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
As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the
old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love
of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of
the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have
all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of
others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant
recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole.
Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks
in to its own integrated, coördinated activity, (2) it sees that
activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole
of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates
into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to
society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of
social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just
as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.
Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice.
Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our
particularism while changing its name from individual to group.
The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory,
perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists’ doctrine. The
pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their
life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word
most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of
power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. “The dilemma
which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There
is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not
merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”[132]
But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your
conclusion.
The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument
has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three
years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations,
that little further criticism is needed here. Unity must be our aim
to-day. When you have not unity, you have balance or struggle or
domination—of one over others. The nations of Europe refuse domination,
aim at balance, and war is the result.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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