The New State

amusing to those who are telling us of the tyranny of majorities. From one point of view indeed majority rule tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not want a majority in either case, either as a tyrant or as an inert mass. But those who talk of the tyranny of majorities are usually those who are advocating the “rights of minorities.” If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in certain quarters is also unsound. There is no inherent virtue in a minority. If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those in a minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more apt to be right than eleven. It may be one of those false assumptions more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age we shall not deny its value. Still sour grapes hang sometimes just as high and no higher than the majority, and it seems possible to find a working assumption that will work even better than this. In fact the assumption that the minority is always right is just as much an error as the assumption that the majority is always right. The right is not with the majority or minority because of preponderance of numbers or because of lack of preponderance of numbers.

But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of opinion at all, but of fact: all the great reforms of the past, they say, whose victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated by an intelligent and devoted few. You can indeed point to many causes led by a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a numerical and inert majority, but this minority was usually a majority of those who thought on the subject at all.

But all talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by which unity is attained. Our fetish of majorities has held us back, but most of the plans for stopping the control of majorities look to all kinds of bolstering up of minorities. This keeps majorities and minorities apart, whereas they have both one and only use for us⁠—their contribution to the all-will. Because such integration must always be the ideal in a democracy, we cannot be much interested in those methods for giving the minority more power on election day. The integration must begin further back in our life than this.

I know a woman of small school education, but large native intelligence, who spends her time between her family and the daily laundry work she does to support that family, who, when she goes to her Mothers’ Club at the “School Centre” penetrates all the superficialities she may find there, and makes every other woman go home with higher standards for her home, her children and herself. The education of children, the opportunities of employment for girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and all the many questions which touch one’s everyday life are considered in a homely way on those Thursday afternoons. Sometime these women will vote on these questions, but a true intermingling of majority and minority will have taken place before election day.

Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional representation,66 is always an interesting experiment, just because it is a method of representation and not a mode of association the party can circumvent it. We are told that minority representation tried in the lower house of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to their own ends by the politicians. And also that in Belgium, where proportional representation has been introduced, this system has become a tool in the hands of the dominant party. No electoral or merely representative method can save us.

Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern of politics is modes of association. We do not want the rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will through group organization⁠—when young men are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of democracy.

XVIII

Democracy Not the Crowd: Our Popular Delusion

When we define democracy as the “rule of the whole,” this is usually understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the meaning of “all,” we run the danger of falling a victim to the crowd fallacy. The reaction to our long years of particularism, of “individual rights” and “liberty,” which led to special privilege and all the evils in its train, has brought many to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman sang of men “en masse.” Many of our recent essayists and poets and novelists idealize the crowd. Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful volume, Alpha and Omega, says, “Human life is lived to the full only in and through the herd.” There is an interesting group of young poets in France67 who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in the union of all, that an “Altogetherness” is the supreme fact of life. Mr. Ernest Poole in The Harbor glorifies the crowd, and the New York Tribune said of this book, “The Harbor is the first really notable novel produced by the New Democracy,” thus identifying the new democracy with the crowd. Another writer, looking at our present social and political organization and finding it based largely on class and therefore unsound, also leaps to the conclusion that our salvation rests not on this individual or that, this class or that, this body of people or that,