In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the state is not now always identical with the interests of its parts. It is to the interest of England to win this war, they say, but England has yet to prove that it is also for the interest of her working people.
In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning of the disappearance of the crowd. Many people advocate vocational representation because they see in it a method of getting away from our present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation. They see our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and manipulated by “interests,” and propose the occupational group as a substitute for the crowd. New political experiments must indeed be along this line. We must guard only (1) that the “group” itself shall not be a crowd, (2) that the union of groups shall not be a numerical union.
Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future because it has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of identity, of association, of federalism,135 as the central problem of politics as it is the central problem of life. The force of the pluralist school is that it is not academic; it is considering a question which every thoughtful person is asking himself. We are faced today with a variety of group interests, with many objects demanding our enthusiasm and devotion; our duty itself shines, not a single light showing a single path, but shedding a larger radiance on a life which is most gloriously not a path at all. Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my church, my union? With the complexity of interests increasing every day on the outside, inside with the power of the soul to “belong” expanding every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less than the American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism and the political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this yet the soul of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential nature. How is this to be obtained? Social evolution is in the hands of those who can solve this problem.
What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the law of gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of interpenetration and of multiples. I am the multiple man and the multiple man is the germ of the unified state. If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or church or trade-union or any other special group. The miracle of spirit is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read only in the different instalments of my different groups. We do not give a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes its classifications and this is what some of the writers on group organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit is the power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies each individual. We have thought that federal government consisted of mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the spirit which liveth and giveth life.
Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer tell us that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry their pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only by actual living that we can understand an undivided allegiance. James tells us that “Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.” This is the way we must understand an undivided allegiance. I live forever the undivided life. As an individual I am the undivided one, as the group-I, I am again the undivided one, as the state-I, I am the undivided one—I am always and forever the undivided one, mounting from height to height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting.
XXXIII
Increasing Recognition of the Occupational Group
From the confessedly embryonic stage of thinking in which the movement for group organization still is, two principal questions have emerged: (1) shall the groups form a pluralistic or a unifying state, (2) shall the economic group be the sole basis of representation? The first question I have tried to answer, the second offers greater difficulties with our present amount of experience. Men often discuss the occupational vs. the neighborhood group on the pivotal question—which of these is nearest a man? Benoist’s plea for the occupational group was that politics must represent la vie. But, agreed as to that, we still question whether the occupational group is the most complete embodiment of la vie.
It is not, however, necessary to balance the advantages of neighborhood and occupational group, for I am not proposing that the neighborhood group take the place of the occupational. We may perhaps come to wish for an integration of neighborhood and industrial groups—and other groups too as their importance and usefulness demand—as their “objective” value appears. In our neighborhood group we shall find that we can correct many partial points of view which we get from
