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
