Edizioni ARCIPELAGO

THE NEW STATE di Mary Parker Follett
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	Introduction Our political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at war, the nations of Europe are at one another's throats--because we have not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us. Group organization is to be the new method of politics, the basis of our future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after, for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved through the activity of the group life. We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy. Party or "interests" govern us with some fiction of the "consent of the governed" which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life. We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the individual. Our particularism--our laissez-faire, our every-man-for-his-own-interests--has little to do with true individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his all. Politics do not need to be "purified." This thought is leading us astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. "Representative government," party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will. Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told--The people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people can do this or that. What does the "sovereign will" of the people amount to unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any "sovereign will?" There is little yet that is practical in "practical politics." But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more interested in the mechanisms of life than in anything else. We keep on putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images, moulds--all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of men. Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the American people be extended from mechanical things to political organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the necessary political and social adjustments--that is the crucial question which faces America to-day. Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes. Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose. No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the individual. Up to the present moment, we have never seen the individual. Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are condemning us to a new form of the old particularism? The ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people to-day is--How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the good government associations, this is all herd life--"following the herd"--democracy means a wholly different kind of existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society--democracy depends upon the creative power of every man. We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because the modes by which the individual are brought forth and made effective are the modes of practical politics. But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the individual we are to find within the group? Every man to count as one? That was once our slogan. Now we have relegated it to a mechanical age. To-day we see that every many must count for infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a cog in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point of view the whole itself. A man said to me the other day, "That is not democracy, that is mysticism." But why mysticism? It is our daily life as lived from hour to hour. We join with one group of men at work, with another at play, another in our civic committee, another in our art club. Man's life is one of manifold relatings. His vote at the polls must express not his particularist self, but the whole complex of his related life, must express as much of the whole as these multiple relations have brought into existence for him, through him. I find my expression of the whole-idea, the whole-will, through my group life. The group must always dictate the modes of activity for the individual. We must put clearly before us the true individual with his infinite relations, expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics, as the meaning of democracy. The first purpose of genuine politics is to make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign (sic) of outlook. In every man is the potential of such expression. To call it forth is the aim of all training, the end sought by all modes of real living. Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers. Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization. Many men despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as they should be, they must be clearly understood as creative. What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative power? The activity which produces the true individual is at the same time interweaving him and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has creative force. Does this seem "mystical?" The power of our corporations depends upon this capability of men to interknit themselves into such genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is the "real personality" of modern legal theory. Are our company directors and corporation lawyers usually mystics? The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands a new attitude and a new activity in man. The fallacy of self-and- others fades away and there is only self-in-and-through-others, only others so firmly rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing there that sundering is impossible. We must now enter upon modes of living commensurate with this thought. What American politics need to-day is positive principles. We do not want to "regulate" our trusts to "restrain" our bosses. The measure of our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. It may be necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing state of the garden. The group organization movement means the substitution of intention for accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. It rests on the solid assumption that this is a man-made not a machine-made world, that men and women are capable of constructing their own life, and that not upon socialism or any rule or any order or any plan or any utopia can we rest our hearts, but only on the force of a united and creative citizenship. We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once from the region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a practical scheme of living. We hear a good deal of academic talk about "the functioning of the social mind"; what does it all amountto? We have no social mind yet, so we have no functioning of the social mind. We want the directive force of consciously integrated thought and will. All our ideas of