THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XVIII
Democracy Not The Crowd: Our Popular Delusion

When we define democracy as the "rule of the whole," this is
usually understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully
understand the meaning of "all," we run the danger of falling a
victim to the crowd fallacy.  The reaction to our long years of
particularism, of "individual rights" and "liberty," which led to
special privilege and all the evils in its train has brought many
to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman sang of men "en masse."
Many of our recent essayists and poets and novelists idealize the
crowd.  Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful volume, "Alpha and
Omega," says, "Human life is lived to the full only in and through
the herd."  There is an interesting group of young poets in France
[1]

     1.  Arcos, Romains and Vildrac, are the chief of these.
     Romains, who has written "La Vie Unanime," is the most
     interesting for our present purpose, for his togetherness is
     so plainly that of the herd:
     ... "quelle joie
          De fondre dans ton corps [la ville] immense
          o l'on a chaud!"
     Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most
     civilized (perhaps) portion of our most civilized (perhaps)
     nation.  Again
          "Nous sommes indistincts: chacun denous est mort;
          Et la vie unanime est notre sepulture."

who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in the union
of all, that an "Altogetherness" is the supreme fact of life.  Mr.
Ernest Poole in "The Harbor" glorifies the crowd, and the New York
"Tribune" said of his book, "'The Harbor' is the first really
notable novel produced by the New Democracy," thus identifying the
new democracy with the crowd.  Another writer, looking at our
present social and political organization and finding it based
largely on class and therefore unsound, also leaps to the
conclusion that our salvation rests not on this individual or that,
this class or that, this body of people or that, but on all
together, on "this mass-life, seething, tumultuous, without compass
or guide or will or plan."

  This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or
the many to the all, in preaching that the race contains within
itself the  power of its own advancement; but this power which the
race contains within itself is not got through its being a crowd,
"without guide or will or plan," but just because it contains the
potentialities of guide, will, plan, all within itself, through its
capability of being a true society, that is, through its capability
of adopting group methods.  It is in the group that we get that
complex interpenetration which means both modification and
adjustment, and at the same time cooperation and fulfillment.  The
group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social process.
Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and women
surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not
dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which
act and react on each other.  This is the dialectic of life.  But
this upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent
power of the mass but of the group.  It is useless to preach
"togetherness" until we have devised ways of making our
togetherness fruitful, until we have thought out the methods of a
genuine integrated togetherness.  Anything else is indeed
"blubbering sentimentality," as Bismarck defined democracy.

  But there are two sets of people who are victims of the crowd
fallacy: those who apotheosize the crowd and those who denounce the
crowd; both ignore the group.  The latter fear the crowd because
they see in the crowd the annihilation of the individual.  They are
opposed to what they call collective action because they say that
this is herd action and does not allow for individual initiative.
We are told, "Man loses his identity in a crowd," "The crowd
obliterates the individual mind."  Quite true, but these writers do
not see that the crowd is not the only form of association, that
man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd, and that a group
fulfills, not wipes out his individuality.  The collective action
of the group not only allows but consists of individual initiative,
of an individual initiative that has learned how to be part of a
collective initiative.

  Collective thought, moreover, is often called collective
mediocrity.  But the collective thought evolved by the group is not
collective mediocrity.  On the contrary there is always a tendency
for the group idea to express the largest degree of psychic force
there is in a group, ideally it would always do so.  Herein lies
the difference between the group idea and the mass idea.  When we
hear it stated as a commonplace of human affairs that combined
action is less intelligent than individual action, we must point
out that it all depends upon whether it is a crowd combination or
a group combination.  The insidious error that democracy means the
"average" is at the root of much of our current thought.

  The confusion of democratic rule and mass rule, the
identification of the people with the crowd, has led many people to
denounce democracy.  One writer, thinking the collective man and
the crowd man the same, condemns democracy because of his
condemnation of the crowd man.  Another speaks of "the crowd-mind
or the state," and therefore abandons the state.  All these writers
think that the more democracy, the more complete the control of the
crowd.  Our faith in democracy means a profound belief that this
need not be true.  Moreover this idea that the crowd man must
necessarily be the unit of democracy has led many to oppose
universal suffrage because they have seen it as a particularist
suffrage, giving equal value, they say, to the enlightened and the
unenlightened.  True democracy frees us from such particularist
point of view.  It is the group man, not the crowd man, who must be
the unit of democracy.

  The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be
opposed to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting
to notice that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest
on the same fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the
crowd doctrine is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated
individuals we have so ardently believed in.  This is the danger of
the crowd.  The crowd idea of sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic.
This is sometimes called an era of crowds, sometimes an era of
individuals: such apparent opposition of judgment need not confuse
us, the crowd spirit and the particularist spirit are the same;
that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and disrupt society
until we replace it by the group spirit.

