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No one has yet given us a satisfactory account of the history of the notion of sovereignty: just how and in what degree it has been affected by history, by philosophy, by jurisprudence, etc., and how all these have interacted. We have not only to disentangle many strands to trace each to its source, but we have, moreover, just not to disentangle them, but to understand the constant interweaving of all. To watch the interplay of legal theory and political philosophy from the Middle Ages down to the present day is one of the most interesting parts of our reading, but perhaps nowhere is it more fruitful than in the idea of sovereignty. We see the corporation long ignored and the idea of legal partnership influencing the development of the social contract theory, which in its turn reacted on legal theory. We find the juristic conception of group personality, clearly seen as early as Althusius (1557–1638), and revived and expanded by Gierke, influencing the whole German school of “group sociologists.” But to-day are not many of us agreed that however interesting such historical tracing, our present notion of sovereignty must rest on what we learn from group psychology?

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XXX

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POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM

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The Service State vs. the “Sovereign State”

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THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the people who advocate vocational representation believe in what they call an organic democracy. This leads them to believe that the group not the individual should be the unit of government: a man in an industry is to vote not as an individual but as a department member because he is thus representing his function. But man has many functions and then there is something left over. It is just because our place in the whole can never be bounded by any one function that we cannot accept the organism of the Middle Ages, the organic society of certain sociologists, or the “organic democracy” of the upholders of occupational representation.

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Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many functions. The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating—with his family, at school, at work, with his play group, with his art group: the carpenter may join the Arts and Crafts to find there an actualization of spirit for which he is fitted, and so on and so on. All the different sides of our nature develop by the process of compounding. If you shut a man up in his occupation, you refuse him the opportunity of full growth. The task has been given to humanity to “Know thyself,” but man cannot know himself without knowing the many sides of his self. His essential self is the possibility of the multiple expression of spirit.

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We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we cannot do one thing well by doing one thing alone. The interrelations are so manifold that each of us does far more than he wishes, not because our tendency is a senseless ramifying, but because we cannot do our own job well unless we do many other things: we do not take on the extra activities as an _ex_tension of our life, but simply as an _in_tensification of our life at the point of our particular interest. Ideally one should fulfil all the functions of man in order to perform one function. No one ought to teach without being a parent! etc. etc. Man must identify himself with humanity. The great lesson which the pluralist school has to teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively but only actually, through his group relations. What it leaves out is that the task is manifold and infinite because man must identify himself with a manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced humanity.

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Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all these various groups. There is a more subtle process going on—the interlocking of groups. And in these interlocking groups we have not only the same people taking up different activities, but actually representing different interests. In some groups I may be an employer, in others an employee. I can be a workman and a stockholder. Men have many loyalties. It is no longer true that I belong to such a class and must always identify myself with its interests. I may belong at the same time to the college club and the business women’s club, to the Players’ League (representing the actor’s point of view) and to the Drama Association (representing the playgoer’s point of view). I not only thus get opposite points of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite points of view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I may have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team, next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens’ league or neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross many times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable value in the development of society.

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Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these groups may be working together for the satisfaction of some interest. This is recognized by law. A man can be a member of different corporations. Our possibility of association is not exhausted by contributing to the production of one legal person, we may help to create many different legal persons, each with an entirely different set of liabilities. Then there may be some sort of relation with a definite legal status existing between these bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation with myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere, this interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of the neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic social organization: not only in the sense of a flexible interaction between the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity which makes it possible for individuals to change constantly their relations, their groups, without destroying social cohesion. Vocational representation would tend to crystallize us into definite permanent groups.

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The present advocacy of organic democracy or “functionalism” is obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to “individualism”: the functional group must be the unit because the individual is so feared. I agree with the denunciation of the individual if you mean the man who seeks only his own advantage. But have we not already seen that that is not the true individual? And do we not see now that man is a multiple being? Life is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity. Politics must be shaped for that. Our task is to make straight the paths for the coming of the Lord—the true Individual. Man is struggling for the freedom of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must have as many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man—this does away with “organic democracy.”

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The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any number of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state demands the whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no one group can seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that having taken one-tenth there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not divisible into so many parts as a house into so many rooms. My group uses me and then the whole of me is still left to give to the whole. This is the constant social process. Thus my citizenship is something bigger than my membership in a vocational group. Vocational representation does not deal with men—it deals with masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of my personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what is left over—is that going to be lost? The whole of every man must go into his citizenship.

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Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many “rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father is to be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.

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As ideally every function should include every other, as every power of which I am capable should go into my work, occupational representation might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted for the limitations of man in 1918.

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I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals, but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on. The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the particularist-individual, but the group-individual.