conscious self-determination lead us to a new method: it is not merely that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern ourselves; it is not only that we must be given "free speech," we must learn a speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights; it is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created. Politics have one task only--to create. To create? But what are politics to create? The state? The state is now discredited in many quarters. The extremists cry, "The state is dead. Down with the state." And it is by no means the extremists alone who are saying that our present state has played us false and that therefore we are justified in abolishing it. An increasing number of men are thinking what one writer has put into words, "We have passed from the regime of the state to that of the groups." We must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to get the advantage of the group. Many trickles have gone to feed the stream of reaction against the state: (1) an economic and industrial progress which demands political recognition, which demands that labor have a share in political power, (2) the trend of philosophic thought towards pluralism and the whole anti-intellectualistic tendency, (3) a progressive legal theory of the "real personality" of groups, (4) a growing antagonism to the state because it is supposed to embody the crowd mind: our electorate is seen as a crowd hypnotized by the party leaders, big words, vague ideas and loose generalizations, (5) our life of rapidly increasing intercourse has made us see our voluntary associations as real and intimate, the state as something remote and foreign to us, and (6) the increasing alignment before the war of interests across state lines. Every one of these reasons has force. Almost any one of these reasons is sufficient to turn political theory into new channels, seeking new currents of political life. Yet if our present state is taken from us and we are left with our multiple group life, we are at once confronted with many questions. Shall the new state be based on occupational groups or neighborhood groups? Shall they form a unifying or a plural state? Shall the group or the individual be the basis of politics? The pluralist gives us the group as the unit of politics, but most of the group theories of politics are as entirely particularistic as the old "individualistic" theories; our particularism is merely transferred from the individual to the group. Pluralism is the most vital trend in political thought to-day, but there are many dangers lurking in pluralism as at present understood. The pluralists apotheosize the group; the average American, on the other hand, is afraid of the group because he thinks of it chiefly in the form of corporation and trust. Both make the same mistake: both isolate the group. The group in relation must be the object of our study if that study is to be fruitful for politics. The pluralists have pointed out diversity but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question to which we must find an answer--What is to be done of this diversity? Some of the pluralists tend to lose the individual in the group; others, to abandon the state for the group. But the individual, the group, the state--they are all there to be reckoned with--we cannot ignore or minimize any one. The relation of individual to group, of group to group, of individual and group to state--the part that labor is to have in the new state--these are the questions to the consideration of which this book is directed. This book makes no attempt, however, to construct the new state, only to offer certain suggestions. But before the details of a new order are even hinted at, we must look far enough within for our practical suggestions to have value. In Part I we shall try to find the fundamental principles which must underlie the new state; in Part II we shall see how far they are expressed in present political forms; in Part III we shall consider how they can be expressed. When they are fully expressed, then we shall have the true Federal State, then we shall see appearing the World State. To sum up this Introduction: The immediate problem of political science is to discover the method of self-government. Industrial democracy, the self-government of smaller nations, the "sovereignty" of an International League, our own political power,--how are these to be attained? Not by being "granted" or "conferred." Genuine control, power, authority are always a growth. Self-government is a psychological process. It is with that psychological process that this book is largely concerned. To free the way for that process is the task of practical politics. New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we must open the way for their entrance and onflow. To-day the individual is submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy, the herd theory. Free him from these, release his energies, and he with all other Freemen will work out quick, flexible, constantly changing forms which shall respond sensitively to every need. Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary because of changing social and economic conditions cannot be brought about. The first reform needed in our political practice is to find some method by which the government shall continuously represent the people. No state can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew. The organization of men in small local groups gives opportunity for this continuous political activity which ceaselessly creates the state. Our government forms cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be sensitive, mobile channels for the quick and quickening soul of the individual to flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth the state. Thus every man is the state at every moment, whether in daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself, leading a myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in its humblest citizen as in its supreme assembly. The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative citizenship, must predominantly and preeminently body itself and be acknowledged by every human being. Then will "practical politics" be for the first time practical. 