[130]. Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on “consent.” When he speaks of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on consent. I do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction between the “sovereignty” of the present end the sovereignty which I hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski’s book, but it is lacking in much of the writing on the “consent of the governed.”
[131]. Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the state is an arbitrary creation of men. Group organization to-day must give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely and fully on its legitimate psychological basis.
[132]. This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that competition is the mode of progress.
[134]. Mr. Laski, I think.
[135]. It does not matter in the terms of which branch of study you express it—philosophy, sociology, or political science—it is always the same problem.
[137]. Some writers talk of trade representation vs. party organization as if in the trade group you are rid of party. Have they studied the politics of trade unionism? In neither the trade group nor the neighborhood group do you automatically get rid of the party spirit. That will be a slow growth indeed.
[138]. Yet perhaps the trade-union has been one of the truest groups, one of the most effective teachers of genuine group lessons which we have yet seen. Increased wages, improved conditions, are always for the group. The trade-unionist feels group-wants; he seeks to satisfy these through group action. Moreover the terms of a collective bargain cannot be enforced without a certain amount of group solidarity. In strikes workmen often sacrifice their own interests for what will benefit the union: the individual—I may prefer his present wages to the privations of a strike; the group-I wants to raise the wages of the whole union.