To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not something outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves and control our social life. But it must “control” our life by expressing it. The state is always the great Yes, not the great No. Liberty and restraint are not opposed, because ideally the expression of the social will in restraint is our freedom. The state has a higher function than either restraining individuals or protecting individuals. It is to have a great forward policy which shall follow the collective will of the people, a collective will which embodied through our state, in our life, shall be the basis of a progress yet undreamed of. When we can give up the notion of individual rights, we shall have taken the longest step forward in our political development. When we can give up the idea of national rights—but it is too soon to talk of that yet.
XVII
DEMOCRACY NOT THE MAJORITY: OUR POLITICAL FALLACY
IF many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights, others have defined it as “the ascendancy of numbers,” as “majority rule.” Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us the political will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the state is not discovered by counting.[[65]] This means a new conception of politics: it means that the organization of men in small, local groups must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.
A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize their power they can have what they want, since, their numbers being so great, they can out-vote other classes. But the reason the working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is because it is not true—we are never to be ruled by numbers alone.
Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees—Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three—which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold—the full-fledged era of bosses is at hand, with the “consent of the governed” simply because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give us of their best—tyranny.
Many working-men are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes the rule of the few. If “industrial democracy” is to mean majority rule, let us be warned by our experience of it in politics—it will rend whoever dallies with it.
Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us. Some one has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.
This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.