The Occupational Group
Chapter XXIX
Political Pluralism and Sovereignty

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

I have said that many of the pluralists are opposed to the monistic state because they do not see that a collective and distributive sovereignty can exist together. They talk of the Many and the One without analyzing the process by which the Many and the One are creating each other. We now see that the problem of the compounding of consciousness, of the One and the Many, need not be
left either to an intellectualistic or to an intuitive metaphysics.

It is to be solved through a laboratory study of group psychology.
When we have that, we shall not have to argue any more about the One and the Many: we shall actually see the Many and the One emerging at the same time; we can then work out the laws of the
relation of the One (the state) to the Many (the individual), and of the Many (the individual) to the One (the state), not as a metaphysical question but on a scientific basis. And the process of the Many becoming One is the process by which sovereignty is created. Our conceptions of sovereignty can no longer rest on mere abstractions, theory, speculative thought. How absurdly inadequate such processes are to explain the living, interweaving web of humanity. The question of sovereignty concerns the organization of men (which obviously must be fitted to their nature), hence it finds its answer through the psychological analysis of man.

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

The idea of sovereignty held by guild socialists [1] is based largely on the so-called "objective" theory of _le droit_ expounded by M. Leon Duguit of Bordeaux. This theory is accepted as the "juridical basis" of a new state, what some call the functionarist state [2]. Man, Duguit tells us, has no rights as man, but only as a member of the social order. His rights are based on the fact of social interdependence -- on his relations and consequent obligations. In fact he has no rights, but duties and powers. All power and all obligation is found in "social solidarity," in a constantly evolving social solidarity [3].

1. See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned above.

2. See "Traite de Droit Constitutionnel" and "Etudes de Droit Public": I, L'Etat, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L'Etat, Les Gouvernants and Les Agents.
As in French _droit_ may be either law or a rigat, Duguit, in order to distinguish between these meanings, follows the German distinction of _objektives Recht_ and _subjektives Recht, and speaks of le droit objectif and _le droit subjectif_, thus meaning by _le droit objectif_ merely law.
But because he at the same time writes of power as resting on function in contradistinction to the classical theory of the abstract "rights" of man, rights apart from law and only declared by law, political writers sometimes speak of Duguit's "objective" theory of law, as opposed to a "subjective" theory of law, when jurists would tell us that law is objective, and that subjective right is always merely a right, my right. This matter of terminology must be made much clearer than it is at present.

3. Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French and Roman law has been questioned.

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

But Duguit says that if there were a collective will there is no reason why it should impose itself on the individual wills. "_L'affirmat ion que la collectivile a le pouvoir le'gitime de commander force qu'elle est la collectivite", est une affirmation d'ordre me'taphysique ou religieux_. . . ." This in itself shows a
misunderstanding of the evolution of a collective will. This school does not seem to understand that every one must contribute to the collective will; ideally it would have no power unless this
appened, actually we can only be constantly approaching this ideal [1]. Duguit makes a thing-in-itself of _la volonte' nationale_ --it is a most insidious fallacy which we all fall into again and again. But we can never accept that kind of a collective will. We believe in a collective will only so far as it is _really_ forming from out our actual daily life of intermingling men and women.
There is nothing "metaphysical" or "religious" about this. Duguit says metaphysics "_doit rester e'tranger a' toute jurisprudence_. . . ." We agree to that and insist that jurisprudence must be
founded on social psychology.

1. I have just read in a work on sociology, "Men surrender their individual wills to the collective will." No, the true social process is not when they _surrender_ but when they _contribute_ their wills to the collective will. See chs.
Il-VI, "The Group Process."

Five people produce a collective idea, a collective will. That will becomes at once an imperative upon those five people. It is not an imperative upon any one else. On the other hand no one else can make imperatives for those five people. It has been generated by the social process which is a self-sufficing, all-inclusive process. The same process which creates the collective will creates at the same time the imperative of the collective will. It is absolutely impossible to give self-government: no one has the right to give it; no one has the power to give it. Group A _allows_ group B to govern itself. This is an empty permission unless B has _learned how_ to govern itself. Self-government must always be
grown. Sovereignty is always a psychological process.

