The New State

Introduction

Our political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at war, the nations of Europe are at one another’s throats—because we have not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us.

Group organization is to be the new method in politics, the basis of our future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after, for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved through the activity of the group life.

We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy. Party or “interests” govern us with some fiction of the “consent of the governed” which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life.

We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the individual. Our particularism—our laissez-faire, our everyman-for-his-own-interests—has little to do with true individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his all.

Politics do not need to be “purified.” This thought is leading us astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. “Representative government,” party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are deadwood. In their stead must appear the organization of nonpartisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will.

Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told—The people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people can do this or that. What does the “sovereign will” of the people amount to unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any “sovereign will?” There is little yet that is practical in “practical politics.”

But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more interested in the mechanism of life than in anything else. We keep on putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images, moulds—all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of men.

Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the American people be extended from mechanical things to political organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the necessary political and social adjustments—that is the crucial question which faces America today.

Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes. Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.

No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the individual. Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual. Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism? The ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people today is—How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the good government associations, this is all herd life—“following the lead”—democracy means a wholly different kind of existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy depends upon the creative power of every man.

We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made effective are the modes of practical politics.

But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the individual we are to find within the group? Certainly not the particularist individual. Every man to count as one? That was once our slogan. Now we have relegated it to a mechanical age. Today we see that every man must count for infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a cog in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point of view the whole itself. A man said to me the other day, “That is not democracy, that is mysticism.” But why mysticism? It is our daily life as lived from hour to hour. We join with one group of men at work, with another at play, another in our civic committee, another in our art club. Man’s life is one of manifold relatings. His vote at the polls must express not his particularist self, but the whole complex of his related life, must express as much of the whole as these multiple relations have brought into existence for him, through him. I find my expression of the whole-idea, the whole-will, through my group life. The group must always dictate the modes of activity for the individual. We must put clearly before us the true individual with his infinite relations, expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics, as the meaning of democracy. The first purpose of genuine politics is to make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign of outlook. In every man is the potentiality of such expression. To call it forth is the aim of all training, the end sought by all modes of real living.

Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers. Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization. Many men despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as they should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.

What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative power? The activity which produces the true individual is at the same time interweaving him and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has creative force. Does this seem “mystical?” The power of our corporations depends upon this capability of men to interknit themselves into such genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is the “real personality” of modern legal theory. Are our company directors and corporation lawyers usually mystics?

The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands a new attitude and a new activity in man. The fallacy of self-and-others fades away and there is only self-in-and-through-others, only others so firmly rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing there that sundering is impossible. We must now enter upon modes of living commensurate with this thought.

What American politics need today is positive principles. We do not want to “regulate” our trusts, to “restrain” our bosses. The measure of our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. It may be necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing state of the garden.

The group organization movement means the substitution of intention for accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. It rests on the solid assumption that this is a man-made not a machine-made world, that men and women are capable of constructing their own life, and that not upon socialism or any rule or any order or any plan or any utopia can we rest our hearts, but only on the force of a united and creative citizenship.

We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once from the region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a practical scheme of living. We hear a good deal of academic talk about “the functioning of the social mind”; what does it all amount to? We have no social mind yet, so we have no functioning of the social mind. We want the directive force of consciously integrated thought and will. All our ideas of conscious self-determination lead us to a new method: it is not merely that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern ourselves; it is not only that we must be given “free speech,” we must learn a speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights; it is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created.

Politics have one task only—to create. To create? But what are politics to create? The state? The state is now discredited in many quarters. The extremists cry, “The state is dead, Down with the state.” And it is by no means the extremists alone who are saying that our present state has played us false and that therefore we are justified in abolishing it. An increasing number of men are thinking what one writer has put into words, “We have passed from the regime of the state to that of the groups.” We must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to get the advantage of the group.

Many trickles have gone to feed the stream of reaction against the state: (1) an economic and industrial progress which demands political recognition, which demands that labor have a share in political power, (2) the trend of philosophic thought towards pluralism and the whole anti-intellectualistic tendency, (3) a progressive legal theory of the “real personality” of groups, (4) a growing antagonism to the state because it is supposed to embody the crowd mind: our electorate is seen as a crowd hypnotized by the party leaders, big words, vague ideas and loose generalizations, (5) our life of rapidly increasing intercourse has made us see our voluntary associations as real and intimate, the state as something remote and foreign to us, and (6) the increasing alignment before the war of interests across state lines.

