THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

The Occupational Group:  
Chapter XXXII
Political Pluralism (concluded)

I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at
things as they are as one of its excellencies.  But a progressive
political science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no
logical argument against a sovereign state to say that we have not
one at present or that our present particularistic states are not
successful.  Proof of actual plural sovereignty does not constitute
an argument against the ideal of unified or rather a unifying
sovereignty. The question is do we want a unifying state?  And if
so, how can we set about getting it?

  The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the
state absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a
unified state when they conceive it as a monster which has
swallowed up everything within sight.  It reminds one of the
nursery rhyme of one's childhood:
                     Algy met a bear
                     The bear was bulgy
                     The bulge was Algy.

The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members.
(This is a word used by many writers) [1]. But the ideal unified
state is not all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive -- a very
different matter: we are not, individual or group, to be absorbed
into a whole, we are to be constituent members of the whole. I am
speaking throughout of the ideal unified state, which I call a
unifying state.

     1.  p 39 note.

  The failure to understand a unifying state is responsible for the
dread on the one hand of a state which will "demand" our
allegiance, and on the other of our being left to the clash of
"divided" allegiances. Both these bugbears will disappear only
through an understanding of how each allegiance can minister to
every other, and also through a realization that no single group
can embrace my life. It is true that the state as state no more
than family or trade-union or church can "capture my soul." But
this does not mean that I must divide my allegiance; I must find
how I can by being loyal to each be loyal to all, to the whole. I
am an American with all my heart and soul and at the same time I
can work daily for Boston and Massachusetts.  I can work for my
nation through local machinery of city or neighborhood. My work at
office or factory enriches my family life; my duty to my family is
my most pressing incentive to do my best work. There is no
competing here, but an infinite number of filaments cross and
recross and connect all my various allegiances. We should not be
obliged to choose between our different groups. Competition is not
the soul of true federalism but the interlocking of all interests
and all activities.

  The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It
must take our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I
have all these different allegiances, I should indeed lead a
divided and therefore uninteresting life if I could not unify them,
Life _would_ be "just one damned thing after another."  The true
state has my devotion because it gathers up into itself the various
sides of me, is the symbol of my multiple self, is my multiple self
brought to significance, to self-realization. If you leave me with
my plural selves, you leave me in desolate places, my soul craving
its meaning, its home. The home of my soul is in the state.

  But the true state does not "demand" my allegiance. It is the
spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our
multiple interests. And as it does not "demand" allegiance, so also
it does not "compete" with trade-unions etc., as the present state
often does, for my allegiance. We have been recently told that the
tendency of the state is to be intolerant of "any competing
interest or faith or hope," but if it is, the cure is not to make
it tolerant, but to make it recognize that the very substance of
its life is all these interests and faiths and hopes. Every group
which we join must increase our loyalty to the state because the
state must recognize fully every legitimate interest. Our political
machinery must not be such that I get what I need by pitting the
group which most clearly embodies my need against the state; it
must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my
loyalty to the state.

  When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the
state conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I
am a trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union
clash at the time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of
immediate action, decide between these loyalties. But my duty to
either group or state is not thereby exhausted: I must, if my
disapproval of war is to be neither abandoned nor remain a mere
particularist conviction, seek to change the policy of my state in
regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing that there can be
no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted against the
state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial and
political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can
become a constituent part of the interests of the state.

  I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable
of a unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will
claim, but that is something very different from an "undivided"
allegiance. It is, to use James' phrase again, a compounding of
allegiances. "Multiple allegiance" leaves us with the abnormal idea
of competing groups. "Supplementary allegiance" gives us too
fragmentary an existence. "Cooperative allegiance" comes nearer the
truth. Can we not perhaps imagine a cooperative or unified
allegiance, all these various and varying allegiances actually
living in and through the other?

  We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the
unifying power: it is the state-principle when two or three are
gathered together, when any differences are harmonized.  Our
problem is how all the separate community sense and community
loyalty and community responsibility can be gathered up into larger
community sense and loyalty and control.

  One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the
unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static
state. We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to
ourselves today, but organized as a plastic state, those commands
may change to-morrow with our changing needs and changing ideals,
and they will change through _our_ initiative. The true state is
neither an external force nor an unchanging force.  Rooted in our
most intimate daily lives, in those bonds which are at the same
time the strongest and the most pliant, the "absolutism" of the
true state depends always upon _our_ activity.  The objectors to
the unified state seem to imply that it is necessarily a ready-made
state, with hard and fast articulations, existing apart from us,
imposing its commands upon us which we must obey; but the truth is
that the state must be in perfect flux and that it is utterly
dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we actualize it,
it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we see it in
a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an
arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification
to express its different stages of growth which each and all must
be so flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of
continual growth.

