THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

The Neighborhood Group:
Chapter XXIV
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization

The Will of The People

MANY of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the
importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development
of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of
neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving
our city and national problems. What our political life needs
to-day is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in
our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a
machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer
mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they
are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must
be adopted from any we have hitherto known.

  Where do we show political vitality at present? In our
government? In our party organization?  In our local communities? 
We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality
of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream
of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for
personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the
vital current of our political life. There is a wide-spread idea
that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking
the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could
separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the
forces which have allied business and politics; far below the
surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated
couple.

  Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most
important are: to give a knock-out blow to party organization, to
make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and
needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to
create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the
new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party
organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of
American political life.

  An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow
to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of
party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the
people [1], (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3)
by putting a responsible government in the place of the
irresponsible party.

     1 Public opinion in a true democracy is a potential will.
     Therefore for practical purposes they are identical and I use
     them synonymously.

  First, there is at present no real unity of the people. 

  It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was
the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must
be obtained by the manipulation of other men's minds or by the
evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two.  In
the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he
represented the unity of his people -- the tribal or national
consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America
we have now no one man who represents a true collective
consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from
the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo
collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a
common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity
was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather
than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party
organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us
collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place
was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and
ineffective, particularism.  No "independent" method of voting can
ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated
nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the
closely organized machine.

  The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives --
whether they are to adhere to party or to be "independent" -- is
futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man's duty in life; an
effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty
gives us social effectiveness. When we go up to the gates of
another world and say, "I have been honest, I have been pure, I
have been diligent" -- no guardian of those Heavenly gates will
fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with the counter
thrust: "How have you used those qualities for making blossom the
earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues here. 
Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity,
personal honesty, personal growth?"

  To make our "independence" effective, to vie success-fully with
party organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in
those true collective action. No particularistic theory of politics
will ever be strong enough to take the place of party. The
political consciousness of men must be transferred from the party
to the neighborhood group.

  We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion
governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our
legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our
courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our
executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men
like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will
of the people [1]. We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it
is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is,
it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems
which surround us.  Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd
often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated.
Is this public opinion?  Certain interests find a voice; one party
or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public
opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the
driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.

     1. Our federal system of checks and balances thwarted the will
     of the people. The party system thwarted the will of the
     people. Our state governments were never designed to get at
     the will of the people.

  We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common
will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices
for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that
we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to
get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some
wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the
aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is
surely to have something to represent.  It isn't that we need one
kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell
us, it isn't that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell
us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its
own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the
people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom
and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation.

  The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely
that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I
have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn
some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the
American people to starve. The average American citizen says to
himself, "It doesn't matter very much what I think because American
public opinion is sound at the core. It is our Great Illusion.
There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will,
but not every circle is a halo, and you can't put a wreath round
"the popular will" and call it democracy. The popular will to mean
democracy must be a properly evolved popular will -- the true will
of the people.

  Who are the people? Every individual? The majority?  A
theoretical average?  A compromise group? The reason we go astray
about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and
adequate definition of the "people." We are told that we must
elevate the "people." There are no "people." We have to create a
people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius
and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made
by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the
people. The people are the integration of every development, of
every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting
life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be
through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is
vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found
by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the
crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box.

  The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same
sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our
political thought: that the social process is the spread of
similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is
shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But
if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers
by "unconscious imitation," then it is not a genuine public
opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must
be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has
been defined as the opinions of all the men on the "tops of
busses," or the opinion made by "banks, stock-exchanges and all the
wire-pullers of the world," or the opinion "imposed on the public
by a succession of thinkers." All this is, no doubt, true of much
of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion
to-day is largely crowd opinion.  But there is less of this than
formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there
shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an
evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about
by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily;
there is no real progress here.

  Political parties and business interests will continue to
dominate us until we learn new methods of association.  Men follow
party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply
because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have,
they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by
those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that
purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to
claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the
power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and
file of men and women to-day, and which must be brought clearly to
their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful
future for our political life under the present scheme of party
domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial
life under the present class domination, then some plan must be
devised for the will of the people to control the life of the
people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding
that such fighting is a tilting at wind-mills.  The abuses in
themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and
build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We
need to-day: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible
citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship -- a citizenship building
its own world, creating its own political and social structure,
constructing its own life forever.

  Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men
have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite
consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth
a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no
machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood
groups will give us this machinery.

  Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a
genuine public opinion.

  First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local,
intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of
the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the
neighborhood meeting.  These common interests will become the
political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no
point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people.
Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our
affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard
to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs.  When our
daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer
be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that
they have nothing to do with us.

  Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of
government through the increased social legislation of all our
states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was
organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The
introduction of social pro-grams into party platforms means that a
powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a
machine to a living thing. When the political questions were
chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these
questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general
knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little
to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has
taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal
about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen's
compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis,
mothers' pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment
agencies etc.

  Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family,
no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the
long view: votes are not crudely bought -- always; the boy is found
a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out
mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to
mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance,
mothers' pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power.

  We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that
campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday
needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split
would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not
be "handled." Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet
this difficulty. In non-partisan neighborhood associations we shall
have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall
have different alignments on the same question in different years.
Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears.  The party
meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the
human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed
upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the
neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from
the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is
the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be
true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany
organization -- it is true wherever the machine is put above the
man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get
freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing
which costs the party money -- keeping its members together -- is
its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after
question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote
according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease
until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to
show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it
has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for
considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can
not join a different party every day, but you can separate
political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you want. 
The reason more of our real wants have not got expressed in our
politics is just because people cannot be held together on many
issues.

  Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party
organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we
shall not have to ask, "How will the management of this affect the
power and prestige of our party?"

  Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of
problems is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the
ephemeral comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or
the particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question
brought forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue.

  Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A
party gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are
stereotyped, conventional. Under a party system we have no
spontaneous political life.  The party system gives no exercise to
the judgment, it weakens the will, it does away with personal
responsibility.  The party, as the crowd, blots out the individual. 
Mass suggestion is dominating our politics to-day. We shall get rid
of mass influence exactly as fast as we develop the group
consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood organizations will
not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party has prevented
us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any chance get
a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition to
party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life.

  Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective
thinking in the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to
his neighborhood group pledged beforehand to any particular way of
thinking.  The object of the party system is to stifle all
difference of opinion. Moreover, in partisan discussion you take
one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an infinitely varied
number of points of view can be brought out, and thus the final
decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The
neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on
every question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our
views. If we get into the habit of suppressing our differences,
these differences atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their
demands. And we have found that the expression and the maintenance
of difference is the condition of the 'full and free development of
the race.

  But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive
public opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be
constantly understanding anew. At the same time that we see the
necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we
must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by
which any particular expression of the common will should be taken
as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will.
It is right for to-day but not for to-morrow. The flaming fact is
our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the
common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power
pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands.
Constitutional conventions are seeking the machinery by which the
reason and justice which have existed among us can be utilized in
our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the springs which will
reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their day. This is
life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet with
our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts,
but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force
which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then
indeed will our government be no longer directed by a "body of
law," but by the self-renewing appearing of the will of the people.

  The chief need of society to-day is an enlightened, progressive
and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an
enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and
organized group opinion. When public opinion becomes conscious of
itself it will have a justified confidence in itself. Then the
"people," born of an associated life, will truly govern. Then shall
we at last really have an America.
