THE NEW STATE
by Mary Parker Follett

The Neighborhood Group: 
Chapter XXII
Neighborhood Needs The Basis of Politics

POLITICS are changing in character: shall the change be without
plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? 

  We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of
politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those
set apart for the purpose.  The methods by which the party platform
is constructed are not those which put into it the real issues
before the public; the tendency is to put in what will elect
candidates or to cover up the real issues by generalities. But just
so long as we separate politics and our daily life, just so long
shall we have all our present evils. Politics can no longer be an
extra-activity of the American people, they must be a means of
satisfying our actual wants. 

  We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the
work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we
live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for
bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily
life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of
the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall
between my private life and my public life. A man I know tells me
that he "wouldn't touch politics with a ten-foot pole," but how can
he help touching politics? He may not like the party game, but
politics shape the life he leads from hour to hour. When this is
once understood no question in history will seem more astonishing
than the one so often reiterated in these days, "Should woman be
given a place in politics?"  Woman _is_ in politics; no power under
the sun can put her out. 

  Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the
needs of the people?  Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of
certain classes, of certain "interests"; these can never be woven
into the needs of the people. Further back we must go, down into
the actual life from which all these needs spring, down into the
daily, hourly living with all its innumerable cross currents, with
all its longings and heart-burnings, with its envies and jealousies
perhaps, with its unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations,
and its power, manifest or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment.
The needs of the people are not now articulate: they loom out of
the darkness, vague, big, portentously big, but dumb because of the
separation of men. To open up this hinterland of our life the cross
currents now burrowing under ground must come to the surface and be
openly acknowledged.

  We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one
of whose life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent
to a landlord whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet
our home is our most precious possession; we have a doctor who is
with us in the crucial moments of birth and death, but whom we
ordinarily do not meet; we buy our food, our clothes, our fuel, of
automatons for the selling of food, clothes and fuel. We know all
these people in their occupational capacity, not as men like
ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like ours, hopes like
ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our lives, to
whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our
neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think
our-selves a little better than every other two or three, and this
becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of
antagonism. How can we do away with this artificial separation
which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each
has something to give. Every man comes to us with a golden gift in
his heart. Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by
myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my
own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own
life increases in multiple measure. The aim of each of us should be
to live in the lives of all. Those fringes which connect my life
with the life of every other human being in the world are the
inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a worse
lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these
wider contacts.  Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with
every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in
isolation. 

  But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. 
How we waste immeasureable force in much of our social life in a
mere tossing of the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of
a common life which we do not penetrate for the secret at its
heart. The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality. We may
flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us,
however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for
substance. We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a
worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the
calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths
forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and
let the winds of Heaven blow upon us - we throw ourselves open to
every breath and current which spring from this meeting of life's
vital forces. 

  Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in
a worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that
people should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to
express their daily life, to bring to the surface the needs,
desires and aspirations of that life, that these needs should
become the substance of politics, and that these neighborhood
groups should become the recognized political unit.

  Let us consider some of the advantages of the neighborhood group.
First, it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means
fuller acquaintance and a more real understanding.  The task of
creation from electrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the
only one who refuses this task? I do not know my next-door
neighbor! One of the most unfortunate circumstances of our large
towns is that we expect concerted action from people who are
strangers to one another. So mere acquaintance is the first
essential. This will lead inevitably to friendly feeling.
The story is told of some American official who begged not to be
introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate any
one with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more
kindly to the people we actually see. It is what has been called
"the pungent sense of effective reality." Neighborhood organization
will substitute confidence for suspicion - a great gain. 

  Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for
constant and regular intercourse.  We are indeed far more
interested in humanity than ever before. Look at what we are
studying: social psychology, social economics, social medicine and
hygiene, social ethics etc. But people must socialize their lives
by practice, not by study. Until we begin to acquire the habit of
a social life no theory of a social life will do us any good. It is
a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity, brotherhood
etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect.  I
learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship,
but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience
the obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my
relation to society by coming into contact with a wide range of
experiences, of people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy
and whole understanding of life. 

  When we have come together and got acquainted with one another,
then we shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the
game - the game of association which is the game of life.  Certain
organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of
fighting war with love. If only we knew how to love! I am ready to
say to you this minute, "I love my neighbors." But all that I mean
by it is that I have a vague feeling of kindliness towards them. 
I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I shall offend against
the law of love within an hour. The love of our fellow-men to be
effective must be the love evolved from some actual group relation.
We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling with a
thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist
consciousness, think that all we have to do is to decide on
fellowship as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest
thing on earth to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it
can come into being as a genuine part of our life only through a
deep understanding of what it really means. 

  Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The
whole social process is that of association, individual with
individual, group with group. Progress from one point of view is a
continuously widening of the area of association.  Our modern
civilization has simply overlaid and falsified this primary
instinct of life. But this is rapidly changing.  The most striking
characteristic of the present day is that people are doing more
things together: they are coming together as never before in
labor organizations, in cooperative societies, in consumers'
leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal
movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men's City
Club, the Women's City Club; professional societies are multiplying
over night. The explanation sometimes given for this present
tendency towards union is that we are beginning to see the material
advantages of cooperation, but the root of the thing is far from
utilitarian advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all,
is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost,
exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union. 

  I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us
with a fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common
life, is going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. 
Some psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental
instincts, and that if we do not have war we shall have all the
dangers of thwarted instinct. But the lure of war is neither the
instinct of hate nor the love of fighting; it is the joining of one
with another in a common purpose. "And the heart of a people beat
with one desire." Many men have gone joyfully to war because it
gave them fellowship. I said to some one that I thought the reason
war was still popular in spite of all its horrors was because of
our lack of imagination, we simply could not realize war. "No,"
said the man I spoke to, "I know war, I know its horrors, and the
reason that in spite of it all men like war is because there we are
doing something all together.  That is its exhilaration and why we
can't give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life and
it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly
separateness of our ordinary life." 

  When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek
for a substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way
of making ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-
creatures. If the essential characteristic of war is doing things
together, let us begin to do things together in peace. Yet not an
artificial doing things together, we could so easily fall into
that, but an entire reorganization of life so that the doing things
together shall be the natural way the way we shall all want to do
things.

  But mere association is not enough. We need more than the
"collective life," the mere "getting-together," so much talked of
in these days; our getting together must be made effective, must
exercise our minds and wills as well as our emotions, must serve
the great ends of a great life. Neighborhood organization gives all
an opportunity to learn the technique of association. 

  A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a
member of a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life
than as a member of any other kind of a group we can find, no
matter how big our city or how complex or comprehensive its
interests. This statement sounds paradoxical - it will seem to many
like saying that the smaller is greater than the larger. Let us
examine this statement therefore and see if perhaps in this case
the smaller is not greater than the larger.  Why is the
neighborhood group better for us than the selected group?  Why are
provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if
provincial people have taken advantage of _their_ opportunities?
Because cosmopolitan people are all alike - that has been the aim
of their existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows
the "best" society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and
that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the
"best" society of London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows
life across but not down - it is a horizontal civilization instead
of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of
everything horizontal. This man has always been among the same kind
of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the
friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting
of people of different opportunities and different tastes and
different standards.  But this is just what we may have in a
neighborhood group - different education, different interests,
different standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the
factory, the organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister,
the watchmaker, the school-teacher, all living within a few blocks
of one another.  On the other hand consider how different it is
when we _choose_ the constituents of our group - then we choose
those who are the same as ourselves in some particular. We have the
authors' club, the social workers' club, the artists' club, the
actors' society, the business men's club, the business women's
club, the teachers' club etc. [1]. The satisfaction and contentment
that comes with sameness indicates a meager personality. I go to
the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood
club to meet men.  It is just because my next door neighbor has
never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may
come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory
girl's point of view.

     1. This movement to form societies based on our occupations is
     of course, although usually unconscious, part of the whole   
     syndicalist movement, and as such has real advantages which
     will be taken up later. 

  In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing
effect of many different experiences and ideals. And in this
infinite variety which touches you on every side, you have a life
which enriches and enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil
of human development - just because you have here a natural and not
an artificial group, the members find all that is necessary in
order to grow into that whole which is true community living.

  Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities
that there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for,
but often the larger our world the narrower we become, for we
cannot face the vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people
as nearly like ourselves as we can find. 

  In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some
selective process, they are not so good for our purpose.  The
Italian colony or the Syrian colony does not give us the best
material for group organization, neither does any occupational
segregation like the stockyard district of Chicago.  (This is an
argument against the industrial colonies which are spreading.) In
a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different
nationalities or different classes come together easily and
naturally on the ground of many common interests: the school,
recreational opportunities, the placing of their children in
industry, hygiene, housing etc. Race and class prejudices are
broken down by working together for intimate objects. 

  Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends,
those who disagree with me at once become violent on the subject.
I have never understood why it inflames them more easily than other
topics.  They immediately take it for granted that I am proposing
to shut them up tight in their neighborhoods and seal them
hermetically; they assume that I mean to substitute the
neighborhood for every other contact.  They tell me of the
pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to stories of
neighbor hood iniquities ranging from small gossip to determined
boycotting.  Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the neighborhood
group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am not
proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even
so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood. 

  We may like some selected group better than the company of our
neighbors, but such a group is no "broader" necessarily, because it
draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow
interests as well as narrow spaces.  Neighbors may, it is true,
discuss the comings and goings of the family down the street, but
I have heard people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial
subjects.  But supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less
petty in the sense of less personal in their conversation, they are
often also less real, and this is an important point. If I dress in
my best clothes and go to another part of the city and take all my
best class of conversation with me, I don't know that it does me
any good if I am the same person who in my every-day clothes goes
in next door and talks slander. What I mean is that the only place
in the world where we can change ourselves is on that level where
we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who think
neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own argument)
it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods who
are impersonal and noble in another part of the city.

  Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would
be well for us to analyze the cause - there may be a worthy reason,
there may not. Is it perhaps that one does not get as much
consideration there as one thinks one's due? Have we perhaps, led
by our vanity, been drawn to those groups where we get the most
consideration? My neighbors may not think much of me because I
paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is dirty, but my artist
friends who like my color do not know or care about my back
yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific
researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a
neighbor in trouble. 
  You may reply, "But this is not my case. I am one of the most
esteemed people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the
City Club, but I prefer the latter just because of that: there is
room for me to aspire there, but where I am leading what is there
for me to grow toward, how can I expand in such an atmosphere?" But
I should say that this also might be a case of vanity; possibly
these people prefer the City Club because they do not like to think
they have found their place in life in what they consider an
inferior group; it flatters them more to think that they belong to
a superior group even if they occupy the lowest place there.  But
the final word to be said is I think that this kind of seeking
implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the
attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place
in a neighborhood group. 

  Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy
most, as we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and
down our spine.  We may have a selected group feeling "good," but
that is not going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we
nestle down into and in which we find all the comfort of a down
pillow, does not provide the differences in which alone we can
grow.  We must know the finer enjoyment of recognized diversity.

  It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the
neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of
association - trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies,
local improvement leagues, cooperative societies, men's clubs,
women's clubs etc. - yet the hope is that it shall not be one more
association merely, but that it shall be the means of coordinating
and translating into community values other local groups. The
neighborhood association might become a very mechanical affair if
we were all to go there every evening and go nowhere else.  It must
not with its professed attempt to give a richer life cut off the
variety and spontaneity we now have. 

  But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so
much unutilized spontaneity.  The small merchant of a neighborhood
meets with the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes
to church on Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge
or club, but where and when does he consider any possible
integration of these into channels for community life?  At his
political rally, to be sure, he meets his neighbors irrespective of
business or church or social lines, but there he comes under party
domination. A free, full community life lived within the sustaining
and nourishing power of the community bond, lived for community
ends, is almost unknown now.  This will not come by substituting
the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using it as a
clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation and
unofficial integration. 

  There should be as much spontaneous association as the vitality
of the neighborhood makes possible, but other groups may perhaps
find their significance and coordination through the neighborhood
association.  If a men's or women's club is of no use to the
community it should not exist; if it is of use, it must find out of
what use, how related to all other organizations, how through and
with them related to the whole community. The lawyers' club, the
teachers' club, the trade association or the union - these can have
little influence on their community until they discover their
relation to the community through and in one another. I have seen
many examples of this.  If the neighborhood group is to be the
political unit, it must learn how to gather up into significant
community expression these more partial expressions of individual
wants. 

  It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is
lessening now-a-days with the ease of communication, but this is
true only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be
paying the ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their
homes, nor the more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-
five cents it costs them to go to the city and back. The
fluctuating population of neighborhoods may be an argument against
getting all we should like out of the neighborhood bond, but at the
same time it makes it all the more necessary that some organization
should be ready at hand to assimilate the new-comers and give them
an opportunity of sharing in civic life as an integral, responsible
part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has common traditions
and memories which persist and influence even although the
personnel changes.

  To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or
whether we want to find the unities which will make for peace and
order, for justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn
back to the neighborhood group and there begin the a b c of a
constructive brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much
congeniality makes for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not
the ignoring, of our differences leads us to the truth. 
Neighborhood organization gives us the best opportunity we have yet
discovered of finding the unity underneath all our differences,
the real bond between them - of living the consciously creative
life. 

  We can never reform American politics from above, by reform
associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political
forms will have no vitality unless our political life is so
organized that it shall be based primarily and fundamentally on
spontaneous association. "Government is a social contact," was
found in the examination papers of a student in a near-by college.
He was nearer the truth than he knew. Political progress must be by
local communities.  Our municipal life will be just as strong as
the strength of its parts. We shall never know how to be one of a
nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what better
training for world organization can each man receive than for
neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a
true community, for no League of Nations will be successful which
regards France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units
of a world-union. 

  Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished
immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization;
only those will be interested who think that it is far more
important for us to find the right method of attacking all our
problems than to solve any one. We who believe in neighborhood
organization believe that the neighborhood group is a more
significant unit to identify ourselves with than any we have
hitherto known in cities. People have been getting together in
churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in
industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to
these partial groups communities are to get together as
communities. 

  The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal
institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative
forces there are within a community and taking these and building
the future with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a
protest against both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized
humanity on the other. It consists of the process of building
always with the best we have, and its chief problem is to discover
the methods by which the best we have can be brought to the
surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a method which will
revolutionize politics. 