Many of Duguit's errors come from a misconception of the social process. Violently opposed to a collective will, he sees in the individual thought and will the only genuine "_chose en soi_" (it is interesting to notice that _la chose en soi_ finds a place in the thought of many pluralists). Not admitting the process of "community" he asserts that _la re'gle de droit_ is anterior and superior to the state; he does not see the true relation of _le droit_ to l'e'tat_, that they evolve together, that the same
process which creates _le droit_ creates _l'e'tat_ [1]. The will of the people, he insists, can not create _le droit_. Here he does not see the unity of the social process. He separates will and purpose and the activity of the reciprocal inter-change instead of seeing them as one. Certainly the will of the people does not create _le droit_, but the social process in its entire unity does.

"Positive law must constantly follow _le droit objectif_." Of course. "_Le droit objectif_ is constantly evolving." Certainly.
But how evolving? Here is where we disagree. The social process creates _le droit objectif_, and will is an essential part of the social process. Purpose is an essential part of the social process.
Separate the parts of the social process and you have a different idea of jurisprudence, of democracy, of political institutions.
Aim is all-important for Duguit. The rule of _le droit_ is the rule of conscious ends: only the aim gives a will its worth; if the aim is juridical (conformed to _la re'gle de droit_), then the will is juridical. Thus Duguit's pragmatism is one which has not yet rid itself of absolute standards. It might be urged that it has, because he finds his absolute standards in "social solidarity." But any one who believes that the individual will is a _chose en soi_, and who separates the elements of the social process, does not
wholly admit the self-sufficing character of that process.

1. See p. 130.

The modern tendency in many quarters, however, in regard to conceptions of social practice, is to substitute ends for will [1].

1. De Maeztu tells us, "Bights do not arise from personality.
This idea is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of the associated with the thing which associates them Authority, Liberty, and Function, p.250.
Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of "murder in the air" when it is a question of the "competition of ideas, not of real collective personalities."
(See "The Discredited State," in _The Political Quarterly_, February, 1915.) This seems a curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a twentieth-century writer.
The article is, however, an interesting and valuable one.
See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I,
472.

This is a perfectly comprehensible reaction, but future jurisprudence must certainly unite these two ideas. Professor Jethro Brown says, "The justification for governmental action is found not in consent but in the purpose it serves." Not in that alone. De Maeztu says, "The profound secret of associations is not that men have need of one another, but that they need the same thing." These two ideas can merge. Professor Brown makes the common good the basis of the new doctrine of natural right [1]. But we must all remember, what I do not doubt this writer does remember, that purpose can never be a _chose en soi_, and that, of the utmost importance, the "new natural law" can be brought into manifestation only by certain modes of association.

1. See "Underlying Principles of Legislation."

It is true, as Duguit says, that the state has the "right" to will because of the thing willed, that it has no "subjective" right to will, that its justification is in its purpose. (This is of course the truth in regard to all our "rights"; they are justified only by the use we make of them.) And yet there is a truth in the old idea of the "right" of a collectivity to will. These two ideas must be synthesized. They _are_ synthesized by the new psychology which sees the purpose forming the will at the same time as the
will forms the purpose, which finds no separation anywhere in the social process. We can never think of purpose as something in front which leads us on, as the carrot the donkey. Purpose is never in front of us, it appears at every moment with the appearance of will. Thus the new school of jurisprudence founded on social psychology cannot be a teleological school alone, but must be founded on all the elements which constitute the social process.
Ideals do not operate in a vacuum. This theorists seem sometimes to forget, but those of us who have had tragic experience of this truth are likely to give more emphasis to the interaction of purpose, will and activity, past and present activity. The recognition that _le droit_ is the product of a group process swallows up the question as to whether it is "objective" or "subjective"; it is neither, it is both; we look at the matter quite differently [1].

1. The teleological school of sociology is interesting just here. While it marked a long advance on older theories, the true place of selection of ends is to-day more clearly seen.
We were told: "Men have wants, therefore they come together to seek means to satisfy those wants." When do men "come together"? When were they ever separated? But it is not necessary to push this further.

