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
WE see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle
must be more than a coördinating agency. It must appear as the great
moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is morality?
The fulfilment of relation by man to man, since it is impossible to
conceive an isolated man: the father and mother appear in our mind and
with the three the whole infinite series. The state is the ordering of
this infinite series into their right relations that the greatest
possible welfare of the total may be worked out. This ordering of
relations is morality in its essence and completeness. The state must
gather up into itself all the moral power of its day, and more than
this, as our relations are widening constantly it must be the explorer
which discovers the kind of ordering, the kind of grouping, which best
expresses its intent.
But “things are rotten in Denmark.” The world is at present a moral
bankrupt, for nations are immoral and men worship their nations. We have
for centuries been thinking out the morals of individuals. The morality
of the state must now have equal consideration. We spring to that duty
to-day. We have the ten commandments for the individual; we want the ten
commandments for the state.
How is the state to gain moral and spiritual authority?
Only through its citizens in their growing understanding of the widening
promise of relation. The neighborhood group feeds the imagination
because we have daily to consider the wants of all in order to make a
synthesis of those wants; we have to recognize the rights of others and
adapt ourselves to them. Men must recognize and unify difference and
then the moral law appears in all its majesty in concrete form. This is
the universal striving. This is the trend of all nature—the harmonious
unifying of all. The call of the moral law is constantly to recognize
this. Our neighborhood group gives us preëminently the opportunity for
moral training, the associated groups continue it, the goal, the
infinite goal, the emergence of the all-inclusive state which is the
visible appearance of the total relativity of man in all right
connections and articulations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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