
THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

The Occupational Group:
Chapter XXVIII
Political Pluralism

ALL that I have written has been based on the assumption of the
unifying state.  Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood
organization as if it were possible to take it for granted that the
neighborhood group is to be the basis of the new state. The truth
of both these assumptions is denied by some of our most able
thinkers.

  The unified state is now discredited in many quarters.
Syndicalists, guild socialists, some of the Liberals in England,
some of the advocates of occupational representation in America,
and a growing school of writers who might be called political
pluralists are throwing the burden of much proof upon the state,
and are proposing group organization as the next step in political
method. To some the idea of the state is abhorrent. One writer
says, "The last hundred years marked in all countries the beginning
of the dissolution of the State and of the resurrection of
corporate life [trade unions etc.] ...  In the face of this growth
of syndicalism in every direction, . . . it is no longer
venturesome to assert that the State is dead."

  Others like to keep the word "state" but differ much as to the
position it is to occupy in the new order: to some it seems to be
merely a kind of mucilage to keep the various groups together; with
others the state is to hold the ring while different groups fight
out their differences. Still other thinkers, while seeing the open
door to skepticism in regard to the state, are nevertheless not
ready to pass through, but, preserving the instinct and the
reverence for the unity of the state, propose as the most immediate
object of our study how the unity can be brought about, what is to
be the true and perfect bond of union between the multiple groups
of our modern life. All these thinkers, differing widely as they
do, yet may be roughly classed together as the upholders of a
multiple group organization as the basis for a new state.

  This movement is partly a reaction against an atomistic
sovereignty, the so-called theory of "subjective" rights, a
"senseless" geographical representation, a much berated
parliamentary system, and partly the wish to give industrial
workers a larger share in the control of industry and in
government.

  The opposition to "numerical representation" has been growing for
some time. We were told thirty years ago by Le Prins that
vocational representation is "the way out of the domination of the
majority," that the vocational group is the "natural" group
"spontaneously generated in the womb of a nation." Twenty-five
years ago Benoist said that the state must recognize private
associations: universities, chambers of commerce, professional
associations, societies of agriculture, syndicates of workmen - "en
un mot tout ce qui a corps et vie dans la nation." If the state is
to correspond to reality, it must recognize, Benoist insisted, all
this group life, all these interests, within it.  Moreover. he
urged, with our present pulverized suffrage, with sovereignty
divided among millions, we are in a state of anarchy; only group
representation will save us from "la force stupide de nombre."  M.
Leon Duguit has given us a so-called "objective" theory of law
which means for many people a new conception of the state.

  Many say that it is absurd for representation to be based on the
mere chance of residence as is the case when the geographical
district is the unit.  The territorial principle is going, we are
told, and that of similar occupational interests will take its
place. Again some people are suggesting that both principles should
be recognized m our government: that one house in Parliament
represent geographical areas, the other occupations [1]. No one has
yet, however, made any proposal of this kind definite enough to
serve as a basis of discussion.

     1. Leon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman
     Angell, etc.

  Syndicalism demands the abolition of the "state" while -- through
its organization of the syndicate of workers, the union of
syndicates of the same town or region and the federation of these
unions -- it erects a system of its own controlled entirely by the
workers. Syndicalism has gained many adherents lately because of
the present reaction against socialism.  People do not want the
Servile State and, therefore, many think they do not want any
state.

  In England a new school is arising which is equally opposed to
syndicalism and to the bureaucracy of state socialism. Or rather it
takes half of each. Guild socialism believes in state ownership of
the means of production, but that the control of each industry or
"guild" --- appointment of officers, hours and conditions of work
etc. -- should be vested in the membership of the industry. The
syndicalists throw over the state entirely, the guild socialists
believe in the "co-management" of the state. There are to be two
sets of machinery side by side but quite distinct: that based on
the occupational group will be concerned with economic
considerations, the other with "political" considerations, the
first culminating in a national Guild Congress, and the second in
the State [1].