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 aim 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 inter-weaving 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 the 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." There is, however, another and very important aspect of contemporary psychology closely connected with this one of relation. We are to-day seeking to understand the sources of human motives [1], and then to free their channels so that these 1. See William McDougall, Social Psychology elementary springs of human activity (the fundamental instincts of man) shall not be dammed but flow forth in normal fashion, for normal man is constructive. A few years ago, for instance, we were satisfied merely to condemn sabotage and repudiation of law; now we are trying to discover the cause of this deviation from the normal in order to see if it can be removed. This necessity for the understanding of the nature and vital needs of men has not yet reached full self-consciousness, but appears in diverse forms: as the investigation of the I.W.W., as a study of "Human Nature in Politics," an examination of "The Great Society," as child-study, as Y.M.C.A. efforts to nourish all sides of men at the front, etc. etc. To-day the new psychology speaks to many voices. Soon we may hope for some unified formulation of all this, varied and scattered utterance. Soon we may hope also that the connection will be made between this aspect of contemporary psychology and the group psychology upon which this book is mainly founded. I wish to add my reasons for giving quotations from many writers whose names I have not cited. This has been chiefly because often the sentence or phrase quoted taken away from all context does not give a fair idea of the writer's complete thought, and I have used it not in an attempt to refute these writers, but merely as illustrating certain tendencies to which we are all more or less subject at present. Many of the writers with whom I have disagreed in some particular have been in the main my teachers and guides. A certain amount of repetition has seemed necessary in order to look at the same idea from a number of angles and to make different applications of the same principle. From a few friends I have received much help. My thanks are especially due to my teacher and counsellor of many years, Miss Anna Boynton Thompson, who went over the first copy of the manuscript with me and gave to it the most careful consideration and criticism, offering constantly invaluable suggestion and advice; to her unflagging and most generous help the final form owes more than I can quite express. The inception of the book is due to my friends and fellow-workers, Mrs. Louis Brandeis, Mrs. Richard Cabot and Mr. Arthur Woodworth, as also much of its thought to the stimulus of "group" discussion with them. Mrs. Charles W. Mixter, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor H.A. Overstreet, Professor W. Ernest Hocking and Mr. Roscoe Pound have read the manuscript in full or in part and have given me many valuable suggestions. I owe to my friend, Miss Isobel L. Briggs, daily help, advice and encouragement in the development of the book, and the revision of manuscript and proofs
	Chapter I The Group and the New Psychology Politics must have a technique based on the understanding of the laws of association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology. Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency of scientific method, of analysis, of efficiency engineering. The study of democracy has been based largely on the study of institutions; it should be based on the study of how men behave together. We have to deal, not with institutions, or any mechanical thing, or with abstract ideas, or "man," or anything but just men, ordinary men. The importance of the new psychology is that it acknowledges man as the centre and shaper of his universe. In his nature all institutions are latent and perforce must be adapted to this nature. Man not things must be the starting point of the future. But man in association, for no man lives to himself. And we must understand further that the laws of association are the laws of the group. We have long been trying to understand the relation of the individual to society; we are only just beginning to see that there is no "individual," that there is no "society." It is not strange, therefore, that our efforts have gone astray, that our thinking yields small return for politics. The old psychology was based on the isolated individual as the unit, on the assumption that a man thinks, feels and judges independently. Now that we know that there is no such thing as a separate ego, that individuals are created by reciprocal interplay, our whole study of psychology is being transformed. Likewise there is no "society" thought of vaguely as the mass of people we see around us. I am always in relation not to "society" but to some concrete group. When do we ever as a matter of fact think of "society" ? Are we not always thinking of our part in our board of directors or college faculty, in the dinner party last night [1], in our football team, our club, our political party, our trade-union, our church? 1. Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common. Practically "society" is for every one of us a number of groups. The recognition of this constitutes a new step in sociology analogous to the contribution William James made in regard to the individual. James brought to popular recognition the truth that since man is a complex of experiences there are many selves in each one. So society as a complex of groups includes many social minds. The craving we have for union is satisfied by group life, groups and groups, groups ever widening, ever unifying, but always groups. We sometimes say that man is spiritually dependent upon society; what we are referring to is his psychic relation to his groups. The vital relation of the individual to the world is through groups; they are the potent factors in shaping our lives. Hence social psychology cannot be the application of the old individual psychology to a number of people. A few years ago I went to a lecture on "Social Psychology," as the subject was announced. Not a word was said except on the nervous systems and other aspects of individual psychology, but at the last moment the lecturer told us that had there been time he would have applied what he has said to social conditions! It reminded me of the mental processes of the man who, when he wanted to know something about Chinese metaphysics, first looked up China in the encyclopedia and then metaphysics and put them together. The new psychology must take people with their inheritance, their "tendencies," their environment, and then focus its attention on their interrelatings. The most careful laboratory work must be done to discover the conditions which make these interrelatings possible, which make there interrelatings fruitful. Some writers make "socially minded" tendencies on the part of individuals the subject of social psychology, but such tendencies belong still to the field of individual psychology. A social action is not an individual initiative with social application [1]. 