Every one of these reasons has force. Almost any one of these reasons is sufficient to turn political theory into new channels, seeking new currents of political life. Yet if our present state is taken from us and we are left with our multiple group life, we are at once confronted with many questions. Shall the new state be based on occupational groups or neighborhood groups? Shall they form a unifying or a plural state? Shall the group or the individual be the basis of politics? The pluralist gives us the group as the unit of politics, but most of the group theories of politics are as entirely particularistic as the old “individualistic” theories; our particularism is merely transferred from the individual to the group.

Pluralism is the most vital trend in political thought today, but there are many dangers lurking in pluralism as at present understood. The pluralists apotheosize the group; the average American, on the other hand, is afraid of the group because he thinks of it chiefly in the form of corporation and trust. Both make the same mistake: both isolate the group. The group in relation must be the object of our study if that study is to be fruitful for politics. The pluralists have pointed out diversity but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question to which we must find an answer—What is to be done with this diversity?

Some of the pluralists tend to lose the individual in the group; others, to abandon the state for the group. But the individual, the group, the state—they are all there to be reckoned with—we cannot ignore or minimize any one. The relation of individual to group, of group to group, of individual and group to state—the part that labor is to have in the new state—these are the questions to the consideration of which this book is directed.

This book makes no attempt, however, to construct the new state, only to offer certain suggestions. But before the details of a new order are even hinted at, we must look far enough within for our practical suggestions to have value. In part I we shall try to find the fundamental principles which must underlie the new state; in part II we shall see how far they are expressed in present political forms; in part III we shall consider how they can be expressed. When they are fully expressed, then we shall have the true Federal State, then we shall see appearing the World State.

To sum up this Introduction: The immediate problem of political science is to discover the method of self-government. Industrial democracy, the self-government of smaller nations, the “sovereignty” of an International League, our own political power—how are these to be attained? Not by being “granted” or “conferred.” Genuine control, power, authority are always a growth. Self-government is a psychological process. It is with that psychological process that this book is largely concerned. To free the way for that process is the task of practical politics.

New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we must open the way for their entrance and onflow. Today the individual is submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy, the herd theory. Free him from these, release his energies, and he with all other Freemen will work out quick, flexible, constantly changing forms which shall respond sensitively to every need.

Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary because of changing social and economic conditions cannot be brought about. The first reform needed in our political practice is to find some method by which the government shall continuously represent the people. No state can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew. The organization of men in small local groups gives opportunity for this continuous political activity which ceaselessly creates the state. Our government forms cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be sensitive, mobile channels for the quick and quickening soul of the individual to flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth the state. Thus every man is the state at every moment, whether in daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself, leading a myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in its humblest citizen as in its supreme assembly.

The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative citizenship, must predominantly and preeminently body itself and be acknowledged by every human being. Then will “practical politics” be for the first time practical.

A few words of explanation seem necessary. I have no bibliography simply because any list of references which I could give would necessarily be a partial one since much of this book has come by wireless. Besides all that is being written definitely of a new state, the air today is full of the tentative, the partial, the fragmentary thought, the isolated flash of insight from some genius, all of which is being turned to the solution of those problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face us with their urgent demand. I am here trying to show the need of a wide and systematic study of these problems, not pretending to be able to solve them. Much interweaving of thought will be necessary before the form of the new state appears to us.

Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led us to our present ideas. That does not mean that I do not recognize the slow building up of these ideas or all our indebtedness to the thinkers of the past. I speak of principles as “new” which we all know were familiar to Aristotle or Kant and are new today only in their application.

The word new is so much used in the present day—New Freedom, New Democracy, New Society etc.—that it is perhaps well for us to remind ourselves what we mean by this word. We are using the word new partly in reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a world which has culminated in this war, but more especially in the sense of the live, the real, in contrast to the inert, the dead. It is not a time distinction—the “new” (the vital) claims fellowship with all that is “new” (vital) in the past. When we speak of the “New” Freedom we mean all the reality and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions of freedom up to the present moment. The “New” Society is the “Perfect Society.” The “New” Life is the Vita Nuova, “when spring came to the heart of Italy.”

It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of the term “the new psychology,” I am not referring to any definitely formulated body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding the new psychology as such. By the “new psychology” I mean something now in the making: I mean partly that group psychology which is receiving more attention and gaining more influence every day, and partly I mean simply that feeling out for a new conception of modes of association which we see in law, economics, ethics, politics, and indeed in every department of thought. It is a short way of saying that we are now looking at things not as entities but in relation. When our modern jurists speak of the growing emphasis upon relation rather than upon contract—they are speaking of the “new psychology.”