THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

The Occupational Group:
Chapter XXX
Political Pluralism and Functionalism

The Service State vs. the "Sovereign State"

THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won
it many adherents is that of the interdependence of function.  Most
of the people who advocate vocational representation believe in
what they call an organic democracy.  This leads them to believe
that the group not the individual should be the unit of government:
a man in an industry is to vote not as an individual but as a
department member because he is thus representing his function. But
man has many functions and then there is something left over. It is
just because our place in the whole can never be bounded by any one
function that we cannot accept the organism of the Middle Ages, the
organic society of certain sociologists, or the "organic democracy"
of the upholders of occupational representation.

  Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many
functions. The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating --
with his family, at school, at work, with his play group, with his
art group: the carpenter may join the Arts and Crafts to find there
an actualization of spirit for which he is fitted, and so on and so
on. All the different sides of our nature develop by the process of
compounding. If you shut a man up in his occupation, you refuse him
the opportunity of full growth. The task has been given to humanity
to "Know thyself," but man cannot know himself without knowing the
many sides of his self. His essential self is the possibility of
the multiple expression of spirit.

  We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we
cannot do one thing well by doing one thing alone. The
interrelations are so manifold that each of us does far more than
he wishes, not because our tendency is a senseless ramifying, but
because we cannot do our own job well unless we do many other
things: we do not take on the extra activities as an extension of
our life, but simply as an intensification of our life at the point
of our particular interest. Ideally one should fulfil all the
functions of man in order to perform one function. No one ought to
teach without being a parent! etc. etc. Man must identify himself
with humanity. The great lesson which the pluralist school has to
teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively but only actually,
through his group relations. What it leaves out is that the task is
manifold and infinite because man must identify himself with a
manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced
humanity.

  Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all
these various groups. There is a more subtle process going on --
the interlocking of groups. And in these interlocking groups we
have not only the same people taking up different activities, but
actually representing different interests.  In some groups I may be
an employer, in others an employee. I can be a workman and a
stockholder. Men have many loyalties. It is no longer true that I
belong to such a class and must always identify myself with its
interests. I may belong at the same time to the college club and
the business women's club, to the Players' League (representing the
actor's point of view) and to the Drama Association (representing
the playgoer's point of view). I not only thus get opposite points
of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite points of
view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I may
have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team,
next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens' league
or neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross
many times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable
value in the development of society.

  Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these
groups may be working together for the satisfaction of some
interest. This is recognized by law. A man can be a member of
different corporations.  Our possibility of association is not
exhausted by contributing to the production of one legal person, we
may help to create many different legal persons, each with an
entirely different set of liabilities. Then there may be some sort
of relation with a definite legal status existing between these
bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation with
myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the
case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere,
this interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of
the neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating
occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic
social organization: not only in the sense of a flexible
interaction between the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity
which makes it possible for individuals to change constantly their
relations, their groups, without destroying social cohesion. 
Vocational representation would tend to crystallize us into
definite permanent groups.

  The present advocacy of organic democracy or "functionalism" is
obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to
"individualism": the functional group must be the unit because the
individual is so feared. I agree with the denunciation of the
individual if you mean the man who seeks only his own advantage.
But have we not already seen that that is not the true individual? 
And do we not see now that man is a multiple being? Life is a
recognition of multitudinous multiplicity. Politics must be shaped
for that. Our task is to make straight the paths for the coming of
the Lord- - the true Individual. Man is struggling for the freedom
of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must have as
many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man -- this
does away with "organic democracy."

  The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any
number of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state
demands the whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no
one group can seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that
having taken one-tenth there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not
divisible into so many parts as a house into so many rooms. My
group uses me and then the whole of me is still left to give to the
whole. This is the constant social process. Thus my citizenship is
something bigger than my membership in a vocational group. 
Vocational representation does not deal with men -- it deals with
masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of my
personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what
is left over -- is that going to be lost? The whole of every man
must go into his citizenship.