     1. The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of  
     economics and politics. First, the interests of citizenship
     and guild-membership are not distinct; secondly, in any proper
     system of occupational representation every one should be
     included -- vocational representation should not be trade
     representation; third, as long as you call the affairs of the
     guilds "material," and say that the politics of the state
     should be purified of financial interests, you burn every
     bridge which might make a unity of financial interests and
     sound state policy.  Guild socialism, however, because it is
     a carefully worked out plan for the control of industry by
     those who take part in it, is one of the most well worth
     considering of the proposals at present before us.

  "Guild Socialism," edited by A. R. Orage, gives in some detail
this systematic plan already familiar to readers of the _New Age_. 
A later book of the same school "Authority, Liberty and Function,"
by Ramiro de Maeztu, concerns itself less with detail and more with
the philosophical basis of the new order. The value of this book
consists in its emphasis on the functional principle [2].

     2. See G. D. H. Cole, "The World of Labor," for the relation
     of trade unionism to guild socialism.

  Mr. Ernest Barker of Oxford, although he formulates no definite
system, is a political pluralist.

  John Neville Figgis makes an important contribution to pluralism
[3], and although he has a case to plead for the church, he is
equally emphatic that all the local groups which really make our
life should be fostered and given an increased authority.

     3. See especially "Churches in the Modern State" and "Studies
     in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius."

  In America vocational representation has many distinguished
advocates, among them Professor Felix Adler and Professor H. A.
Overstreet.  Mr. Herbert Croly, who has given profound thought to
the trend of democracy, advocates giving increased power and legal
recognition to the powerful groups growing up within the state.
Mr. Harold Laski is a pronounced political pluralist, especially in
his emphasis on the advantage of multiple, varied and freely
developing groups for the enrichment and enhancement of our whole
life. Mr. Laski's book, "Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty," is
one of the most thought-stimulating bits of modern political
writing: it does away with the fetish of the abstract state -- it
is above all an attempt to look at things as they are rather than
as we imagine them to be; it shows that states are not supreme by
striking examples of organizations within the state claiming and
winning the right to refuse obedience to the state; it sees the
strength and the variety of our group life to-day as a significant
fact for political method; it is a recognition, to an extent, of
the group principle -- it sees that sovereignty is not in people as
a mass; it pleads for a revivification of local life, and finally
it shows us, implicitly, not only that we need to-day a new state,
but that the new state must be a great moral force [1].

     1. See also Mr. Laski's articles: "The Personality of
     Associations," Harv. Law Rev. 29, 404-26, and "Early History
     of the Corporation in England," Harv. Law Rev.: 30, 561-588.
     This is the kind of work which is breaking the way for a new
     conception of politics.

  Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the pluralists is
their clear showing that "a single unitary state with a single
sovereignty" is not true to the facts of life to-day. Mr. Barker
says, "Every state is something of a federal society and contains
different national groups, different churches, different economic
organizations, each exercising its measure of control over its
members." The following instances are cited to show the present
tendency of different groups to claim autonomy:
  1. Religious groups are claiming rights as groups. Many churchmen
would like to establish the autonomy of the church. It is
impossible to have undenominational instruction in the schools of
England because of the claims of the church.
  2. There is a political movement towards the recognition of
national groups. The state in England is passing Home Rule Acts and
Welsh Disestablishment Acts to meet the claims of national groups.
"All Europe is Convulsed with a struggle of which one object is a
regrouping of men in ways which will fulfil national ideals."
  3. "The Trade-Unions claim to be free groups." "Trade-unions have
recovered from Parliament more than they have lost in the courts."

  Let us consider the arguments of the pluralist school, as they
form the most interesting, the most suggestive and the most
important theory of politics now before us. It seems to me that
there are four weaknesses in the pluralist school [1] which must be
corrected before we can take from them the torch to light us on our
political way: (1) some of the pluralists ostensibly found their
books on pragmatic philosophy and yet in their inability to
reconcile the distributive and collective they do not accept the
latest teachings of pragmatism, for pragmatism does not end with a
distributive pluralism, (2) the movement is in part a reaction to
a misunderstood Hegelianism, (3) many of the pluralists are
professed followers of medieval doctrine, (4) their thinking is not
based on a scientific study of the group, which weakens the force
of their theories of "objective" rights and sovereignty, much as
these latter are an advance on our old theories of "subjective"
rights and a sovereignty based on an atomistic conception of
society.

