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
A few words of explanation seem necessary. I have no bibliography simply
because any list of references which I could give would necessarily be a
partial one since much of this book has come by wireless. Besides all
that is being written definitely of a new state, the air to-day is full
of the tentative, the partial, the fragmentary thought, the isolated
flash of insight from some genius, all of which is being turned to the
solution of those problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face
us with their urgent demand. I am here trying to show the need of a wide
and systematic study of these problems, not pretending to be able to
solve them. Much interweaving of thought will be necessary before the
form of the new state appears to us.
Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led us to
our present ideas. That does not mean that I do not recognize the slow
building up of these ideas or all our indebtedness to the thinkers of
the past. I speak of principles as “new” which we all know were familiar
to Aristotle or Kant and are new to-day only in their application.
The word new is so much used in the present day—New Freedom, New
Democracy, New Society etc.—that it is perhaps well for us to remind
ourselves what we mean by this word. We are using the word new partly in
reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a
world which has culminated in this war, but more especially in the sense
of the live, the real, in contrast to the inert, the dead. It is not a
time distinction—the “new” (the vital) claims fellowship with all that
is “new” (vital) in the past. When we speak of the “New” Freedom we mean
all the reality and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions
of freedom up to the present moment. The “New” Society is the “Perfect
Society.” The “New” Life is the Vita Nuova, “when spring came to the
heart of Italy.”
It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of the term
“the new psychology,” I am not referring to any definitely formulated
body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding the new
psychology as such. By the “new psychology” I mean something now in the
making: I mean partly that group psychology which is receiving more
attention and gaining more influence every day, and partly I mean simply
that feeling out for a new conception of _modes of association_ which we
see in law, economics, ethics, politics, and indeed in every department
of thought. It is a short way of saying that we are now looking at
things not as entities but in relation. When our modern jurists speak of
the growing emphasis upon relation rather than upon contract—they are
speaking of the “new psychology.”
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