Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on “consent.” When he speaks of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on consent. I do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction between the “sovereignty” of the present end the sovereignty which I hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski’s book, but it is lacking in much of the writing on the “consent of the governed.” Footnote 131: Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the state is an arbitrary creation of men. Group organization to-day must give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely and fully on its legitimate psychological basis. Footnote 132: This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that competition is the mode of progress. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXXII POLITICAL PLURALISM (CONCLUDED) -------------- I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logical argument against a sovereign state to say that we have not one at present, or that our present particularistic states are not successful. Proof of actual plural sovereignty does not constitute an argument against the ideal of unified or rather a unifying sovereignty. The question is do we want a unifying state? And if so, how can we set about getting it? The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the state absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a unified state when they conceive it as a monster which has swallowed up everything within sight. It reminds one of the nursery rhyme of one’s childhood: Algy met a bear The bear was bulgy The bulge was Algy. The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members. (This is a word used by many writers).[133] But the ideal unified state is not all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive—a very different matter: we are not, individual or group, to be absorbed into a whole, we are to be constituent members of the whole. I am speaking throughout of the ideal unified state, which I call a unify_ing_ state.