PG73755.B01134
The federal state is the unifying state. The political pluralists, following James, use the “trailing and”[126] argument to prove that we can never have a unified state, that there is always something which never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have a unify_ing_ state, that this “and” is the very unifying principle. The “trailing and” is the deepest truth of psychology. It is because of this “and” that our goal must always be the unified state—the unified state to be attained through the federal form. Our spirit it is true is by nature federal, but this means not infinite unrelation but infinite possibility of relation, not infinite strung-alongness but infinite seeking for the unifying of the strung-alongness. I forever discover undeveloped powers. This is the glory of our exhaustless nature. We are the expression of the principle of endless growth, of endless appearing, and democracy must, therefore, so shape its forms as to allow for the manifestation of each new appearing. I grow possibilities; new opportunities should always be arising to meet these new possibilities.

PG73755.B01135
Then through group and group and ascending group I actualize more and more. The “trailing and” is man’s task for ever and ever—to drag in more spirit, more knowledge, more harmony. Federalism is the only possible form for the state because it leaves room for the new forces which are coming through these spiritual “ands,” for the myriad centres of life which must be forever springing up, group after group, within a vital state. Our impulse is at one and the same time to develop self and to transcend self. It is this ever transcending self which needs the federal state. The federal state is not a unified state, I agree, but it is a unifying state, not a “strung-along” state.

PG73755.B01136
Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental principles of life—the compounding of consciousness and the endless appearings of new forces.

PG73755.B01137
I have said that the pluralists’ mistaken interpretation of federalism includes the particularist notions of “consent” and “rights” and “balance,” and that all these come from a false conception of sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of “consent”? Power is generated within the true group not by one or several assuming authority and the others “consenting,” but solely by the process of intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.

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If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that, what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora, a “larger life”? The pluralists open the gates to too much. They wish to throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals. Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate task, but let us ponder well the method.

PG73755.B01139
The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority over “other groups.”[127] But as he who expresses the unity of my group has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups—that is, the state—should have no authority _as a separate group_, but only so far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of the other groups as “coextensive” or “complementary” to the state—the state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they and all individuals are the constituents of the state.[128]

PG73755.B01140
I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.[129] This those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves with all particularists.[130]

PG73755.B01141
Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the “inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a compact.[131] The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals. As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs._ the State but The Group _vs._ the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think it progress to write Group _vs._ the State? If the principle of individual _vs._ the state is wrong, what difference does it make whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in so far as we can talk of group _vs._ the state, we are held in the thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty, that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem to realize.

PG73755.B01142
Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of group and state can be approaching coincidence.

PG73755.B01143
As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole. Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks in to its own integrated, coördinated activity, (2) it sees that activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.

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Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice. Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our particularism while changing its name from individual to group.

PG73755.B01145
The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory, perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists’ doctrine. The pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. “The dilemma which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”[132]

PG73755.B01146
But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your conclusion.

PG73755.B01147
The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations, that little further criticism is needed here. Unity must be our aim to-day. When you have not unity, you have balance or struggle or domination—of one over others. The nations of Europe refuse domination, aim at balance, and war is the result.

PG73755.B01148
It seems curious that these two movements should be going on side by side: that we are giving up the idea of the balance of nations, that we are refusing to think any longer in terms of “sovereign” nations, and yet at the same time an increasing number of men should be advocating balancing, “sovereign” groups within nations. The pluralists object to unity, but unity and plurality are surely not incompatible. The true monistic state is merely the multiple state working out its own unity from infinite diversity. But the unifying state shows us what to do with that diversity. What advantage is that diversity if it is to be always “competing,” “fighting,” “balancing?” Only in the unifying state do we get the full advantage of diversity where it is gathered up into significance and pointed action.

PG73755.B01149
The practical outcome of the balance theory will be first antagonistic interests, then jealous interests, then competing interests, then dominating interests—a fatal climax.

PG73755.B01150
The trouble with the balance theory is that by the time the representatives of the balancing groups meet, it is too late to expect agreement. The chief objection to pluralism is, perhaps, that it is usually merely a scheme of representation, that its advocates are usually talking of the kind of roof they want before they have laid the foundation stones. No theory of the state can have vitality which is merely a plan of representation. The new state must rest on a new conception of living, on a true understanding of the vital modes of association. The reason why occupational representation must bring balance and competition is because the integrating of differences, the essential social process, does not take place far enough back in our life. If Parliaments are composed of various groups or interests, the unification of those interests has to take place in Parliament. But then it is too late. The ideas of the different groups must mingle earlier than Parliament. We must go further back than our legislatures for the necessary unifying. We do not want legislatures full of opposing interests. The ideas of the groups become too crystallized by the time their representatives get to the Parliament, in fact they have often hardened into prejudices. Moreover, the representatives could not go against their constituencies, they would be pledged to specific measures. The different groups would come together each to try to prevail, not to go through the only genuine democratic process, that of trying to integrate their ideas and interests.

