When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action, decide between these loyalties. But my duty to either group or state is not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted against the state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can become a constituent part of the interests of the state.
I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but that is something very different from an “undivided” allegiance. It is, to use James’ phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. “Multiple allegiance” leaves us with the abnormal idea of competing groups. “Supplementary allegiance” gives us too fragmentary an existence. “Cooperative allegiance” comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps imagine a cooperative or unified allegiance, all these various and varying allegiances actually living in and through the other?
We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all the separate community sense and community loyalty and community responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and loyalty and control.
One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state. We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves today, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change tomorrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will change through our initiative. The true state is neither an external force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives, in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most pliant, the “absolutism” of the true state depends always upon our activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations, existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must obey; but the truth is that the state must be in perfect flux and that it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual growth.
But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought.
First, they prick the bubble of the present state’s right to supremacy. They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle Ages with its pretences and unfulfilled claims has not won either our regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state obedience? “[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves.” With the latter we are all beginning to agree.
Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but in the sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an actual psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the implicit warning of the pluralists that to attain this power is an infinite task. Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political forms must keep closely in touch with the specific stage of that growth. In rendering the state obedience, we assume that the state has genuine power (because the consequences of an opposite assumption would be too disastrous) while we are trying to approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski’s book is in its implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make one. Political theory will not create sovereignty, acts of Parliament cannot confer sovereignty, only living the life will turn us, subjects indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny.
Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use the phrase cooperative sovereignty134 which seems happily to be taking them away from their earlier “strung-along” sovereignty. If they press along this path, we shall all be eager to follow.
Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that the variety of our group life today has a significance which must be immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they repudiate the idea that the groups are given authority by the state. An able political writer recently said, “All other societies rest on the authority given by the state. The state itself stands self-sufficient, self-directing. …” It is this school of thought which the pluralists are combating and thereby rendering invaluable service to political theory.
Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for a revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state has failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the state. To the former, the group is to be the substitute for the repudiated state. As for the latter, the Fabians have long felt that local units should