To sum up this point. We must all, I think, agree with the "objective" conception of law in its essence, but not in its dividing the social process, a true unity, into separate parts.
Rights arise from relation, and purpose is bound up in the relation. The relation of men to one another and to the object sought are part of the same process. Duguit has rendered us invaluable service in his insistence that _le droit_ must be based on "_la vie actuelle_," but he does not take the one step further and see that _le droit_ is born within the group, that there is an essential law of the group as different from other modes of association, and that this has many implications.

The _droit_ evolved by a group is the _droit_ of that group. The_droit_ evolved by a state-group (we agree that there is no state-group yet, the state is evolving, the _droit_ is evolving, there is only an approximate state, an approximately genuine_droit_) is the _droit_ of the state. The contribution of the new psychology is that _le droit_ comes from relation and is always in relation. The warning of the new psychology to the advocates of vocational representation is that the _droit_ (either as law or
right) [2] evolved by men of one occupation only will represent too little intermingling to express the "community" truth. We don't want doctors' ethics and lawyers' ethics, and so on through the various groups. That is just the trouble at present. Employers and employees meet in conference. Watch those conferences. The difference of interest is not always the whole difficulty; there is also the difference of standard. Capitalist ethics and workman ethics are often opposed. We must accept _le droit_ as a social product, as a group product, but we must have groups which will unify interests and standards. Law and politics can be founded on nothing but vital modes of association.

2. I have tried not to jump the track from legal right to ethical right but occasionally one can speak of them together, if it is understood that one is not thereby merging them.

Mr. Roscoe Pound's exposition of modern law is just here a great help to political theory. The essential, the vital part of his teaching, is, not his theory of law based on interests, not his emphasis upon relation, but his bringing together of these two ideas. This takes us out of the vague, nebulous region of much of the older legal and political theory, and shows us the actual method of living our daily lives. All that he says of relation implies that we must seek and bring into use those modes of
association which will reveal true interests, actual interests, yet not particularist interests but the interests discovered through group relations -- employer and employed, master and servant, landlord and tenant, etc. But, and this is of great importance, these groups must be made into genuine groups. If law is to be a group-product, we must see that our groups are real groups, we must find the true principle of association. For this we need, as I must continually repeat, the study of group psychology. "Life," "man," "society," are coming to have little meaning for us: it is your life and my life with which we are concerned, not "man" but the men we see around us, not "society" but the many societies in which we pass our lives. "Social" values? We want individual values, but individual values discovered through group relations.

To sum up this point: (1) law should be a group-product, (2) we should therefore have genuine groups, (3) political method must be such that the "law" of the group can become embodied in our
legislation.

M. Duguit's disregarding of the laws of that intermingling which is the basis of his _droit objectif_ leads to a partial understanding only of the vote. Voting is for him still in a way a particularist matter. To be sure he calls it a function and that marks a certain advance. Moreover he wishes us to consider the vote an "objective" power, an "objective" duty, not a "subjective" right. This is an alluring theory in a pragmatic age. And if you see it leading to syndicalism which you have already accepted beforehand, it is all the more alluring! But to call the vote a function is only half the story; as long as it is a particularist vote, it does not help us much to have it rest on function, or rather, it goes just half the way. It must rest on the intermingling of all my functions, it must rest on the intermingling of all my functions with all the functions of all the others; it must rest indeed on social solidarity, but a social
solidarity in which every man interpenetrating with every other is thereby approaching a whole of which he is the whole at one point.

Duguit, full of Rousseau, does not think it possible to have a collective sovereignty without every one having an equal share of this collective sovereignty, and he most strenuously opposes _le suffrage universal egalitaire_. But le suffrage universel egalitaire staring all the obvious inequalities of man in the face, Rousseau's divided sovereignty based on an indivisible sovereignty_- all these things no longer trouble you when you see the vote as the expression at one point of some approximate whole produced by the intermingling of men.