PG73755.B01151
When the desire to prevail is once keenly upon us, we behave very differently than when our object is the seeking of truth. Suppose I am the representative in Congress of a group or a party. A bill is under consideration. I see a weakness in that bill; if I point it out some one else may see a remedy for it and the bill may be immensely improved. But do I do this? Certainly not. I am so afraid of the bill being lost if I show any weakness in it that I keep this insight to myself and my country loses just so much. I cannot believe that occupational representation will foster truth seeking or truth speaking. It seems to me quite a case of the frying pan into the fire. Compromise and swapping will be the order in Parliaments based solely on the vocational principle. The different interests must fight it out in Parliament. This is fundamentally against democracy because it is against the psychological foundation of democracy, the fundamental law of association. Democracy depends on the blending, not the balancing, of interests and thoughts and wills. Occupational representation assumes that you secure the interests of the whole by securing the interests of every class, the old particularist fallacy transferred to the group.

PG73755.B01152
Moreover, it is often assumed that because the occupational group is composed of men of similar interests we shall have agreement in the occupational group; it is taken for granted that in these economic groups the agreement of opinion necessary for voting will be automatic. But do poets or carpenters or photographers think alike on more than a very few questions? What we must do is to get behind these electoral methods to some fundamental method which shall _produce_ agreement.

PG73755.B01153
Moreover, if the Cabinet were made up of these warring elements, administration would be almost impossible. Lloyd-George’s Cabinet at present is hampered by too much “difference.” I have throughout, to be sure, been advocating the compounding of difference as the secret of politics, but the compounding must begin further back in our life than Parliaments or Cabinets.

PG73755.B01154
And if you had group representation in England would not the Cabinet be made up of the most powerful of the groups, and would not a fear of defeat at any particular time mean overtures to enough of the other groups to make success in the Cabinet? And would not an entirely improper amount of power drift to the Premier under these circumstances? Have we any leaders who would, could any one trust himself to, guide the British Cabinet for the best interests of Great Britain under such conditions as these?

PG73755.B01155
To sum up: a true federalism cannot rest on balance or group-rights or consent. Authority, obedience, liberty, can never be understood without an understanding of the group process. Some of the advocates of guild socialism oppose function to authority and liberty, but we can have function _and_ liberty _and_ authority: authority of the whole through the liberty of all by means of the functions of each. These three are inescapably united. A genuine group, a small or large group, association or state, has the right to the obedience of its members. No group should be sovereign over another group. The only right the state has to authority over “other” groups is as far as those groups are constituent parts of the state. All groups are not constituent parts of the state to-day, as the pluralists clearly see. Possibly or probably all groups never will be, but such perpetually self-actualizing unity should be the process. Groups are sovereign over themselves, but in their relation to the state they are interdependent groups, each recognizing the claims of every other. Our multiple group life is the fact we have to reckon with; unity is the aim of all our seeking. And with this unity will appear a sovereignty spontaneously and joyfully acknowledged. In true federalism, voided of division and balance, lies such sovereignty.

PG73755.B01156
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PG73755.B01157
Footnote 123:

PG73755.B01158
Quoted by Duguit.

PG73755.B01159
Footnote 124:

PG73755.B01160
It must be remembered, however, that while in the Civil War we definitely gave up the compact theory held by us since the Mayflower compact, yet we did not adopt the organism theory. The federal state we have tried and are trying to work out in America is based on the principles of psychic unity described in chapter X. The giving up of the “consent” theory does not bring us necessarily to the organic theory of society.

PG73755.B01161
Footnote 125:

PG73755.B01162
Duguit says that the United States confers the rights of a state on a territory. No, it recognizes that which already exists.

PG73755.B01163
Footnote 126:

PG73755.B01164
“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.... The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.” “A Pluralistic Universe,” 321–322.

PG73755.B01165
Footnote 127:

PG73755.B01166
When they say that the passion for unity is the urge for a dominant One, they think of the dominant One as outside.

PG73755.B01167
Footnote 128:

PG73755.B01168
One of the pluralists says, “I cannot see that ... sovereignty is the unique property of any one association.” No, not sovereignty over “others,” but sovereignty always belongs to any genuine group; as groups join to form another real group, the sovereignty of the more inclusive group is evolved—that is the only kind of state sovereignty which we can recognize as legitimate. (See ch. XXIX on “Political Pluralism and Sovereignty.”)

