[102]. It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all the pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a school although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience I am using the word pluralist roughly and in a sense inaccurately to include all those who are advocating a multiple group organization as the basis of a new state. Most of these agree in making the group rather than the individual the unit of politics, in their support of group “rights,” the “consent” of the group, the “balance” of groups, and in their belief that “rights” should be based on function. But syndicalists and guild socialists are not strictly pluralists since they build up a system based on the occupational group; yet the name is not wholly inapplicable, for, since the guild socialists base their state on balancing groups, that state cannot be called a unified state. It is too early yet to speak of this school with entire accuracy, and in fact there is no “school.”
[103]. From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German “fellowship.”
[104]. And the individual was certainly as prominent in medieval theory as the community of individuals, a fact which the vigorous corporate life of the Middle Ages may lead us to forget.
[105]. See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned above.
[106]. See “Traité de Droit Constitutionnel” and “Études de Droit Public”: I, L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L’État, Les Gouvernants and Les Agents.
As in French droit may be either law or a right, Duguit, in order to distinguish between these meanings, follows the German distinction of objektives Recht and subjektives Recht, and speaks of le droit objectif and le droit subjectif, thus meaning by le droit objectif merely law. But because he at the same time writes of power as resting on function in contradistinction to the classical theory of the abstract “rights” of man, rights apart from law and only declared by law, political writers sometimes speak of Duguit’s “objective” theory of law, as opposed to a “subjective” theory of law, when jurists would tell us that law is objective, and that subjective right is always merely a right, my right. This matter of terminology must be made much clearer than it is at present.
[107]. Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French and Roman law has been questioned.
[108]. I have just read in a work on sociology, “Men surrender their individual wills to the collective will.” No, the true social process is not when they surrender but when they contribute their wills to the collective will. See [chs. II-VI], “The Group Process.”
[110]. De Maeztu tells us, “Rights do not arise from personality. This idea is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of the associated with the thing which associates them....” Authority, Liberty, and Function, p. 250.