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The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational representation—“Do you want representation of numbers or representation of interests?” They are opposed to the former, which they call democracy, because “democracy” means to them the “sovereignty of the people,” which means the reign of the crowd. Democracy and functionalism are supposed to be opposed. An industry is to be composed not of individuals but of departments; likewise the state is to be a union of industries or occupations. The present state is conceived as a crowd-state.[120] If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned to-day in many quarters. But I do not believe this is the alternative we are facing—the crowd-state or the group-state. We want the representation of individuals, but of true individuals, group-individuals.[121]

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The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers with individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the individual at the centre of our political system, without an atomistic sovereignty, and yet by which we can get the whole of the individual. I am proposing for the moment the individual the unit, the group the method, but this alone does not cover all that is necessary. In the French syndicalist organization every syndicate, whatever its size, is represented by a single individual. In this way power is prevented from falling into the hands of a strong federation like the miners, but of course this often means minority rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be dominated by the five large trades, a state of things which has been much complained of there. But we must remember that while the syndicalists get rid of majority rule, that is, that the majority of individuals no longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority of groups. They have not given up the _principle_ of majority rule, they simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with new principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard to the individual and transferring them to the field of the group. I have tried to show in chapter XVII, “Democracy Not the Majority,” that the pressing matter in politics is not whether we want majority rule or not, but to decide upon those methods of association by which we get the greatest amount of integration. The syndicalists are right, we do not want a crowd, but I do not think most syndicalists have discovered the true use of the true group.

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The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group method can be a regular part of our political system—its relation to the individual on the one hand and to the state on the other. No man should have a share in government as an isolated individual, but only as bound up with others: the individual must be the unit, but an individual capable of entering into genuine group relations and of using these for an expanding scale of social, political and international life.

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The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the Service State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two meanings: (1) that the state is created by the actual services of every man, that every man will get his place in the state through the service rendered: (2) that the state itself is tested by the services it renders, both to its members and to the world-community.[122] The weakness of functionalism, as so far developed, is that it has provided no method for all the functions of man to be included in the state. The essence of democracy is the expression of every man in his multiple nature.

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To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple nature. This is the blow to the theory of occupational representation. But also no number of groups can enfold me. This is the reason why the individual must always be the unit of politics, as group organization must be its method. We _find_ the individual through the group, we _use_ him always as the true individual—the undivided one—who, living link of living group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for every new possibility of a forever unfolding life.

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Footnote 120:

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The French syndicalists avowedly do not want democracy because it “mixes the classes,” because, as they say, interests and aims mingle in one great mass in which all true significance is lost.

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Footnote 121:

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See p. 184.

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Footnote 122:

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This is the basis of Duguit’s international law—the place of a state in an international league is to be determined directly by services rendered.

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XXXI

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POLITICAL PLURALISM AND THE TRUE FEDERAL STATE

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IN the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of life—the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1) Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the group—dependent on the principle of interpenetration. (2) Man joins many groups—in order to express his multiple nature. These two principles give us federalism.

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Let us, before considering the conception of federalism in detail, sum up in a few sentences what has already been said of these two principles. The fundamental truth of life we have seen is self-perpetuating activity—activity so regnant, so omnipresent, so all-embracing, that it banishes even the conception of anything static from the world of being. Conscious evolution means that we must discover the essential principle of this activity and see that it is at work in the humblest of its modes, the smallest group or meeting of even two or three. The new psychology has brought to political science the recognition of interpenetration and the “compounding of consciousness” as the very condition of all life. Our political methods must conform to life’s methods. We must understand and follow the laws of association that the state may appear, that our own little purposes may be fulfilled. _Little_ purposes? Is there any great and small? The humblest man and the price of his daily loaf—is this a small matter—it hangs upon the whole world situation to-day. In order that the needs of the humblest shall be satisfied, or in order that world purposes shall be fulfilled—it matters not which—this principle of “compounding” must be fully recognized and embodied in our political methods. It is this vital intermingling which creates the real individual and knits men into the myriad relations of life. We win through life our individuality, it is not presented to us at the beginning to be exploited as we will. We win a multiple individuality through our manifold relations. In the workings of this dual law are rooted all of social and political progress, all the hope and the potency of human evolution.

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Only the federal state can express this dual principle of existence—the compounding and the multiple compounding. It is an incomplete understanding of this dual law which is responsible for the mistaken interpretation of federalism held by some of the pluralists: a conception which includes the false doctrines of division of power, the idea that the group not the individual should be the unit of the state, the old consent of governed theory, an almost discarded particularism (group rights), and the worn-out balance theory.

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The distributive sovereignty school assumes that the essential, the basic part of federalism is the division of power between the central and separate parts: while the parts may be considered as ceding power to the central state, or the central state may be considered as granting power to the parts, yet in one form or another federalism means a divided sovereignty. Esmein says definitely, “_L’État fédératif ... fractionne la souveraineté...._”[123] No, it should unite sovereignty. There should be no absolute division of power or conferring of power. The activity of whole and parts should be one.