1. The old definition of the word social has been a tremendous drag on politics. Social policies are not policies for the good of the people but policies created by the people, etc. etc. We read in the work of a continental sociologist, "When a social will is born in the brain of a man," but a social will never is born in the brain of a man. Neither is social psychology the determination of how far social factors determine the individual consciousness. Social psychology must concern itself primarily with the _interaction_ of minds. Early psychology was based solely on the study of the individual; early sociology was based on the study of society. But there is no such thing as the "individual," there is no such thing as "society"; there is only the group and the group-unit--the social individual. Social psychology must begin with an intensive study of the group, of the selective processes which go on within it, the differentiated reactions, the likenesses and unlikenesses, and the spiritual energy which unites them. The acceptance and the living of the new psychology will do away with all the progeny of particularistic psychology: consent of the governed, majority rule, external leadership, industrial wars, national wars etc. From the analysis of the group must come an understanding of collective thought and collective feeling, of the common will and concerted activity, of the true nature of freedom, the illusion of self-and-others, the essential unity of men, the real meaning of patriotism, and the whole secret of progress and of life as a genuine interpenetration which produces true community. All thinking men are demanding a new state. The question is --What form shall that state take? No one of us will be able to give an answer until we have studied men in association and have discovered the laws of association. This has not been done yet, but already we can see that a political science which is not based on a knowledge of the laws of association gained by a study of the group will soon seem the crudest kind of quackery. Syndicalism in reaction to the so-called "metaphysical" foundation of politics is based on "objective rights," on function, on its conception of modes of association which shall emphasize the object of the associated and not the relation of the associated to one another. The new psychology goes a step further and sees these as one, but how can any of these things be discussed abstractly? Must we not first study men in association? Young men in the hum of actual life, practical politicians, the members of constitutional conventions, labor leaders -- all these must base their work on the principles of group psychology. The fundamental reason for the study of group psychology is that no one can give us democracy, we must learn democracy. To be a democrat is not to decide on a certain form of human association, it is to learn how to live with other men. The whole labor movement is being kept back by people not knowing how to live together much more than by any deliberate refusal to grant justice. The trouble with syndicalism is that its success depends on group action and we know almost nothing of the laws of the group. I have used group in this book with the meaning of men associating under the law of interpenetration as opposed to the law of the crowd -- suggestion and imitation. This may be considered an arbitrary definition, but of course I do not care about names, I only want to emphasize the fact that men meet under two different sets of laws. Social psychology may include both group psychology and crowd psychology, but of these two group psychology is much the more important. For a good many years now we have been dominated by the crowd school, by the school which taught that people met together are governed by suggestion and imitation, and less notice has been taken of all the interplay which is the real social process that we have in a group but not in a crowd. How men behave in crowds, and the relation of the crowd conception of politics to democracy, will be considered in later chapters. While I recognize that men are more often at present under the laws of the crowd than of the group, I believe that progress depends on the group, and, therefore, that the group should be the basis of a progressive social psychology. The group process contains the secret of collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for every individual to learn, it is our chief hope for the political, the social, the international life of the future [1]. 1. This is essentially the process by which sovereignty is created. Therefore chapters II-VI on The Group Process are the basis of the conception of sovereignty given in Part III and of the relation of that conception to the politics of reconstruction.
	Chapter II The Group Process: The Collective Idea Let us begin at once to consider the group process. Perhaps the most familiar example of the evolving of a group idea is a committee meeting. The object of a committee meeting is first of all to create a common idea. I do not go to a committee meeting merely to give my own ideas. If that were all, I might write my fellow-members a letter. But neither do I go to learn other people's ideas. If that were all, I might ask each to write me a letter. I go to a committee meeting in order that all together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than any one of our ideas alone, moreover which will be better than all of our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by any process of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all. This subtle psychic process by which the resulting idea shapes itself is the process we want to study. Let us imagine that you, I, A, B and C are in conference. Now what from our observation of groups will take place? Will you say something, and then I add a little something, and then A, and B, and C, until we have together build up, brick-wise, an idea, constructed some plan of action? Never. A has one idea, B another, C's idea is something different from either, and so on, but we cannot add all these ideas to find the group idea. They will not add any more than apples and chairs will add. But we gradually find that our problems can be solved, not indeed by mechanical aggregations, but by the subtle process of the intermingling of all the different ideas of the group. A says something. Thereupon a thought arises in B's mind. Is it B's idea or A's? Neither. It is a mingling of the two. We find that A's idea, after having been presented to B and returned to A, has become slightly, or largely, different from what it was originally. In like manner it is affected by C and so on. But in the same way B's idea has been affected by all the others, and not only does A's idea feel the modifying influence of each of the others, but A's ideas are affected by B's relation to all the others, and A's plus B's are affected by all the others individually