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
I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.[129] This
those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part
of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the
contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves
with all particularists.[130]
Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist
doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of
group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical
bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the
“inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a
compact.[131] The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an
aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a
numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals.
As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are
to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as
jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for
the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent
rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless
says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists.
Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs._ the
State but The Group _vs._ the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think
it progress to write Group _vs._ the State? If the principle of
individual _vs._ the state is wrong, what difference does it make
whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these
rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in
so far as we can talk of group _vs._ the state, we are held in the
thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists
themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty,
that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups
as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem
to realize.
Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of
the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many
pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the
old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on
“Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are
never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our
present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of
group and state can be approaching coincidence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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