  Some of the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as
many "rights" as he has functions: a shoemaker is also a father and
a rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political
recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father
is to be represented in the state we are not told. The state will
never get the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into
parts. A man is not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an
artisan at work, a business man in his office, a follower of Christ
at church. He is at every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen,
a worker, if he is at any time these in a true sense. We want the
whole man in politics. Clever business men are not engaging
workers, they need men, our churches need men, the insistent demand
of our political life is for men.

  As ideally every function should include every other, as every
power of which I am capable should go into my work, occupational
representation might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted
for the limitations of man in 1918.

  I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group
as the political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the
individual and the group. We must devise some method of using both
at the same time. Our present method is right so far as it is based
on individuals, but we have not yet found the true individual. The
groups are the indispensable means for the discovery of self by
each man. The individual finds himself in a group; he has no power
alone or in a crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me
and so on and on. The different groups bring into appearance the
multiple sides of me. I go to the polls to express the multiple man
which the groups have created. I am to express the whole from my
individual point of view, and that is a multiple point of view
because of my various groups. But my relation to the state is
always as an individual. The group is a method merely. It cannot
supplant either the individual on the one hand or the state on the
other. The unit of society is the individual coming into being and
functioning through groups of a more and more federated nature.
Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the
particularist-ndividual, but the group-individual.

  The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational
representation -- "Do you want representation of numbers or
representation of interests?" They are opposed to the former, which
they call democracy, because "democracy" means to them the
"sovereignty of the people," which means the reign of the crowd.
Democracy and functionalism are supposed to be opposed. An industry
is to be composed not of individuals but of departments; likewise
the state is to be a union of industries or occupations.  The
present state is conceived as a crowd-state [1]. If the state is
and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned
today in many quarters. But I do not believe this is the
alternative we are facing -- the crowd-state or the group-state. We
want the representation of individuals, but of true individuals,
group-individuals [2].

     1. The French syndicalists avowedly do not want democracy
     because it "mixes the classes," because, as they say,
     interests and aims mingle in one great mass in which all true
     significance is lost.

     2. See p.184.

  The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the
domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers
with individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the
individual at the centre of our political system, without an
atomistic sovereignty, and yet by which we can get the whole of the
individual. I am proposing for the moment the individual the unit,
the group the method, but this alone does not cover all that is
necessary. In the French syndicalist organization every syndicate,
whatever its size, is represented by a single individual. In this
way power is prevented from falling into the hands of a strong
federation like the miners, but of course this often means minority
rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be dominated by the
five large trades, a state of things which has been much complained
of there.  But we must remember that while the syndicalists get rid
of majority rule, that is, that the majority of individuals no
longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority of groups.
They have not given up the _principle_ of majority rule, they
simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist
thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with
new principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard
to the individual and transferring them to the field of the group.
I have tried to show in chapter XVII, "Democracy Not the Majority,"
that the pressing matter in politics is not whether we want
majority rule or not, but to decide upon those methods of
association by which we get the greatest amount of integration. The
syndicalists are right, we do not want a crowd, but I do not think
most syndicalists have discovered the true use of the true group.

  The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group
method can be a regular part of our political system -- its
relation to the individual on the one hand and to the state on the
other. No man should have a share in government as an isolated
individual, but only as bound up with others: the individual must
be the unit, but an individual capable of entering into genuine
group relations and of using these for an expanding scale of
social, political and international life.

  The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the
Service State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two
meanings: (1) that the state is created by the actual services of
every man, that every man will get his place in the state through
the service rendered: (2) that the state itself is tested by the
services it renders, both to its members and to the world-community
[1]. The weakness of functionalism, as so far developed, is that it
has provided no method for all the functions of man to be included
in the state. The essence of democracy is the expression of every
man in his multiple nature.

     1. This is the basis of Duguit's international law -- the
     place of a state in an international league is to be
     determined directly by services rendered

  To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple
nature.  This is the blow to the theory of occupational
representation.  But also no number of groups can enfold me. This
is the reason why the individual must always be the unit of
politics, as group organization must be its method. We _find_ the
individual through the group, we _use_ him always as the true
individual -- the undivided one -- who, living link of living
group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for
every new possibility of a forever unfolding life.