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In spite of all our American doctrines of the end of the eighteenth century, in spite of our whole history of states-right theory and sentiment, the division of sovereignty is not the main fact of the United States government. From 1789 to 1861 the idea of a divided sovereignty—that the United States was a voluntary agreement between free, sovereign and independent states, that authority was “divided” between nation and states—dictated the history of the United States. The war of 1861 was fought (some of the pluralists seem not to know) to settle this question.[124] The two ideas of federalism came to a death grapple in our Civil War and the true doctrine triumphed. That war decided that the United States was not a delegated affair, that it had a “real” existence, and that it was sovereign, yet not sovereign over the states as an external party, for it is composed of the states, but sovereign over itself, merely over itself. You have not to be a mystic to understand this but only an American. Those who see in a federal union a mere league with rights and powers granted to a central government, those who see in a federal union a balancing of sovereign powers, do not understand true federalism. When we enumerate the powers of the states as distinct from the powers of our national government, some people regard this distinction as a dividing line between nation and states, but the true “federalist” is always seeing the relation of these powers to those of the central government. There are no absolute divisions in a true federal union.

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Do we then want a central government which shall override the parts until they become practically non-existent? The moment federalism attempts to transcend the parts it has become vitiated. Our Civil War was not, as some writers assert, the blow to states-rights and the victory of centralization. We shall yet, I believe, show that it was a victory for true federalism.[125] The United States is neither to ignore the states, transcend the states, nor to balance the states, it is to _be_ the states in their united capacity.

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Of course it is true that many Americans do think of our government as a division of powers between central and local authority, therefore there is as a matter of fact much balancing of interests. But as far as we are doing this at Washington it is exactly what we must get rid of. The first lesson for every member of a federal government to learn is that the interests of the different parts, or the interests of the whole and the interests of the parts, are never to be pitted against each other. As far as the United States represents an interpenetration of thought and feeling and interest and will, it is carrying out the aims of federalism.

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We have not indeed a true federalism in the United States to-day; we are now learning the lesson of federalism. Some one must analyze for us the difference between centralization and true federalism, which is neither nationalization, states-rights, nor balance, and then we must work for true federalism. For the federal government to attempt to do that which the states should do, or perhaps even are doing, means loss of force, and loss of education-by-experience for the states. On the other hand, not to see when federal action means at the same time local development and national strength, means a serious retarding of our growth. It is equally true that when the states attempt what the federal government alone should undertake, the consequence is general muddle.

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And it is by no means a question only of what the federal government should do and what it should not do. It is a question of the _way_ of doing. It is a question of guiding, where necessary, without losing local initiative or local responsibility. It is a question of so framing measures that true federation, not centralization, be obtained. Recently, even before the war, the tendency has been towards increased federal action and federal control, as seen, for instance, in the control of railroad transportation, of vocational education etc. The latter is an excellent example of the possibility of central action being true federal and not nationalized action. The federal government upon application from a state grants to that state an amount for vocational education equal to what the state itself will appropriate. The administration of the fund rests with the state. The federal government thus makes no assumptions. It _recognizes existing facts_. And it does not impose something from without. The state must understand its needs, must know how those needs can best be satisfied; it must take responsibility. The experience of one state joins with the experience of other states to form a collective experience.

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As we watch federalism being worked out in actual practice at Washington, we see in that practice the necessity of a distinction which has been emphasized throughout this book as the contribution of contemporary psychology to politics: nationalization is the Hegelian reconciliation, true federalism is the integration of present psychology. This means a genuine integration of the interests of all the parts. If our present tendency is towards nationalization, we must learn the difference between that and federalism and change it into the latter. We need a new order of statesmen in the world to-day—for our nation, for our international league—those who understand federalism.

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But I have been talking of federalism as the integration of parts (the states). We should remember also, and this is of the greatest importance, that the United States is not only to be the _states_ in their united capacity, but it is to be all the men and women of the United States in _their_ united capacity. This it seems difficult for many Europeans to understand; it breaks across their traditional conception of federalism which has been a league, a confederation of “sovereign” parts, not a true federal state. We of Massachusetts feel ourselves not first children of Massachusetts and then through Massachusetts of the United States. We belong directly to the United States not merely through Massachusetts. True federalism means that the individual, not the group, is the unit. A true federal government acts directly on its citizens, not merely through the groups.

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America has not led the world in democracy through methods of representation, social legislation, ballot laws or industrial organization. She has been surpassed by other countries in all of these. She leads the world in democracy because through federalism she is working out the secret of the universe actively. Multiple citizenship in its spontaneous unifying is the foundation of the new state. Federalism and democracy go together, you do not decide to have one or the other as your fancy may be. We did not establish federalism in the United States, we are growing federalism. Cohesion imposed upon us externally will lack in significance and duration. Federalism must live through: (1) the reality of the group, (2) the expanding group, (3) the ascending group or unifying process.
