The Community Council, however, is not to duplicate other organizations but first to coordinate all existing agencies before planning new activities. ↩
And spontaneously many towns and villages turned to the schoolhouse as the natural centre of its war services. ↩
For the moment I ignore the occupational group to be considered later. ↩
I have taken this account from the official report. I have been told by New York people that these commissions have shown few signs of life. This does not, however, seem to me to detract from the value of the plan as a suggestion, or as indication of what is seen to be advisable if not yet wholly practicable. The New York charter provides for Local Improvement Boards as connecting links with the central government, but these I am told have shown no life whatever. ↩
Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc. ↩
The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of economics and politics. First, the interests of citizenship and guild-membership are not distinct; secondly, in any proper system of occupational representation everyone should be included—vocational representation should not be trade representation; third, as long as you call the affairs of the guilds “material,” and say that the politics of the state should be purified of financial interests, you burn every bridge which might make a unity of financial interests and sound state policy. Guild socialism, however, because it is a carefully worked out plan for the control of industry by those who take part in it, is one of the most well worth considering of the proposals at present before us. ↩
See G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labor, for the relation of trade unionism to guild socialism. ↩
See especially Churches in the Modern State and Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius. ↩
See also Mr. Laski’s articles: “The Personality of Associations,” Harvard Law Review 29, 404–426, and “Early History of the Corporation in England,” Harvard Law Review 30, 561–588. This is the kind of work which is breaking the way for a new conception of politics. ↩
It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all the pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a school although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience I am using the word pluralist roughly and in a sense inaccurately to include all those who are advocating a multiple group organization as the basis of a new state. Most of these agree in making the group rather than the individual the unit of politics, in their support of group “rights,” the “consent” of the group, the “balance” of groups, and in their belief that “rights” should be based on function. But syndicalists and guild socialists are not strictly pluralists since they build up a system based on the occupational group; yet the name is not wholly inapplicable, for, since the guild socialists base their state on balancing groups, that state cannot be called a unified state. It is too early yet to speak of this school with entire accuracy, and in fact there is no “school.” ↩
From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German “fellowship.” ↩
And the individual was certainly as prominent in medieval theory as the community of individuals, a fact which the vigorous corporate life of the Middle Ages may lead us to forget. ↩
See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned above. ↩
See Traité de Droit Constitutionnel and Études de Droit Public: I, L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L’État, Les Gouvernants and Les Agents.
As in French droit may be either law or a right, 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. ↩
Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French and Roman law has been questioned. ↩
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 chapters II–VI, “The Group Process.” ↩
De Maeztu tells us, “Rights 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