and collectively, and so on and on until the common idea springs into being. We find in the end that it is not a question of my idea being supplemented by yours, but that there has been evolved a composite idea. But by the time we have reached this point we have become tremendously civilized people, for we have learned one of the most important lessons of life: we have learned to do that most wonderful thing, to say "I" representing a whole instead of "I" representing one of our separate selves. The course of action decided upon is what we all together want, and I see that it is better than what I had wanted alone. It is what _I_ now want. We have experienced this at committee meetings or conferences. We see therefore that we cannot view the content of the collective mind as a holiday procession, one part after another passing before our mental eyes; every part is bound up with every other part, every tendency is conditioned by every other tendency. It is like a game of tennis. A serves the ball to B. B returns the serve but his play is influenced as largely by the way the ball has been served to him as it is by his own method of return. A sends the ball back to B, but his return is made up of his own play plus the way in which the ball has been played to him by B plus his own original serve. Thus in the end does action and reaction become inextricably bound up together. I have described briefly the group process. Let us consider what is required of the individual in order that the group idea shall be produced. First and foremost each is to do his part. But just here we have to get rid of some rather antiquated notions. The individual is not to facilitate agreement by courteously (!) waiving his own point of view. That is just a way of shirking. Nor may I say, "Others are able to plan this better than I." Such an attitude is the result either of laziness or of a misconception. There are probably many present at the conference who could make wiser plans than I alone, but that is not the point, we have come together each to give something. I must not subordinate myself, I must affirm myself and give my full positive value to that meeting. And as the psychic coherence of the group can be obtained only by the full contribution of every member, so we see that a readiness to compromise must be no part of the individual's attitude. Just so far as people think that the basis of working together is compromise or concession, just so far they do not understand the first principles of working together. Such people think that when they have reached an appreciation of the necessity of compromise they have reached a high plane of social development; they conceive themselves as nobly willing to sacrifice part of their desire, part of their idea, part of their will, in order to secure the undoubted benefit of concerted action. But compromise is still on the same plane as fighting. War will continue--between capital and labor, between nation and nation--until we relinquish the ideas of compromise and concession [1] 1. This is the heart of the latest ethical teaching based on the most progressive psychology: between two apparently conflicting courses of action, a and b, a is not to be followed and b suppressed, nor b followed and a suppressed, nor must compromise between the two be sought, but the process must always be one of integration. Our progress is measured by our ability to proceed from integration to integration. But at the same time that we offer fully what we have to give, we must be eager for what all others have to give. If I ought not to go to my group feeling that I must give up my own ideas in order to accept the opinions of others, neither ought I to go to force my ideas upon others. The "harmony" that comes from the domination of one man is not the kind we want. At a board of directors' meeting once Mr. E.H. Harriman said, "Gentlemen, we must have cooperation. I insist upon it." They "cooperated" and all his motions were put through. At the end of the meeting some one asked Mr. Harriman to define cooperation. "Oh, that's simple," he said, "do as I say and do it damned quick." There are many people who conscientiously go to their group thinking it their duty to impose their ideas upon others, but the time is coming soon when we are going to see that we have no more right to get our own way by persuading people than by bullying or bribing them. To take our full share in the synthesis is all that is legitimate [2]. 2. This statement may be misunderstood unless there is borne in mind at the same time: (1) the necessity for the keenest individual thinking as the basis of group thinking, and (2) that every man should maintain his point of view until it has found its place in the group thought, that is, until he has been neither overruled nor absorbed but integrated. Thus the majority idea is not the group idea. Suppose I belong to a committee composed of five: of A, B, C, D and myself. According to the old theory of my duties as a committee member I might say, "A agrees with me, if I can get B to agree with me that will make a majority and I can carry my point." That is, we five can then present this idea to the world as our group idea. But this is not a group idea, although it may be the best substitute we can get for the moment. To a genuine group idea every man must contribute what is in him to contribute. Thus even the passing of a unanimous vote by a group of five does not prove the existence of a group idea if two or three (or even one) out of indifference or laziness or prejudice, or shut-upness, or a misconception of their function, have not added their individual thought to the creation of the group thought. No member of a group which is to create can be passive. All must be active and constructively active. It is not, however, to be constructively active merely to add a share: it must be a share which is related to and bound up with every other share. And it must be given in such a way that it fits in with what others are giving. Some one said to me the other day, "Don't you think Mr. X talks better than anyone else in Boston?" Well the fact is that Mr. X talks so well that I can never talk with him. Everything he says has such a ring of finality, is such a rounding up of the whole question, that it leaves nothing more to be said on the subject. This is particularly the kind of thing to be avoided in a committee meeting or conference. There are many people, moreover, who want to score, to be brilliant, rather than to find agreement. Others come prepared with what they are going to say and either this has often been said long before they get a chance to speak, or, in any case, it allows no give-and-take, so they contribute nothing; when we really learn the process our ideas will be struck out by the