An ethical philosophy of life presented in its main outlines

by Felix Adler

The System of Representation Which Is Required to Give Expression to the Organic Idea of the State.

The ethical aim of political reformation and reconstruction may be put in a single word, Organization. The state and especially the democratic state must be organized.[86] This means practically that the basis of representation shall be the vocational group, that vocational representation shall replace representation by geographical districts.[87] The law-making body on this basis will consist of representatives or delegates of the agricultural, the commercial, the industrial, the scientific group, etc. Women belonging to these groups will exercise the franchise within them. There will also be a distinct group of home-makers; motherhood will be recognized as a vocation.

Attention may be called to certain practical advantages of the proposed rearrangement of the representative system. It will tend to bring forward in political life the best citizens, instead of the mediocre or the base. This is likely to come about because there is no distinction that men more ardently covet than that of being considered primus inter pares; as, for instance, the first or one of the first of the city’s merchants, or one of the most eminent scientists, or an artist whom his fellow-artists select as the fittest to represent them in the great council of city, state, or nation. And if only this much can be gained by the new representative system, that the law-making body shall consist of the most experienced, the most enlightened, the wisest, the actual leaders in the various walks of life, in brief, that the elected shall be the elect, certainly one of the principal evils with which individualistic democracy is afflicted will tend to be removed.

But other advantages will accrue. This, in particular, that the constituencies, instead of merely delegating their powers, will share in the business of law-making, will be in vital touch with their leaders or representatives, while the latter conversely will politically educate the constituencies. The mode of procedure under the system here sketched will be somewhat as follows:

Take, as an illustration, the group of industrial laborers. They will first meet in a primary assembly, and discuss measures deemed by them important in the interests of their group. The leader who represents them in the legislature will take part in the initial discussions, and exercise no doubt a strong influence in bringing matter finally to a head. He will then carry into the law-making body,—which consists of representatives of the various social groups,—the sifted-out demands of the laborers, the measures which they desire to have enacted into law. He will bring forward these measures in the legislature. But there objections are likely to be raised. The representatives of the other groups will discover what the laborers naturally failed to note, that the proposed law or laws, if enacted, will have certain injurious effects on the interests of the other groups. The sifting-out process, therefore, will now begin anew and be carried on on a higher level in the legislature. The representatives of all the various groups will separate the wheat from the chaff in what is proposed by any one group. The next stop will be that the representative of the laborers, returning to his constituency, will communicate to them the difficulties that were raised, the decisions reached, and will thus impart to them the wider vision which he himself gained in the discussions of the law-making body. In this way he will be the instructor, the political teacher of his constituents. And the principle by which the value of any new measure will finally be judged will be simply this: that the supposed interests of one group cannot be its true interests unless they are found to promote the interests of all the other vocational groups.[88]

The law-making body should be a council of the groups. It should not be a “Parliament,” or “talking body,” but a sifting body. Nor yet a body of mandatories commissioned to merely give effect to a public opinion or a public sentiment already existing. In fact, public opinion or public sentiment in the raw is apt to be a poor index of what is really for the public good. Public opinion is apt to be unripe, haphazard, impulsive rather than reflective. Besides, it is often contaminated at its very source, the facts on which the public depend for their opinions being deliberately falsified or placed in false perspective; while the opinions furnished in newspaper editorials are almost inevitably biased. Only on great occasions, when simple moral issues are presented, can the common sense and moral sense of the people be wholly depended on. But such occasions are episodical; and the orderly business of government cannot be carried on by spurts. Government by public opinion may be and in some respects is better indeed than class government; in other important respects it is worse. A class at the head of the state at least as a rule knows what it wants, and proceeds methodically to carry out its purposes. Public opinion, on the other hand, like all opinion, is unsure, unsafe, as Plato has long since made dialectically clear. And public sentiment, like all sentiment, is fluctuating. To build the state on public opinion and public sentiment, as many of our writers on politics would have us do, is after all a good deal like building a house on sand.[89]

Instead of “public opinion” and “public sentiment” let us say public reason and public will!—reason and will to discover in conjunction what the public good really is. For what it really is no one as yet knows. The “public good” is a problem to be approximately solved. The public good will be consummated when the conditions are furnished necessary and favorable to the development of personality in each of the constituent groups of the social body. To study these conditions is the office of the law-making body, and therefore that body must be so constituted as to include these groups in their capacity as groups.

Another advantage to be expected from vocational representation is that the different interests of society,—I stress the fact that they are different, and often temporarily conflicting,—will be compelled under this plan to come out into the open. An industry, for instance, may require the assistance of a protective tariff, in its infant stages, and the agricultural group may rightly be asked to make the necessary sacrifices.

In the long run there will be compensation. The agriculturists will eventually benefit by the diversification of the national life. But “in the long run” means that the next generation will benefit, not the present agriculturists, a distinction sometimes somewhat cavalierly ignored. The present generation will be called upon to make a sacrifice, precisely as in the family some of the members may have to sacrifice a part of their income to provide for a weaker member. But the circumstance that the sacrifice is recognized as a sacrifice will serve to put an end to the protection when the special need for it has ceased. Under the present system, on the other hand, the state is supposed to have no concern with the special interests of any group. All the same, there are the special interests, and in consequence that which is for the interest of one group has to be advocated as if it were for the general interest of the entire community. And since general interest is easily mistaken for perpetual interest, the protection is apt to be continued long after its particular usefulness has ceased.[90]

I am earnestly concerned that vocational representation shall not be regarded as a mere device in the mechanism of politics, like the substitution of the long for the short ballot, or the initiative and referendum. Innovations of the latter kind leave the prevalent conception of democracy untouched, they are merely intended to improve the machinery by which that conception is to be worked out in practice; they are mechanical contrivances, not fundamental reconstructions. Vocational representation, in my view of it, is the appropriate expression of the organic idea of the state. The state is the soul. The soul must have a body. Vocational representation is that body.