True sovereignty and true functionalism are not opposed; the vote resting on "subjective" right and the vote resting on "objective" power are not opposed, but the particularist vote and the genuinely
individual vote are opposed. Any doctrine which contains a trace of particularism in any form cannot gain our allegiance.

Again Duguit's ignoring of the psychology of the social process leads him to the separation of governors and governed. This separation is for him the essential fact of the state. Sovereignty
is with those individuals who can impose their will upon others. He says no one can give orders to himself, but as a matter of fact no one can really give orders to any one but himself [1]. Here Duguit
confuses present facts and future possibilities. Let us _be_ the state, let us be sovereign -- over ourselves. As the problem in the life of each one of us is to find the way to unify the warring
elements within us -- as only thus do we gain sovereignty over ourselves -- so the problem is the same for the state. Duguit is right in saying that the German theory of auto-limitation is unnecessary, but not in the reasons he gives for it. A psychic entity is subordinate to the _droit_ which itself evolves not by auto-limitation, but by the essential and intrinsic law of the group.

1. The old consent theory assumes that some make the laws and others obey them. In the true democracy we shall obey the laws we have ourselves made. To find the methods by which we can be approaching the true democracy is now our task; we can never rest satisfied with "consent."

But Duguit has done us large service not only in his doctrine of a law, a right, born of our actual life, of our always evolving life, but also in his insistence on the individual which makes him one of the builders of the new individualism [2]. We see in the gradual transformation of the idea of natural law which took place among the French jurists of the end of the nineteenth century, the struggle of the old particularism with the feelings-out for the true individualism. That the French have been slow to give up individual rights, that many of them have not given them up for any collective theory, but, feeling the truth underneath the old doctrine, have sought (and found) a different interpretation, a different basis and a different use, has helped us all immeasurably.

2. Although I do not agree with the form individualism takes in his doctrine.

Group psychology shows us the process of man creating social power, evolving his own "rights." We now see that man's only rights are group-rights. These are based on his activity in the group -- you can call it function if you like, only unless you are careful that tends to become mechanical, and it tends to an organic functionalism in which lurk many dangers. But the main point for us to grasp is that we can never understand rights by an abstract discussion of "subjective" _vs_. "objective" -- only by the closest study of the process by which these rights are evolved. The true basis of rights is neither a "mystical" idea of related personalities, nor is it to be found entirely in the relation of
the associated to the object sought; a truly modern conception of law synthesizes these two ideas. "Function," de Maeztu tells us "[is] a quality independent of the wills of men." This is a meaningless sentence to the new psychology. At present the exposition of the "objective" theory of law is largely a polemic against the "subjective." When we understand more of group psychology, and it can be put forth in a positive manner, it will win many more adherents.

Then as soon as the psychological foundation of law is clearly seen, the sovereignty of the state in its old meaning will be neither acclaimed nor denied. An understanding of the group process teaches us the true nature of sovereignty. We can agree with the pluralist school that the present state has no "right" to sovereignty [1]; we can go further and say that the state will never be more than ideally sovereign, further still and say that the whole idea of sovereignty must be recast and take a different
place in political science. And yet, with the meaning given to it by present psychology, it is perhaps the most vital thought of the new politics. The sovereign is not the crowd, it is not millions of
unrelated atoms, but men joining to form a real whole. The atomistic idea of sovereignty is dead, we all agree, but we may learn to define sovereignty differently.

1. Some of the pluralists are concerned, I recognize, with the fact rather than the right of sovereignty.

Curiously enough, some of the pluralists are acknowledged followers of Gierke and Maitland, and base much of their doctrine on the "real personality" of the group. But the group can create its own personality only by the "compounding of consciousness," by every member being at one and the same time an individual and the "real personality." If it is possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a real personality. The imagination of the born pluralist stops with the group [2].

2. The trouble with the pluralists is that their emphasis is not on the fact that the group creates its own personality, but on the fact that the state does _not_ create it When they change this emphasis, their thinking will be unchained, I believe, and leap ahead to the constructive work which we eagerly await and expect from them.

