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 today, 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 with 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. Today 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 air today 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 interweaving 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 today 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 this 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 today seeking to understand the sources of human motives,1 and then to free their channels so that these elemental 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. Today the new psychology speaks in 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 reason 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.

The New State

Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government

Part I

The Group Principle

I

The Group and the New Psychology

Politics must have a technique based on an 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 returns 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,2 in our football team, our club, our political party, our trade-union, our church? 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 his 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 had said to social conditions! It reminded me of our old acquaintance Silas Wegg 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 these 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.3 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 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 the 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.4

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 built 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 problem can be solved, not indeed by mechanical aggregation, 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 all 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.