The New State by Mary Parker Follett — Read

The two problems of democracy today are: (1) how to make the individual politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the development of individualism; until we have become in some degree socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the individual.

From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray, involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century, fostered by Bentham's ideas of individual happiness, by the laissez-faire of the Manchester school and the new industrial order, by Herbert Spencer's interpretations of the recent additions to biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of "individual rights" became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously resisted, "individual" freedom was the goal of our desire, "individual" competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of progress. The title of Herbert Spencer's book, The Man Versus the State, implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an unrelated individual.