     1. It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all
     the pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a
     school although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience
     I am using the word pluralist roughly and in a sense
     inaccurately to include all those who are advocating a
     multiple group organization as the basis of a new state. Most
     of these agree in making the group rather than the individual
     the unit of politics, in their support of group "rights," the
     "consent" of the group, the "balance" of groups, and in their
     belief that "rights" should be based on function. But
     syndicalists and guild socialists are not strictly pluralists
     since they build up a system based on the occupational group;
     yet the name is not wholly inapplicable, for, since the guild
     socialists base their state on balancing groups, that state
     cannot be called a unified state. It is too early yet to speak
     of this school with entire accuracy, and in fact there is no
     "school."

  First, the underlying problem of pluralism and pragmatism is, as
James proclaims, the relation of "collective" and "distributive."
The problem of to-day, we all agree, is the discovery of the kind
of federalism which will make the parts live fully in the whole,
the whole live fully in the parts. But this is the central problem
of philosophy which has stirred the ages. The heart of James'
difficulty was just this: how can many consciousnesses be at the
same time one consciousness? How can the same identical fact
experience itself so diversely? How can you be the absolute and the
individual? It is the old, old struggle which has enmeshed so many,
which some of our philosophers have transcended by the deeper
intuitions, sure that life is a continuous flow and not spasmodic
appearance, disappearance and reappearance. James struggled long
with this problem, but the outcome was sure. His spirit could not
be bound by intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity.  He was
finally forced to adopt a higher form of rationality. He gave up
conceptualistic logic "fairly, squarely and irrevocably," and knew
by deepest inner testimony that "states of consciousness can
separate and combine themselves freely and keep their own identity
unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience
of wider scope." James always saw the strung-along universe, but he
also saw the unifying principle which is working towards its goal.
"That secret," he tells us, "of a continuous life which the
universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a
contradiction incarnate. . . . Our intelligence must keep on
speaking terms with the universe.

  When James found that the "all-form" and the "each-forms" are not
incompatible, he found the secret of federalism.  It is our task to
work out in practical politics this speculative truth which the
great philosophers have presented to us. The words absolute and
individual veil it to us, but substitute state and individual and
the problem comes down to the plane of our actual working everyday
life. It may be interesting to read philosophy, but the thrilling
thing for every man of us to do is to make it come true. We may be
heartened by our sojourns on Sinai, but no man may live his life in
the clouds. And what does pragmatism mean if not just this? We can
only, as James told us again and again, understand the collective
and distributive by living. Life is the true revealer: I can never
understand the whole by reason, only when the heart-beat of the
whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own being.

  If we in our neighborhood group live James' philosophy of the
compounding of consciousness, if we obey the true doctrine, that
each individual is not only himself but the state -- for the
fullness of life overflows -- then will the perfect form of
federalism appear and express itself, for then we have the spirit
of federalism creating its own form. Political philosophers talk of
the state, but there is no state until we make it. It is pure
theory. We, every man and woman to-day, must create his small group
first, and then, through its compounding with other groups, it
ascends from stage to stage until the federal state appears. Thus
do we understand by actual living how collective experiences can
claim identity with their constituent parts, how "your experience
and mine can be members of a world-experience." In our neighborhood
groups we claim identity with the whole collective will, at that
point we are the collective will.

  Unless multiple sovereignty can mean ascending rather than
parallel groups it will leave out the deepest truth which
philosophy has brought us. But surely the political pluralists who
are open admirers of James will refuse with him to stay enmeshed in
sterile intellectualism, in the narrow and emasculated logic of
identity.  Confessedly disciples of James, will they not carry
their discipleship a step further? Have they not with James a wish
for a world that does not fall into "discontinuous pieces," for "a
higher denomination than that distributed, strung-along and flowing
sort of reality which we finite beings [now] swim in"? Their groups
must be the state each at its separate point. When they see this
truth clearly, then the leadership to which their insight entitles
them will be theirs.

