The New State

such an association of citizens, neighbors will have become acquainted with one another in a more vital way than before, and they will have begun to learn how to think and to act together as a neighborhood unit.

We are coming to a more general realization of this. In the municipal buildings in the parks of Chicago, the people are not given free lectures, free moving pictures, free music, free dances etc.; they are invited to develop their own activities. To the Recreation Centres of New York, operated by the Board of Education, are being added the Community Centres controlled by local boards of neighbors. In Boston we have under the School Committee a department of “The Extended Use of School Buildings,” and the aim is to get the people of each district to plan, carry out and supervise what civic, educational and recreational activities they wish in the schoolhouses.

A Chicago minister said the other day that the south side of Chicago was the only part of the city where interest in civic problems and community welfare could be aroused, and this he said was because of the South Park’s work in field houses, clubrooms and gymnasiums for the last ten or twelve years.

When the chairman of the Agricultural Council of Defense of Virginia asked a citizen of a certain county what he thought the prospects were of being able to rouse the people in his county in regard to an increased food production, the prompt reply was, “On the north side of the county we shall have no trouble because we have several Community Leagues there, but on the south side it will be a hard job.”

The School or Community Centre is the real continuation school of America, the true university of true democracy.

Endnotes

1. See William McDougall, Social Psychology. ↩

2. Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common. ↩

3. 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. ↩

4. 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. ↩

5. 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 a 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. ↩

6. 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. ↩

7. 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. ↩

8. I am sometimes told that mine is a counsel of perfection only to be realized in the millennium, but we cannot take even the first step until we have chosen our path. ↩

9. 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. ↩

10. Free speech is not an “individual” right; society needs every man’s difference. ↩

11. It has been overemphasized in two ways: first, many of the writers on imitation ignore the fact that the other law of association, that of interpenetrating, is also in operation in our social life, as well as the fact that it has always been the fundamental law of existence; secondly, they speak as if it were necessary for human beings to be under the law of imitation, not that it is merely a stage in our development. ↩

12. This is the alpha and omega of philosophical teaching: Heraclitus said, “Nature desires eagerly opposites and out of them it completes its harmony, not out of similars.” And James, twenty-four hundred years later, has given his testimony that the process of life is to “compenetrate.” ↩

13. Also the group-units of early societies are studied to the exclusion of group-units within modern complex society. ↩

14. Even some of our most advanced thinking, which repudiates the like-minded theory and takes pains to prove that imitation is not an instinct, nevertheless falls into some of the errors implicit in the imitation theory. ↩

15. When we come in part III to consider the group process in relation to certain political methods now being proposed, we shall find that part of the present disagreement of opinion is verbal. I therefore give here a list of words which can be used to describe the genuine social process and a list which gives exactly the wrong idea of it. Good words: integrate, interpenetrate, interpermeate, compenetrate, compound, harmonize, correlate, coordinate, interweave, reciprocally relate or adapt or adjust, etc. Bad words: fuse, melt, amalgamate, assimilate, weld, dissolve, absorb, reconcile (if used in