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The opposition to “numerical representation” has been growing for some time. We were told thirty years ago by Le Prins that vocational representation is “the way out of the domination of the majority,” that the vocational group is the “natural” group “spontaneously generated in the womb of a nation.” Twenty-five years ago Benoist said that the state must recognize private associations: universities, chambers of commerce, professional associations, societies of agriculture, syndicates of workmen—“en un mot tout ce qui a corps et vie dans la nation.” If the state is to correspond to reality, it must recognize, Benoist insisted, all this group life, all these interests, within it. Moreover, he urged, with our present pulverized suffrage, with sovereignty divided among millions, we are in a state of anarchy; only group representation will save us from “la force stupide de nombre.” M. Léon Duguit has given us a so-called “objective” theory of law which means for many people a new conception of the state.

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Many say that it is absurd for representation to be based on the mere chance of residence as is the case when the geographical district is the unit. The territorial principle is going, we are told, and that of similar occupational interests will take its place. Again some people are suggesting that both principles should be recognized in our government: that one house in Parliament represent geographical areas, the other occupations.[97] No one has yet, however, made any proposal of this kind definite enough to serve as a basis of discussion.

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Syndicalism demands the abolition of the “state” while—through its organization of the syndicate of workers, the union of syndicates of the same town or region and the federation of these unions—it erects a system of its own controlled entirely by the workers. Syndicalism has gained many adherents lately because of the present reaction against socialism. People do not want the Servile State and, therefore, many think they do not want any state.

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In England a new school is arising which is equally opposed to syndicalism and to the bureaucracy of state socialism. Or rather it takes half of each. Guild socialism believes in state ownership of the means of production, but that the control of each industry or “guild”—appointment of officers, hours and conditions of work etc.—should be vested in the membership of the industry. The syndicalists throw over the state entirely, the guild socialists believe in the “co-management” of the state. There are to be two sets of machinery side by side but quite distinct: that based on the occupational group will be concerned with economic considerations, the other with “political” considerations, the first culminating in a national Guild Congress, and the second in the State.[98]

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“Guild Socialism,” edited by A. R. Orage, gives in some detail this systematic plan already familiar to readers of the _New Age_. A later book of the same school “Authority, Liberty and Function,” by Ramiro de Maeztu, concerns itself less with detail and more with the philosophical basis of the new order. The value of this book consists in its emphasis on the functional principle.[99]

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Mr. Ernest Barker of Oxford, although he formulates no definite system, is a political pluralist.

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John Neville Figgis makes an important contribution to pluralism,[100] and although he has a case to plead for the church, he is equally emphatic that all the local groups which really make our life should be fostered and given an increased authority.

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In America vocational representation has many distinguished advocates, among them Professor Felix Adler and Professor H. A. Overstreet. Mr. Herbert Croly, who has given profound thought to the trend of democracy, advocates giving increased power and legal recognition to the powerful groups growing up within the state. Mr. Harold Laski is a pronounced political pluralist, especially in his emphasis on the advantage of multiple, varied and freely developing groups for the enrichment and enhancement of our whole life. Mr. Laski’s book, “Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty,” is one of the most thought-stimulating bits of modern political writing: it does away with the fetich of the abstract state—it is above all an attempt to look at things as they are rather than as we imagine them to be; it shows that states are not supreme by striking examples of organizations within the state claiming and winning the right to refuse obedience to the state; it sees the strength and the variety of our group life to-day as a significant fact for political method; it is a recognition, to an extent, of the group principle—it sees that sovereignty is not in people as a mass; it pleads for a revivification of local life, and finally it shows us, implicitly, not only that we need to-day a new state, but that the new state must be a great moral force.[101]

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Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the pluralists is their clear showing that “a single unitary state with a single sovereignty” is not true to the facts of life to-day. Mr. Barker says, “Every state is something of a federal society and contains different national groups, different churches, different economic organizations, each exercising its measure of control over its members.” The following instances are cited to show the present tendency of different groups to claim autonomy:

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1. Religious groups are claiming rights as groups. Many churchmen would like to establish the autonomy of the church. It is impossible to have undenominational instruction in the schools of England because of the claims of the church.