interplay. To compare notes on what we have thought separately is not to think together. I asked a man once to join a committee I was organizing and he replied that he would be very glad to come and give his advice. I didn't want him -- and didn't have him. I asked another man and he said he would like very much to come and learn but that he couldn't contribute anything. I didn't have him either -- I hadn't a school. Probably the last man thought he was being modest and, therefore, estimable. But what I wanted was to get a group of people who would deliberately work out a thing together. I should have liked very much to have the man who felt that he had advice to give if he has had also what we are now learning to call the social attitude, that is, that of a man willing to take his place in the group, no less and no more. This definition of social attitude is very different from our old one -- the willingness to give; my friend who wanted to come and give advice had that, but that is a crude position compared with the one we are now advocating. It is clear then that we do not go to our group -- trade-union, city council, college faculty -- to be passive and learn, and we do not go to push through something we have already decided we want. Each must discover and contribute that which distinguishes him from others, his difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process [1] 1. We must not of course confuse the type of unifying spoken of here (an integration), which is a psychological process, with the "reconciliation of opposites," which is a logical process. We must have an imagination which will leap from the particular to the universal. Our joy, our satisfaction, must always be in the more inclusive aspect of our problem. We can test our group in this way: do we come together to register the results of individual thought, to compare the results of individual thought in order to make selections therefrom, or do we come together to create a common idea? Whenever we have a real group something new _is_ actually created. We can now see therefore that the object of group life is not to find the best individual thought, but the collective thought. A committee meeting isn't like a prize show aimed at calling out the best each can possibly produce and then the prize (the vote) awarded to the best of all these individual opinions. The object of a conference is not to get a lot of different ideas, as is often thought, but just the opposite -- to get at one idea. There is nothing rigid or fixed about thoughts, they are entirely plastic, and ready to yield themselves completely to their master -- the group spirit [1] 1. I am sometimes told that mine is a counsel of perfection only to be realized in the millenium (sic), but we cannot take even the first step until we have chosen our path. I have given some of the conditions necessary for collective thinking. In every governing board -- city counsels, hospital and library trustees, the boards of colleges and churches, in business and industry, in directors' meetings -- no device should be neglected which will help to produce joint rather than individual thinking. But no one has yet given us a scientific analysis of the conditions necessary or how to fulfill them. We do not yet know, for instance, the best number to bring out as many differences as possible, the best number to bring out the group idea, the number, that is, which will bring out as many differences as possible and yet form a whole or group. We cannot guess at it but only get it through scientific experiments. Much laboratory work has to be done. The numbers on Boards of Education, on Governors' Commissions, should be determined by psychological as well as by political reasons. Again it is said that private sessions are undemocratic. If they contribute to true collective thinking (instead of efforts to dazzle the gallery), then in so far, they are democratic, for there is nothing in then world so democratic as the production of a genuine group will. Mr. Gladstone must have appreciated the necessity of making conditions favorable to joint thinking, for I have been told that at important meetings of the Cabinet he planned beforehand where each member should sit. The members of a group are reciprocally conditioning forces none of which acts as it would act if any one member were different or absent. You can often see this in a board of directors: if one director leaves the room, every many becomes slightly different. When the conditions for collective thinking are more or less fulfilled, then the expansion of life will begin. Through my group I learn the secret of wholeness [1] 1. The break in the English Cabinet in 1915, which led to the coalition Cabinet, came when both Kitchener and Churchill tried to substitute individual for group action. The inspiration of the group is proportionate to the degree in which we do actually identify ourselves with the whole and think that _we_ are doing this, not Mr. A and Mr. B and I, but we, the united we, the singular not the plural pronoun we. (We shall have to write a new grammar to meet the needs of the times, as non-Euclidean geometries are now being published.) Then we shall no longer have a feeling of individual triumph, but feel only elation that the group has accomplished something. Much of the evil of our political and social life comes from the fact that we crave personal recognition and personal satisfaction; as soon as our greatest satisfaction is group satisfaction, many of our present problems will disappear. When one thinks of one's self as part of a group, it means keener moral perceptions, greater strength of will, more enthusiasm and zest in life. We shall enjoy living the social life when we understand it; the things which we do and achieve together will give us much greater happiness than the things we do and achieve by ourselves. It has been asked what, in peace, is going to take the place of those songs men sing as they march to battle which at the same time thrill and unite them. The songs which the hearts of men will sing as they go forward in life with one desire -- the song of the common will, the social will of man. Men descend to meet? This is not my experience. The _laissez-aller_ which people allow themselves when alone disappears when they meet. Then they pull themselves together and give one another of their best. We see this again and again. Sometimes the idea of the group stands quite visibly before us as one which none of us is quite living up to by himself. We feel it there, an impalpable, substantial thing in our midst. It raises us to the nth power of action, it fires our minds and glows in our hearts and fulfils and actuates itself no less, but rather on this very account, because it has been generated only by our being together.