I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals, but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on. The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the particularist-individual, but the group-individual.
The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational representation—“Do you want representation of numbers or representation of interests?” They are opposed to the former, which they call democracy, because “democracy” means to them the “sovereignty of the people,” which means the reign of the crowd. Democracy and functionalism are supposed to be opposed. An industry is to be composed not of individuals but of departments; likewise the state is to be a union of industries or occupations. The present state is conceived as a crowd-state.120 If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no wonder it is being condemned today in many quarters. But I do not believe this is the alternative we are facing—the crowd-state or the group-state. We want the representation of individuals, but of true individuals, group-individuals.121
The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers with individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the individual at the centre of our political system, without an atomistic sovereignty, and yet by which we can get the whole of the individual. I am proposing for the moment the individual the unit, the group the method, but this alone does not cover all that is necessary. In the French syndicalist organization every syndicate, whatever its size, is represented by a single individual. In this way power is prevented from falling into the hands of a strong federation like the miners, but of course this often means minority rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be dominated by the five large trades, a state of things which has been much complained of there. But we must remember that while the syndicalists get rid of majority rule, that is, that the majority of individuals no longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority of groups. They have not given up the principle of majority rule, they simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with new principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard to the individual and transferring them to the field of the group. I have tried to show in chapter XVII, “Democracy Not the Majority,” that the pressing matter in politics is not whether we want majority rule or not, but to decide upon those methods of association by which we get the greatest amount of integration. The syndicalists are right, we do not want a crowd, but I do not think most syndicalists have discovered the true use of the true group.
The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group method can be a regular part of our political system—its relation to the individual on the one hand and to the state on the other. No man should have a share in government as an isolated individual, but only as bound up with others: the individual must be the unit, but an individual capable of entering into genuine group relations and of using these for an expanding scale of social, political and international life.
The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the Service State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two meanings: (1) that the state is created by the actual services of every man, that every man will get his place in the state through the service rendered: (2) that the state itself is tested by the services it renders, both to its members and to the world-community.122 The weakness of functionalism, as so far developed, is that it has provided no method for all the functions of man to be included in the state. The essence of democracy is the expression of every man in his multiple nature.
To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple nature. This is the blow to the theory of occupational representation. But also no number of groups can enfold me. This is the reason why the individual must always be the unit of politics, as group organization must be its method. We find the individual through the group, we use him always as the true individual—the undivided one—who, living link of living group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for every new possibility of a forever unfolding life.
XXXI
Political