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2. There is a political movement towards the recognition of national groups. The state in England is passing Home Rule Acts and Welsh Disestablishment Acts to meet the claims of national groups. “All Europe is convulsed with a struggle of which one object is a regrouping of men in ways which will fulfil national ideals.”

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3. “The Trade-Unions claim to be free groups.” “Trade-unions have recovered from Parliament more than they have lost in the courts.”

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Let us consider the arguments of the pluralist school, as they form the most interesting, the most suggestive and the most important theory of politics now before us. It seems to me that there are four weaknesses in the pluralist school[102] which must be corrected before we can take from them the torch to light us on our political way: (1) some of the pluralists ostensibly found their books on pragmatic philosophy and yet in their inability to reconcile the distributive and collective they do not accept the latest teachings of pragmatism, for pragmatism does not end with a distributive pluralism, (2) the movement is in part a reaction to a misunderstood Hegelianism, (3) many of the pluralists are professed followers of medieval doctrine, (4) their thinking is not based on a scientific study of the group, which weakens the force of their theories of “objective” rights and sovereignty, much as these latter are an advance on our old theories of “subjective” rights and a sovereignty based on an atomistic conception of society.

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First, the underlying problem of pluralism and pragmatism is, as James proclaims, the relation of “collective” and “distributive.” The problem of to-day, we all agree, is the discovery of the kind of federalism which will make the parts live fully in the whole, the whole live fully in the parts. But this is the central problem of philosophy which has stirred the ages. The heart of James’ difficulty was just this: how can many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can the same identical fact experience itself so diversely? How can you be the absolute and the individual? It is the old, old struggle which has enmeshed so many, which some of our philosophers have transcended by the deeper intuitions, sure that life is a continuous flow and not spasmodic appearance, disappearance and reappearance. James struggled long with this problem, but the outcome was sure. His spirit could not be bound by intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity. He was finally forced to adopt a higher form of rationality. He gave up conceptualistic logic “fairly, squarely and irrevocably,” and knew by deepest inner testimony that “states of consciousness can separate and combine themselves freely and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.” James always saw the strung-along universe, but he also saw the unifying principle which is working towards its goal. “That secret,” he tells us, “of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate.... Our intelligence must keep on speaking terms with the universe.”

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When James found that the “all-form” and the “each-forms” are not incompatible, he found the secret of federalism. It is our task to work out in practical politics this speculative truth which the great philosophers have presented to us. The words absolute and individual veil it to us, but substitute state and individual and the problem comes down to the plane of our actual working everyday life. It may be interesting to read philosophy, but the thrilling thing for every man of us to do is to make it come true. We may be heartened by our sojourns on Sinai, but no man may live his life in the clouds. And what does pragmatism mean if not just this? We can only, as James told us again and again, understand the collective and distributive by living. Life is the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own being.

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If we in our neighborhood group live James’ philosophy of the compounding of consciousness, if we obey the true doctrine, that each individual is not only himself but the state—for the fulness of life overflows—then will the perfect form of federalism appear and express itself, for then we have the spirit of federalism creating its own form. Political philosophers talk of the state, but there is no state until we make it. It is pure theory. We, every man and woman to-day, must create his small group first, and then, through its compounding with other groups, it ascends from stage to stage until the federal state appears. Thus do we understand by actual living how collective experiences can claim identity with their constituent parts, how “your experience and mine can be members of a world-experience.” In our neighborhood groups we claim identity with the whole collective will, at that point we are the collective will.

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Unless multiple sovereignty can mean ascending rather than parallel groups it will leave out the deepest truth which philosophy has brought us. But surely the political pluralists who are open admirers of James will refuse with him to stay enmeshed in sterile intellectualism, in the narrow and emasculated logic of identity. Confessedly disciples of James, will they not carry their discipleship a step further? Have they not with James a wish for a world that does not fall into “discontinuous pieces,” for “a higher denomination than that distributed, strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings [now] swim in”? Their groups must be the state each at its separate point. When they see this truth clearly, then the leadership to which their insight entitles them will be theirs.