  I have said that the political pluralists are fighting a
misunderstood Hegelianism. Do they adopt the crudely popular
conception of the Hegelian state as something "above and beyond"
men, as a separate entity virtually independent of men? Such a
conception is fundamentally wrong and wholly against the spirit of
Hegel. As James found collective experience not independent of
distributive experience, as he reconciled the two through the
"compounding of consciousness," so Hegel's related parts received
their meaning only in the conception of total relativity. The soul
of Hegelianism is total relativity, but this is the essence of the
compounding of consciousness. As for James the related parts and
their relations appear simultaneously and with equal reality, so in
Hegel's total relativity: the members of the state in their right
relation to one another appear in all the different degrees of
reality together as one whole total relativity -- never sundered,
never warring against the true Self, the Whole.

  But there is the real Hegel and the Hegel who misapplied his own
doctrine, who preached the absolutism of a Prussian State. Green
and Bosanquet in measure more or less full taught the true Hegelian
doctrine. But for a number of years the false leadings of Hegel
have been uppermost in people's minds, and there has been a
reaction to their teaching due to the panic we all feel at the mere
thought of an absolute monarch and an irresponsible state. The
present behavior of Prussia of course tends to increase the panic,
and the fashion of jeering at Hegel and his "misguided" followers
is widespread.  But while many English writers are raging against
Hegelianism, at the same time the English are pouring out in
unstinted measure themselves and their substance to establish on
earth Hegel's absolute in the actual form of an International
League!

  The political pluralists whom we are now considering, believing
that a collective and distributive sovereignty cannot exist
together, throw overboard collective sovereignty.  When they accept
the compounding of consciousness taught by their own master, James,
then they will see that true Hegelianism finds its actualized form
in federalism.

  Perhaps they would be able to do this sooner if they could rid
themselves of the Middle Ages! Many of the political pluralists
deliberately announce that they are accepting medieval doctrine.

  In the Middle Ages the group was the political unit. The medieval
man was always the member of a group -- of the guild in the town,
of the manor in the country. But this was followed by the theory of
the individual not as a member of a group but as a member of a
nation, and we have always considered this on the whole an advance
step.  When, therefore, the separate groups are again proposed as
the political units, we are going back to a political theory which
we have long outgrown and which obviously cramps the individual. It
is true that the individual as the basis of government has remained
an empty theory. The man with political power has been the rich and
strong man. There has been little chance for the individual as an
individual to become a force in the state. In reaction against such
selfish autocracy people propose a return to the Middle Ages. This
is not the solution. Now is the critical moment. If we imitate the
Middle Ages and adopt political pluralism we lose our chance to
invent our own forms for our larger ideas.

  Again, balancing groups were loosely held together by what has
been called a federal bond. Therefore we are to look to the
medieval empire for inspiration in forming the modern state. But
the union of church and guild, boroughs and shires of the Middle
Ages seems to me neither to bear much resemblance to a modern
federal state nor to approach the ideal federal state. And if we
learn anything from medieval decentralization -- guild and church
and commune -- it is that political and economic power cannot be
separated.

  Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since
then? Are our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same?
Medieval theory, it is true, had the conception of the living
group, and this had a large influence on legal theory [1]. Also
medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its
notion of individual freedom [2], the patent fact of manifold
groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it
is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages hold more warnings
than lessons for us. While there was much that was good about the
medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to all the
weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds, their
selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the
impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal
order or to pursue successful outside relations.

     1. From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German
     "fellowship."

     2. And the individual was certainly as prominent in Medieval
     theory as the community of individuals, a fact which the
     vigorous corporate life of the Middle Ages may lead us to
     forget.

  The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts
could be related to the whole without the result either of
despotism of the more powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. 
Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was true on the whole that your
relation to your class separated you from other classes: you could
not belong to many groups at once. Status was the basis of the
Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must avoid in any plan
for the direct reprsentation of industrial workers in the state.

  Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet
its own problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the
richness which our intricately complex life has woven into it try
to force itself into the embryonic molds of the Middle Ages?

  The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is
one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of
group psychology.  No one yet knows enough of the laws of
associated life to have the proper foundations for political
thinking. The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the
group. They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of
sovereignty.

  In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent
recognition of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in
regard to pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought today in
philosophy, in politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in
sociology, in many schemes of social reorganization proposed by
social workers, therefore we must consider it carefully -- what it
holds for us, what it must guard against.