  But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists
does not I believe take from them the right to leadership in
political thought.

  First, they prick the bubble of the present state's right to
supremacy. They see that the state which has been slowly forming
since the Middle Ages with its pretenses and unfulfilled claims has
not won either our regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we
render this state obedience? "[The state must] prove itself by what
it achieves." With the latter we are all beginning to agree.

  Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but
in the sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an
actual psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the
implicit warning of the pluralists that to attain this power is an
infinite task.  Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political
forms must keep closely in touch with the specific stage of that
growth. In rendering the state obedience, we assume that the state
has genuine power (because the consequences of an opposite
assumption would be too disastrous) while we are trying to
approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski's book is in its
implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make
one. Political theory will not _create_ sovereignty, acts of
Parliament cannot _confer_ sovereignty, only living the life will
turn us, subjects indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny.

  Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use
the phrase cooperative sovereignty [1] which seems happily to be
taking them away from their earlier "strung-along' sovereignty.  If
they press along this path, we shall all be eager to follow.

     1. Mr. Laski, I think.

  Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that
the variety of our group life to-day has a significance which must
be immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they
repudiate the idea that the groups are given authority by the
state. An able political writer recently said, "All other societies
rest on the authority given by the state.  The state itself stands
self-sufficient, self-directing. . . ."  It is this school of
thought which the pluralists are combating and thereby rendering
invaluable service to political theory.

  Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for
a revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the
necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state
has failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the
state. To the former, the group is to be the substitute for the
repudiated state. As for the latter, the Fabians have long felt
that local units should be vitalized and educated and interested,
for they thought that socialism would begin with the city and other
local units. Neighborhood education and neighborhood organization
is then the pressing problem of 1918. All those who are looking
towards a real democracy, not the pretense of one which we have
now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the awakening and
invigorating, the educating and organizing of the local unit. All
those who in the humblest way, in settlement or community centre,
are working for this, are working at the greatest political problem
of the twentieth century.

  In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the
state is not now always identical with the interests of its parts.
It is to the interest of England to win this war, they say, but
England has yet to prove that it is also for the interest of her
working people.

  In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning
of the disappearance of the crowd.  Many people advocate vocational
representation because they see in it a method of getting away from
our present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation.
They see our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and
manipulated by "interests," and propose the occupational group as
a substitute for the crowd. New political experiments must indeed
be along this line. We must guard only (1) that the "group" itself
shall not be a crowd, (2) that the union of groups shall not be a
numerical union.
  Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future
because it has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of
identity, of association, of federalism [1], as the central problem
of politics as it is the central problem of life. The force of the
pluralist school is that it is not academic; it is considering a
question which every thoughtful person is asking himself.  We are
faced to-day with a variety of group interests, with many objects
demanding our enthusiasm and devotion; our duty itself shines, not
a single light showing a single path, but shedding a larger
radiance on a life which is most gloriously not a path at all.
Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my church, my union?
With the complexity of interests increasing every day on the
outside, inside with the power of the soul to "belong" expanding
every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less
than the American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism
and the political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this
yet the soul of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential
nature. How is this to be obtained? Social evolution is in the
hands of those who can solve this problem.

     1. It does not matter in the terms of which branch of study
     you express it -- philosophy, sociology, or political science
     -- it is always the same problem.

  What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the
law of gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of
interpenetration and of multiples. I am the multiple man and the
multiple man is the germ of the unified state. If I live fully I
become so enriched by the manifold sides of life that I cannot be
narrowed down to mere corporation or church or trade-union or any
other special group. The miracle of spirit is that it can give
itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired,
unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read only in
the different installments of my different groups. We do not give
a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to
each and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes
its classifications and this is what some of the writers on group
organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit
is the power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies
each individual. We have thought that federal government consisted
of mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the
spirit which liveth and giveth life.

  Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer
tell us that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry
their pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only
by actual living that we can understand an undivided allegiance.
James tells us that "Reality falls in passing into conceptual
analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life -- it buds and
bourgeons, changes and creates." This is the way we must understand
an undivided allegiance. I live forever the undivided life. As an
individual I am the undivided one, as the group-I, I am again the
undivided one, as the state-I, I am the undivided one -- I am
always and forever the undivided one, mounting from height to
height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting.
