The New State by Mary Parker Follett — Read

When we define democracy as the "rule of the whole," this is usually understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the meaning of "all," we run the danger of falling a victim to the crowd fallacy. The reaction to our long years of particularism, of "individual rights" and "liberty," which led to special privilege and all the evils in its train, has brought many to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman sang of men "en masse. " Many of our recent essayists and poets and novelists idealize the crowd. Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful volume, Alpha and Omega, says, "Human life is lived to the full only in and through the herd. " There is an interesting group of young poets in France67 who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in the union of all, that an "Altogetherness" is the supreme fact of life. Mr. Ernest Poole in The Harbor glorifies the crowd, and the New York Tribune said of this book, "The Harbor is the first really notable novel produced by the New Democracy," thus identifying the new democracy with the crowd. Another writer, looking at our present social and political organization and finding it based largely on class and therefore unsound, also leaps to the conclusion that our salvation rests not on this individual or that, this class or that, this body of people or that, but on all together, on "this mass-life, seething, tumultuous, without compass or guide or will or plan."

This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or the many to the all, in preaching that the race contains within itself the power of its own advancement; but this power which the race contains within itself is not got through its being a crowd, "without guide or will or plan," but just because it contains the potentialities of guide, will, plan, all within itself, through its capability of being a true society, that is, through its capability of adopting group methods. It is in the group that we get that complex interpenetration which means both modification and adjustment and at the same time cooperation and fulfilment. The group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social process. Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act and react on each other. This is the dialectic of life. But this upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent power of the mass but of the group. It is useless to preach "togetherness" until we have devised ways of making our togetherness fruitful, until we have thought out the methods of a genuine, integrated togetherness. Anything else is indeed "blubbering sentimentality," as Bismarck defined democracy.