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I have said that the political pluralists are fighting a misunderstood Hegelianism. Do they adopt the crudely popular conception of the Hegelian state as something “above and beyond” men, as a separate entity virtually independent of men? Such a conception is fundamentally wrong and wholly against the spirit of Hegel. As James found collective experience not independent of distributive experience, as he reconciled the two through the “compounding of consciousness,” so Hegel’s related parts received their meaning only in the conception of total relativity. The soul of Hegelianism is total relativity, but this is the essence of the compounding of consciousness. As for James the related parts and their relations appear simultaneously and with equal reality, so in Hegel’s total relativity: the members of the state in their right relation to one another appear in all the different degrees of reality together as one whole total relativity—never sundered, never warring against the true Self, the Whole.

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But there is the real Hegel and the Hegel who misapplied his own doctrine, who preached the absolutism of a Prussian State. Green and Bosanquet in measure more or less full taught the true Hegelian doctrine. But for a number of years the false leadings of Hegel have been uppermost in people’s minds, and there has been a reaction to their teaching due to the panic we all feel at the mere thought of an absolute monarch and an irresponsible state. The present behavior of Prussia of course tends to increase the panic, and the fashion of jeering at Hegel and his “misguided” followers is wide-spread. But while many English writers are raging against Hegelianism, at the same time the English are pouring out in unstinted measure themselves and their substance to establish on earth Hegel’s absolute in the actual form of an International League!

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The political pluralists whom we are now considering, believing that a collective and distributive sovereignty cannot exist together, throw overboard collective sovereignty. When they accept the compounding of consciousness taught by their own master, James, then they will see that true Hegelianism finds its actualized form in federalism.

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Perhaps they would be able to do this sooner if they could rid themselves of the Middle Ages! Many of the political pluralists deliberately announce that they are accepting medieval doctrine.

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In the Middle Ages the group was the political unit. The medieval man was always the member of a group—of the guild in the town, of the manor in the country. But this was followed by the theory of the individual not as a member of a group but as a member of a nation, and we have always considered this on the whole an advance step. When, therefore, the separate groups are again proposed as the political units, we are going back to a political theory which we have long outgrown and which obviously cramps the individual. It is true that the individual as the basis of government has remained an empty theory. The man with political power has been the rich and strong man. There has been little chance for the individual as an individual to become a force in the state. In reaction against such selfish autocracy people propose a return to the Middle Ages. This is not the solution. Now is the critical moment. If we imitate the Middle Ages and adopt political pluralism we lose our chance to invent our own forms for our larger ideas.

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Again, balancing groups were loosely held together by what has been called a federal bond. Therefore we are to look to the medieval empire for inspiration in forming the modern state. But the union of church and guild, boroughs and shires of the Middle Ages seems to me neither to bear much resemblance to a modern federal state nor to approach the ideal federal state. And if we learn anything from medieval decentralization—guild and church and commune—it is that political and economic power cannot be separated.

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Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory, it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large influence on legal theory.[103] Also medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,[104] the patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds, their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order or to pursue successful outside relations.

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The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in the state.

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Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages?

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The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.

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In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought to-day in philosophy, in politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against.

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Footnote 97:

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Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc.

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Footnote 98:

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The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of economics and politics. First, the interests of citizenship and guild-membership are not distinct; secondly, in any proper system of occupational representation every one should be included—vocational representation should not be trade representation; third, as long as you call the affairs of the guilds “material,” and say that the politics of the state should be purified of financial interests, you burn every bridge which might make a unity of financial interests and sound state policy. Guild socialism, however, because it is a carefully worked out plan for the control of industry by those who take part in it, is one of the most well worth considering of the proposals at present before us.

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Footnote 99:

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See G. D. H. Cole, “The World of Labor,” for the relation of trade unionism to guild socialism.

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Footnote 100:

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See especially “Churches in the Modern State” and “Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius.”

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Footnote 101:

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See also Mr. Laski’s articles: “The Personality of Associations,” Harv. Law Rev. 29, 404–426, and “Early History of the Corporation in England,” Harv. Law Rev.: 30, 561–588. This is the kind of work which is breaking the way for a new conception of politics.

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Footnote 102:

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It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all the pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a school although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience I am using the word pluralist roughly and in a sense inaccurately to include all those who are advocating a multiple group organization as the basis of a new state. Most of these agree in making the group rather than the individual the unit of politics, in their support of group “rights,” the “consent” of the group, the “balance” of groups, and in their belief that “rights” should be based on function. But syndicalists and guild socialists are not strictly pluralists since they build up a system based on the occupational group; yet the name is not wholly inapplicable, for, since the guild socialists base their state on balancing groups, that state cannot be called a unified state. It is too early yet to speak of this school with entire accuracy, and in fact there is no “school.”

