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
When we look upon law as a thing we think of it as a finished thing; the
moment we look upon it as a process we think of it always in evolution.
Our law must take account of our social and economic conditions, and it
must do it again to-morrow and again day after to-morrow. We do not want
a new legal system with every sunrise, but we do want a method by which
our law shall be capable of assimilating from day to day what it needs
to act upon that life from which it has drawn its existence and to which
it must minister. The vital fluid of the community, its life’s blood,
must pass so continuously from the common will to the law and from the
law to the common will that a perfect circulation will be established.
We do not “discover” legal principles which it then behooves us to burn
candles before forever, but legal principles are the outcome of our
daily life. Our law therefore cannot be based on “fixed” principles: our
law must be intrinsic in the social process.
There has been a distinction made between legal principles and the
application of these principles: legal principles partook of the nature
of the absolute, and to our high-priests, the lawyers, fell the
privilege of applying them. But this is an artificial distinction. If
our methods could be such that the energy of lawyers, which now often
goes in making the concrete instance and the legal principle in some way
(by fiction, or twisting, or “interpreting”) fit each other, could help
evolve day by day a crescent law which is the outcome of our life as it
is to be applied to our life, an enormous amount of energy would be
saved for the development of our American people. It is static law and
our reverence for legal abstractions which has produced “privilege.” It
is dynamic law, as much as anything else, which will bring us the new
social order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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