Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory, it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large influence on legal theory.[103] Also medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,[104] the patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds, their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order or to pursue successful outside relations. The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in the state. Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages? The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty. In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought to-day in philosophy, in politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against. ----- Footnote 97: Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc. Footnote 98: