The New State

our more specialized groups. A director of a corporation will be more valuable to his state and even to his corporation if he is at the same time the member of a neighborhood group. It may be that we shall work out some machinery by which the neighborhood group can include the occupational group. All our functions must be expressed, but somewhere must come that coordination which will give them their real effectiveness. We are not yet ready to say what the machinery will be, only to recognize some of the principles which should guide us in constructing that machinery. The power of an individual is his power to live a vital group life. The more your society is diversified in group life, the higher the stage of civilization. Perhaps the destiny of the neighborhood group is to interpret and correlate, to give full significance and value to, all the spontaneous association which our increasingly fuller and more varied life is constantly creating. It may be that the neighborhood group is not so much to include the others as to make each see its relation through every other to every other.136 The possible solution, mentioned above, of the two houses of our legislatures and parliaments dividing neighborhood and occupational representation, seems a little crude now to our further analysis unless some practical integration is being worked out at the same time in the local unit. But all this must be a matter of experiment and experience, of patient trial and open-minded observation.137

The salient fact, however, is that neighborhood and occupational groups, either independently or one through the other, must both find representation in the state. But we must remember that it is industry which must be included in the state, not labor, but labor and capital. This war certainly shows us the importance of the great organizations of industry. Let them be integrated openly with the state on the side of their public service, rather than allow a backstairs connection on the side of their “interests.” And let them be integrated in such manner that labor itself is at last included in our political organization. This will not be easy; as a matter of fact we have no more difficult, as we have no more important, problem before us than the relation within the state of one powerful organized body to another and of these bodies to the state. The average American is against the growth of corporate bodies. But this prejudice must go: we need strong corporate bodies not to compete with the state but to minister to the state. Individualism and concentrated authority have been struggling for supremacy with us since the beginning of our government. From the beginning of our government we have been seeking the synthesis of the two. That synthesis is to be found in the recognition of organized groups, but not, I believe, by taking away power from the state and giving to the group. Some of the pluralists, in their reaction to the present fear of powerful groups, advocate that groups should be given more and more power. I agree with them so far, but their implication is that we shall thereby have shorn the Samson locks of the state. This I do not believe we want to do.

Everyone sees the necessity today of the increase of state control as a war measure, but some tell us that we should guard against its dangers by giving to certain organizations within the state enough power to “balance” the state. I insist that balance can never be the aim of sound political method. We must first change our conception of the state⁠—substitute the Service State for the Sovereign State⁠—then methods must be devised within which such new conception can operate. We should, indeed, give more and more power to the groups, or rather, because we can never “give” power, we should recognize all the power which springs up spontaneously within the state, and seek merely those methods by which that self-generating power shall tend immediately to become part of the strength of the state.

How absurd our logic has been. We knew that it took strong men to make a strong state; we did not realize that those groups which represent the whole industry and business of the country need not be rivals of the state, but must be made to contribute to the state, must be the means by which the state becomes great and powerful at the same time that it uses that power for the well-being and growth of all. Our timidity has been but the reflection of our ignorance. A larger understanding is what we need today. There is no need to condemn the state, as do the pluralists; there is no need to condemn our great corporate bodies, as do their opponents. But full of distrust we shall surely be, on one side or the other, until we come truly to understand a state and to create a state which ministers continuously to its parts, while its parts from hour to hour serve only the enhancement of its life, and through it, the enhancement of the life of its humblest member.

The tendency to which we have long been subject, to do away with everything which stood between man and the state, must go, but that does not mean that we must fly to the other extreme and do away with either the individual or the state. One of the chief weaknesses of political pluralism is that it has so many of the earmarks of a reaction⁠—the truth is that we have groups and man and the state, all to deal with.

Neighborhood groups, economic groups, unifying groups, these have been my themes, and yet the point which I wish to emphasize is not the kind of group, but that the group whatever its nature shall be a genuine group, that we can have no genuine state at all which does not rest on genuine groups. Few