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Footnote 103:

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From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German “fellowship.”

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Footnote 104:

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And the individual was certainly as prominent in medieval theory as the community of individuals, a fact which the vigorous corporate life of the Middle Ages may lead us to forget.

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XXIX

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POLITICAL PLURALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY

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WHAT does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each one giving up his sovereignty? Never. By some one from outside presenting it with authority? No, although that is the basis of much of our older legal theory. Real authority inheres in a genuine whole. The individual is sovereign over himself as far as he unifies the heterogeneous elements of his nature. Two people are sovereign over themselves as far as they are capable of creating one out of two. A group is sovereign over itself as far as it is capable of creating one out of several or many. A state is sovereign only as it has the power of creating one in which all are. Sovereignty is the power engendered by a complete interdependence becoming conscious of itself. Sovereignty is the imperative of a true collective will. It is not something academic, it is produced by actual living with others—we learn it only through group life. By the subtle process of interpenetration a collective sovereignty is evolved from a distributed sovereignty. Just so can and must, by the law of their being, groups unite to form larger groups, these larger groups to form a world-group.

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I have said that many of the pluralists are opposed to the monistic state because they do not see that a collective and distributive sovereignty can exist together. They talk of the Many and the One without analyzing the process by which the Many and the One are creating each other. We now see that the problem of the compounding of consciousness, of the One and the Many, need not be left either to an intellectualistic or to an intuitive metaphysics. It is to be solved through a laboratory study of group psychology. When we have that, we shall not have to argue any more about the One and the Many: we shall actually see the Many and the One emerging at the same time; we can then work out the laws of the relation of the One (the state) to the Many (the individual), and of the Many (the individual) to the One (the state), not as a metaphysical question but on a scientific basis. And the process of the Many becoming One is the process by which sovereignty is created. Our conceptions of sovereignty can no longer rest on mere abstractions, theory, speculative thought. How absurdly inadequate such processes are to explain the living, interweaving web of humanity. The question of sovereignty concerns the organization of men (which obviously must be fitted to their nature), hence it finds its answer through the psychological analysis of man.

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The seeking of the organs of society which are the immediate source of legal sanctions, the seeking of the ultimate source of political control—these are the quests of jurists and political philosophers. To their search must be added a study of the process by which a genuine sovereignty is created. The political pluralists are reacting against the sovereignty which our legal theory postulates, for they see that there is no such thing actually, but if sovereignty is at present a legal fiction, the matter need not rest there—we must seek to find how a genuine social and political control can be produced. The understanding of self-government, of democracy, is bound up with the conception of sovereignty as a psychological process.

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The idea of sovereignty held by guild socialists[105] is based largely on the so-called “objective” theory of _le droit_ expounded by M. Léon Duguit of Bordeaux. This theory is accepted as the “juridical basis” of a new state, what some call the functionarist state.[106] Man, Duguit tells us, has no rights as man, but only as a member of the social order. His rights are based on the fact of social interdependence—on his relations and consequent obligations. In fact he has no rights, but duties and powers. All power and all obligation is found in “social solidarity,” in a constantly evolving social solidarity.[107]

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The elaboration of this theory is Duguit’s large contribution to political thought. His _droit_ is a dynamic law—it can never be captured and fixed. The essential weakness of his doctrine is that he denies the possibility of a collective will, which means that he ignores the psychology of the social process. He and his followers reject the notion of a collective will as “_concept de l’esprit dénué de toute réalité positive_.” If this is their idea of a collective will, they are right to reject it. I ask for its acceptance only so far as it can be proved to have positive reality. There is only one way in the world by which you can ever know whether there is a collective will, and that is by actually trying to make one; you need not discuss a collective will as a theory. If experiment proves to us that we cannot have a collective will, we must accept the verdict. Duguit thinks that when we talk of the sovereignty of the people we mean an abstract sovereignty; the new psychology means by the sovereignty of the people that which they actually create. It is true that we have none at present. Duguit is perfectly right in opposing the old theory of the “sovereign state.”
