But there is the real Hegel and the Hegel who misapplied his own doctrine, who preached the absolutism of a Prussian State. Green and Bosanquet in measure more or less full taught the true Hegelian doctrine. But for a number of years the false leadings of Hegel have been uppermost in people’s minds, and there has been a reaction to their teaching due to the panic we all feel at the mere thought of an absolute monarch and an irresponsible state. The present behavior of Prussia of course tends to increase the panic, and the fashion of jeering at Hegel and his “misguided” followers is widespread. But while many English writers are raging against Hegelianism, at the same time the English are pouring out in unstinted measure themselves and their substance to establish on earth Hegel’s absolute in the actual form of an International League!
The political pluralists whom we are now considering, believing that a collective and distributive sovereignty cannot exist together, throw overboard collective sovereignty. When they accept the compounding of consciousness taught by their own master, James, then they will see that true Hegelianism finds its actualized form in federalism.
Perhaps they would be able to do this sooner if they could rid themselves of the Middle Ages! Many of the political pluralists deliberately announce that they are accepting medieval doctrine.
In the Middle Ages the group was the political unit. The medieval man was always the member of a group—of the guild in the town, of the manor in the country. But this was followed by the theory of the individual not as a member of a group but as a member of a nation, and we have always considered this on the whole an advance step. When, therefore, the separate groups are again proposed as the political units, we are going back to a political theory which we have long outgrown and which obviously cramps the individual. It is true that the individual as the basis of government has remained an empty theory. The man with political power has been the rich and strong man. There has been little chance for the individual as an individual to become a force in the state. In reaction against such selfish autocracy people propose a return to the Middle Ages. This is not the solution. Now is the critical moment. If we imitate the Middle Ages and adopt political pluralism we lose our chance to invent our own forms for our larger ideas.
Again, balancing groups were loosely held together by what has been called a federal bond. Therefore we are to look to the medieval empire for inspiration in forming the modern state. But the union of church and guild, boroughs and shires of the Middle Ages seems to me neither to bear much resemblance to a modern federal state nor to approach the ideal federal state. And if we learn anything from medieval decentralization—guild and church and commune—it is that political and economic power cannot be separated.
Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory, it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large influence on legal theory.103 Also medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,104 the patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it is true is the same today, but the Middle Ages hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds, their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order or to pursue successful outside relations.
The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in the state.
Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages?
The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.
In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought today in philosophy, in politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against.
XXIX
Political Pluralism and Sovereignty
What does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each
