XVII
Democracy Not the Majority: Our Political Fallacy
If many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights, others have defined it as “the ascendancy of numbers,” as “majority rule.” Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us the political will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the state is not discovered by counting.65 This means a new conception of politics: it means that the organization of men in small, local groups must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.
A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize their power they can have what they want, since, their numbers being so great, they can outvote other classes. But the reason the working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is because it is not true—we are never to be ruled by numbers alone.
Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees—Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three—which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold—the full-fledged era of bosses is at hand, with the “consent of the governed” simply because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give us of their best—tyranny.
Many workingmen are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes the rule of the few. If “industrial democracy” is to mean majority rule, let us be warned by our experience of it in politics—it will rend whoever dallies with it.
Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us. Someone has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.
This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.
Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The composition of a political majority depends at present partly on inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice), partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of integration of the different ideas and the different forces of that particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this integration. When we use the expression “artificial majority” we mean chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the artificial stimulus of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an “interest”; majorities which represent unities are not so easily managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.
But “helpless majority” may sound