But even in regard to the group the pluralists seem sometimes to fall into contradictions. Sovereignty, we are often told, must be decentralized and divided among the local units. But according to
their own theory by whom is the sovereignty to be divided? The fact is that the local units must _grow_ sovereignty, that we want to revivify local life not for the purpose of breaking up sovereignty,
but for the purpose of creating a real sovereignty.

The pluralists always tell us that the unified state proceeds from the One to the Many; that is why they discard the unified state. This is not true of the unifying state which I am trying to indicate. They think that the only alternative to pluralism is where you begin with the whole. That is, it is true, the classic
monism, but we know now that authority is to proceed from the Many to the One, from the smallest neighborhood group up to the city, the state, the nation. This is the process of life, always a unifying through the interpenetration of the Many -- Oneness an infinite goal.

This is expressed more accurately by saying, as I have elsewhere, that the One and the Many are constantly creating each other. The pluralists object to the One that comes before the Many. They are right, but we need not therefore give up oneness. When we say that there is the One which comes _from_ the Many, this does not mean that the One is _above_ the Many. The deepest truth of life is that the interrelating by which both are at the same time a-making is constant. This must be clearly understood in the building of the new state.

The essential error in the theory of distributed sovereignty is that each group has an isolated sovereignty. The truth is that each should represent the whole united sovereignty at one point as each
individual is his whole group at one point. An understanding of this fact seems to me absolutely necessary to further development of political theory [1]. This does not mean that the state must
come first, that the group gets its power from the state. This the pluralists rightfully resent. The power within the group is its own genetically and wholly. But the same force which forms a group may
form a group of groups.

1. It is also necessary to an understanding of the new international law See ch. XXXV, "The World State."

But the conclusion drawn by some pluralists from the theory of "real personality" is that the state is superfluous because a corporate personality has the right to assert autonomy over itself.
They thus acknowledge that pluralism means for them group and group and group side by side. But here they are surely wrong. They ignore the implications of the psychological fact that power developed within the group does not cease with the formation of the group.
That very same force which has bound the individuals together in the group (and which the theory of "real personality" recognizes) goes on working, you cannot stop it; it is the fundamental force of
life, of all nature, of all humanity, the universal law of being -- the out-reaching for the purpose of further unifying. If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what becomes of it? It
must reach out to embrace other groups in order to repeat exactly the same process.

When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely lost. It only makes a noise. Do we want this to happen to our groups? Are they to end only in disagreeable noises? In order that the group-force shall not be lost, we must provide means for it to go on working effectively after it is no longer needed within the group, so to speak. We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek new forms of unification. No
"whole" can imprison us infinite beings. The centre of today is the circumference of to-morrow.

Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All. From living group to living group to the "real" state -- such must be our line of evolution.

Sovereignty, it is true, is a fact, not a theory. Whoever can gain obedience has the sovereign power. But we must go beyond this and seek those political methods by which the command shall be with
those who have evolved a genuine authority, that is, an authority evolved by what I have called the true social process. We must go beyond this and seek those methods by which a genuine authority
_can_ be evolved, by which the true social process shall be everywhere possible. To repeat: first, the true social process must be given full opportunity and scope, then it must be made the basis of political method. Then shall we see emerging a genuine authority which we can all acclaim as sovereign. There is, I agree with the pluralists, a great advantage in that authority being multiple and
varied, but a static pluralism, so to speak, would be as bad as a static monism. The groups are always reaching out _towards_ unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is that every fresh unity
means (as I have tried to show in chapter III) the throwing out of myriad fresh differences -- our safeguard is that the universe knows no static unity. Unification means sterilization; unifying
means a perpetual generating. We do not want the unified sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group first, you get unifying sovereignty [1].

1. 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?

The Occupational Group
Chapter XXX
Political Pluralism and Functionalism

The Service State vs. the "Sovereign State"

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.

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.

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 extension of our life, but simply as an intensification 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Some of the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many "rights" as he has functions: a shoemaker 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.

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.

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-ndividual, but the group-individual.

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 [1]. If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned today 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 [2].

1. 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.

2. See p.184.

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.

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.

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 [1]. 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.

1. 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

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.