Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental principles of life—the compounding of consciousness and the endless appearings of new forces.
I have said that the pluralists’ mistaken interpretation of federalism includes the particularist notions of “consent” and “rights” and “balance,” and that all these come from a false conception of sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of “consent”? Power is generated within the true group not by one or several assuming authority and the others “consenting,” but solely by the process of intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.
If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that, what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora, a “larger life”? The pluralists open the gates to too much. They wish to throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals. Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate task, but let us ponder well the method.
The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority over “other groups.”127 But as he who expresses the unity of my group has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups—that is, the state—should have no authority as a separate group, but only so far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of the other groups as “coextensive” or “complementary” to the state—the state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they and all individuals are the constituents of the state.128
I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.129 This those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves with all particularists.130
Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the “inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a compact.131 The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals. As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man vs. the State but The Group vs. the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think it progress to write Group vs. the State? If the principle of individual vs. the state is wrong, what difference does it make whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in so far as we can talk of group vs. the state, we are held in the thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty, that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem to realize.
Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of group and state can be approaching coincidence.
As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole. Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks in to its own integrated, coordinated activity, (2) it sees that activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.
Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice. Let us not now fall into the
