Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory, it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large influence on legal theory.[[103]] Also medieval theory struggled from first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,[[104]] the patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign state. Our problem it is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds, their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order or to pursue successful outside relations.
The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in the state.
Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages?
The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.
In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought to-day in philosophy, in politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against.
XXIX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY
WHAT does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each one giving up his sovereignty? Never. By some one from outside presenting it with authority? No, although that is the basis of much of our older legal theory. Real authority inheres in a genuine whole. The individual is sovereign over himself as far as he unifies the heterogeneous elements of his nature. Two people are sovereign over themselves as far as they are capable of creating one out of two. A group is sovereign over itself as far as it is capable of creating one out of several or many. A state is sovereign only as it has the power of creating one in which all are. Sovereignty is the power engendered by a complete interdependence becoming conscious of itself. Sovereignty is the imperative of a true collective will. It is not something academic, it is produced by actual living with others—we learn it only through group life. By the subtle process of interpenetration a collective sovereignty is evolved from a distributed sovereignty. Just so can and must, by the law of their being, groups unite to form larger groups, these larger groups to form a world-group.
I have said that many of the pluralists are opposed to the monistic state because they do not see that a collective and distributive sovereignty can exist together. They talk of the Many and the One without analyzing the process by which the Many and the One are creating each other. We now see that the problem of the compounding of consciousness, of the One and the Many, need not be left either to an intellectualistic or to an intuitive metaphysics. It is to be solved through a laboratory study of group psychology. When we have that, we shall not have to argue any more about the One and the Many: we shall actually see the Many and the One emerging at the same time; we can then work out the laws of the relation of the One (the state) to the Many (the individual), and of the Many (the individual) to the One (the state), not as a metaphysical question but on a scientific basis. And the process of the Many becoming One is the process by which sovereignty is created. Our conceptions of sovereignty can no longer rest on mere abstractions, theory, speculative thought. How absurdly inadequate such processes are to explain the living, interweaving web of humanity. The question of sovereignty concerns the organization of men (which obviously must be fitted to their nature), hence it finds its answer through the psychological analysis of man.