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
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 fulness 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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