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
Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many
“rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a
rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political
recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father is to
be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get
the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is
not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a
business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at
every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any
time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever
business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need
men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.
As ideally every function should include every other, as every power of
which I am capable should go into my work, occupational representation
might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted for the limitations of
man in 1918.
I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the
political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual
and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same
time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals,
but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the
indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The
individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a
crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on.
The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I
go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have
created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and
that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my
relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method
merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the
state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into
being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated
nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the
particularist-individual, but the group-individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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