The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular governmentFollett, Mary Parker
Science
The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular government
Follett, Mary Parker
Democracy; Political participation; Social psychology; State, The
It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is
lessening now-a-days with the ease of communication, but this is true
only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be paying the
ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their homes, nor the
more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-five cents it costs
them to go to the city and back. The fluctuating population of
neighborhoods may be an argument against getting all we should like out
of the neighborhood bond, but at the same time it makes it all the more
necessary that some organization should be ready at hand to assimilate
the new-comers and give them an opportunity of sharing in civic life as
an integral, responsible part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has
common traditions and memories which persist and influence even although
the personnel changes.
To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or whether
we want to find the unities which will make for peace and order, for
justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn back to the
neighborhood group and there begin the a b c of a constructive
brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much congeniality makes
for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not the ignoring, of our
differences leads us to the truth. Neighborhood organization gives us
the best opportunity we have yet discovered of finding the unity
underneath all our differences, the real bond between them—of living the
consciously creative life.
We can never reform American politics from above, by reform
associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political forms
will have no vitality unless our political life is so organized that it
shall be based primarily and fundamentally on spontaneous association.
“Government is a social contact,” was found in the examination papers of
a student in a near-by college. He was nearer the truth than he knew.
Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will
be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall never know how
to be one of a nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what
better training for world organization can each man receive than for
neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a true
community, for no League of Nations will be successful which regards
France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units of a
world-union.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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