PG73755.B01169
Footnote 129:

PG73755.B01170
See ch. XV.

PG73755.B01171
Footnote 130:

PG73755.B01172
Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on “consent.” When he speaks of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on consent. I do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction between the “sovereignty” of the present end the sovereignty which I hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski’s book, but it is lacking in much of the writing on the “consent of the governed.”

PG73755.B01173
Footnote 131:

PG73755.B01174
Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the state is an arbitrary creation of men. Group organization to-day must give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely and fully on its legitimate psychological basis.

PG73755.B01175
Footnote 132:

PG73755.B01176
This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that competition is the mode of progress.

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PG73755.B01178
XXXII

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POLITICAL PLURALISM (CONCLUDED)

PG73755.B01180
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PG73755.B01181
I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logical argument against a sovereign state to say that we have not one at present, or that our present particularistic states are not successful. Proof of actual plural sovereignty does not constitute an argument against the ideal of unified or rather a unifying sovereignty. The question is do we want a unifying state? And if so, how can we set about getting it?

PG73755.B01182
The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the state absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a unified state when they conceive it as a monster which has swallowed up everything within sight. It reminds one of the nursery rhyme of one’s childhood:

PG73755.B01183
Algy met a bear The bear was bulgy The bulge was Algy.

PG73755.B01184
The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members. (This is a word used by many writers).[133] But the ideal unified state is not all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive—a very different matter: we are not, individual or group, to be absorbed into a whole, we are to be constituent members of the whole. I am speaking throughout of the ideal unified state, which I call a unify_ing_ state.

PG73755.B01185
The failure to understand a unifying state is responsible for the dread on the one hand of a state which will “demand” our allegiance, and on the other of our being left to the clash of “divided” allegiances. Both these bugbears will disappear only through an understanding of how each allegiance can minister to every other, and also through a realization that no single group can embrace my life. It is true that the state as state no more than family or trade-union or church can “capture my soul.” But this does not mean that I must divide my allegiance; I must find how I can by being loyal to each be loyal to all, to the whole. I am an American with all my heart and soul and at the same time I can work daily for Boston and Massachusetts. I can work for my nation through local machinery of city or neighborhood. My work at office or factory enriches my family life; my duty to my family is my most pressing incentive to do my best work. There is no competing here, but an infinite number of filaments cross and recross and connect all my various allegiances. We should not be obliged to choose between our different groups. Competition is not the soul of true federalism but the interlocking of all interests and all activities.

PG73755.B01186
The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It must take our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore uninteresting life if I could not unify them, Life _would_ be “just one damned thing after another.” The true state has my devotion because it gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to self-realization. If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home. The home of my soul is in the state.

PG73755.B01187
But the true state does not “demand” my allegiance. It is the spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple interests. And as it does not “demand” allegiance, so also it does not “compete” with trade-unions etc., as the present state often does, for my allegiance. We have been recently told that the tendency of the state is to be intolerant of “any competing interest or faith or hope,” but if it is, the cure is not to make it tolerant, but to make it recognize that the very substance of its life is all these interests and faiths and hopes. Every group which we join must increase our loyalty to the state because the state must recognize fully every legitimate interest. Our political machinery must not be such that I get what I need by pitting the group which most clearly embodies my need against the state; it must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my loyalty to the state.

PG73755.B01188
When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action, decide between these loyalties. But my duty to either group or state is not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted against the state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can become a constituent part of the interests of the state.

PG73755.B01189
I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but that is something very different from an “undivided” allegiance. It is, to use James’ phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. “Multiple allegiance” leaves us with the abnormal idea of competing groups. “Supplementary allegiance” gives us too fragmentary an existence. “Coöperative allegiance” comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps imagine a coöperative or unified allegiance, all these various and varying allegiances actually living in and through the other?

PG73755.B01190
We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all the separate community sense and community loyalty and community responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and loyalty and control.

PG73755.B01191
One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state. We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves to-day, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change to-morrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will change through _our_ initiative. The true state is neither an external force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives, in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most pliant, the “absolutism” of the true state depends always upon _our_ activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations, existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must obey; but the truth is that the state must be in perfect flux and that it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual growth.

PG73755.B01192
But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought.

PG73755.B01193
First, they prick the bubble of the present state’s right to supremacy. They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle Ages with its pretences and unfulfilled claims has not won either our regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state obedience? “[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves.” With the latter we are all beginning to agree.
