is no inherent virtue in a minority.  If as
a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a certain amount
of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those in a
minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more
apt to be right than eleven.  It may be one of those false
assumptions more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age
we shall not deny its value.  Still sour grapes hang sometimes just
as high and no higher than the majority, and it seems possible to
find a working assumption that will work even better than this.  In
fact the assumption that the minority is always right is just as
much an error as the assumption that the majority is always right. 
The right is not with the majority or minority because of
preponderance of numbers or because of lack of preponderance of
numbers.

  But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of
opinion at all, but of fact: all the great reform of the past, they
say, whose victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated
by an intelligent and devoted few.  You can indeed point to many
causes led by a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a
numerical and inert majority, but this minority was usually a
majority of those who thought on the subject at all.

  But all talk of majority and minority is futile.  It is evident
that we must not consider majority versus minority, but only the
methods by which unity is attained.  Our fetich of majorities has
held us back, but most of the plans for stopping the control of
majorities look to all kinds of bolstering up of minorities.  This
keeps majorities and minorities apart, whereas they have both one
and only use for us -- their contribution to the all-will.  Because
such integration must always be the ideal in a democracy, we cannot
be much interested in those methods for giving the minority more
power on election day.  The integration must begin further back in
our life than this.

  I know a woman of small school education, but large native
intelligence, who spends her time between her family and the daily
laundry work she does to support that family, who, when she goes to
her Mothers' Club at the "School Centre" penetrates all the
superficialities she may find there, and makes every other woman go
home with higher standards for her home, her children and herself. 
The education of children, the opportunities of employment for
girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and all the many questions
which touch one's everyday life are considered in a homely way on
those Thursday afternoons.  Sometime these women will vote on these
questions, but a true intermingling of majority and minority will
have taken place before election day.

  Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional
representation [1], is always an interesting experiment, just
because it is a method of representation and not a mode of
association the party can circumvent it.

     1.  Proportional representation is interesting to the view put
     forward in this book because it is a method to bring out all
     the differences.

We are told that minority representation tried in the lower house
of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to their
own ends by the politicians.  And also that in Belgium, where
proportional representation has been introduced, this system has
become a tool in the hands of the dominant party.  No electoral or
merely representative method can save us.

  Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main
concern of politics is _modes of association_.  We do not want the
rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political
procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely
interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole.  We
shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will
through group organization -- when young men are no longer lectured
to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of
democracy.