  The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been
strengthened by the upholders of the imitation theory of society.
Many of our political as well as our sociological writers have seen
life as some exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd
following without reasoning, without effort of mind or will.  Even
Bagehot, who did so much to set us in the right way of thinking,
overemphasizes the part of imitation.  What he says of the
"imitative part of our natures" is indeed true, but by not
mentioning the creative part of our natures more explicitly, he
keeps himself in the crowd school.

  It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a
mass led by those who suggest.  The suggestion and imitation of
sociology are the leading and following of politics--the leadership
of the boss and the following of the mass.  The successful
politician is one who understands crowds and how to dominate them.
He speaks to the emotions, he relies on repetition, he invents
catch phrases.  The crowd follows.  As long as the cornerstone of
our political philosophy is the theory that the individual
originates and society accepts, of course any many who can get the
people to "accept" will do so.  That is the fallacy at the
foundation of our political structure.  When we have genuine
democracy, we shall not have the defective political machinery of
the present, but some method by which people will be able not to
accept or reject but to create group or whole ideas, to produce a
genuine collective will.  Because we have invented some
governmental machinery by which clever politicians can rule with
the entirely artificial "assent" of their constituencies, does not
mean that we know anything about democracy.

  It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political
development.  A recent writer on political science says that a
study of the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis
of politics, and that "the will of nations or states is the sum of
individual wills fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology."
In so far as this is true it is to be steadily opposed.  Many
writers imply that we must either believe in homogeneity,
similarity, uniformity (the herd, the crowd), or lose the advantage
of fellowship in order to discover and assert our own particularist
ideals.  But our alternatives are not the individual and the crowd:
the choice is not between particularism with all its separatist
tendencies and the crowd with its levelling, its mediocrity, the
sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the neglected group.
Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people are governed
consciously and deliberately by group laws.  We read, "No idea can
conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner."  I should
say, "No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by
those people who inscribe it on their banner."  The triumph of
ideas will never come by crowds.  Union, not hypnotism, is the law
of development.  There can be no real spiritual unity in the mass
life, only in the group life.

  Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of
suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the
underlying problem of to-day.

  The promise for the future is that there now is in associations
of men an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than
the laws of the crowd to govern.  Our most essential duty to the
future is to see that that tendency prevail.  As we increase the
conscious functioning of the group we shall inevitably have less
and less of the unconscious response, chauvinists will lose their
job, and party bosses will have to change their tactics.  People as
a matter of fact are not as suggestible as formerly.  Men are
reading more widely and they are following less blindly what they
read.

  This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread
of railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is
often spoken of as making men more alike in their views.  Tarde
spoke of the "public," which he defined as the people sitting at
home reading newspapers as a mental collectivity because of this
supposed tendency.  Christensen confirms this when he says that the
people reading the newspapers are "a scattered crowd."  The usually
accepted opinion is that the daily press is making us more and more
into crowds, but that is not my experience.  A man with his daily
paper may be obeying the group law or the crowd law as he unites
his own thoughts with the thoughts of others or as he is merely
amenable to suggestion from others, and it seems to me we see a
good deal of the former process.  The newspaper brings home to us
vividly what others are feeling and thinking.  It offers many
suggestions; we see less and less tendency to "swallow these
whole," the colloquial counterpart of the technical "imitation."
These suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of
thinking and the results are fairly rational.  The reader more and
more I believe is selecting, is unifying difference.  The result of
all this is that men's minds are becoming more plastic, that they
are deciding less by prejudice and hypnosis and more by judgment.
And it must be remembered that a man is not necessarily a more
developed person because he rejects his newspaper's theories that
if he accepts them; the developed man is the group man and the
group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins his own thoughts
with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group man is
never sterile, he always brings forth [1].

     1.  Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and
     magazines are that large questions are driving out trivial
     interests (I find this very marked in the country), and the
     enormous amount of publicity now given everything finds a
     channel to the public through the press.  The reports of
     commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the
     surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of
     foundations, like the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly
     increasing bureaus of research like the New York Municipal
     Bureau, all find their way to us through the columns of our
     daily or weekly or monthly.  Therefore we have more material
     on which to found individual thinking.

  Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd.  The
helter-skelter strivings of an endless number of social atoms can
never give us a fair and ordered world.  It may be true that we
have lived under the domination either of individuals or of crowds
up to the present time, but now is the moment when this must be
deliberately challenged.  The party boss must go, the wise men
chosen by the reform associations must go, the crowd must be
abandoned.  The idea of the All has gripped us--but the idea has
not been made workable, we have yet to find the way.  We have said,
"The people must rule."  We now ask, "How are they to rule?"  It is
the technique of democracy which we are seeking.  We shall find it
in group organization.
  


