Curiously enough, some of the pluralists are acknowledged followers of Gierke and Maitland, and base much of their doctrine on the “real personality” of the group. But the group can create its own personality only by the “compounding of consciousness,” by every member being at one and the same time an individual and the “real personality.” If it is possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a real personality. The imagination of the born pluralist stops with the group.[[117]]
But even in regard to the group the pluralists seem sometimes to fall into contradictions. Sovereignty, we are often told, must be decentralized and divided among the local units. But according to their own theory by whom is the sovereignty to be divided? The fact is that the local units must grow sovereignty, that we want to revivify local life not for the purpose of breaking up sovereignty, but for the purpose of creating a real sovereignty.
The pluralists always tell us that the unified state proceeds from the One to the Many; that is why they discard the unified state. This is not true of the unifying state which I am trying to indicate. They think that the only alternative to pluralism is where you begin with the whole. That is, it is true, the classic monism, but we know now that authority is to proceed from the Many to the One, from the smallest neighborhood group up to the city, the state, the nation. This is the process of life, always a unifying through the interpenetration of the Many—Oneness an infinite goal.
This is expressed more accurately by saying, as I have elsewhere, that the One and the Many are constantly creating each other. The pluralists object to the One that comes before the Many. They are right, but we need not therefore give up oneness. When we say that there is the One which comes from the Many, this does not mean that the One is above the Many. The deepest truth of life is that the interrelating by which both are at the same time a-making is constant. This must be clearly understood in the building of the new state.
The essential error in the theory of distributed sovereignty is that each group has an isolated sovereignty. The truth is that each should represent the whole united sovereignty at one point as each individual is his whole group at one point. An understanding of this fact seems to me absolutely necessary to further development of political theory.[[118]] This does not mean that the state must come first, that the group gets its power from the state. This the pluralists rightfully resent. The power within the group is its own genetically and wholly. But the same force which forms a group may form a group of groups.
But the conclusion drawn by some pluralists from the theory of “real personality” is that the state is superfluous because a corporate personality has the right to assert autonomy over itself. They thus acknowledge that pluralism means for them group and group and group side by side. But here they are surely wrong. They ignore the implications of the psychological fact that power developed within the group does not cease with the formation of the group. That very same force which has bound the individuals together in the group (and which the theory of “real personality” recognizes) goes on working, you cannot stop it; it is the fundamental force of life, of all nature, of all humanity, the universal law of being—the out-reaching for the purpose of further unifying. If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what becomes of it? It must reach out to embrace other groups in order to repeat exactly the same process.
When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely lost. It only makes a noise. Do we want this to happen to our groups? Are they to end only in disagreeable noises? In order that the group-force shall not be lost, we must provide means for it to go on working effectively after it is no longer needed within the group, so to speak. We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek new forms of unification. No “whole” can imprison us infinite beings. The centre of to-day is the circumference of to-morrow.
Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All. From living group to living group to the “real” state—such must be our line of evolution.
Sovereignty, it is true, is a fact, not a theory. Whoever can gain obedience has the sovereign power. But we must go beyond this and seek those political methods by which the command shall be with those who have evolved a genuine authority, that is, an authority evolved by what I have called the true social process. We must go beyond this and seek those methods by which a genuine authority can be evolved, by which the true social process shall be everywhere possible. To repeat: first, the true social process must be given full opportunity and scope, then it must be made the basis of political method. Then shall we see emerging a genuine authority which we can all acclaim as sovereign. There is, I agree with the pluralists, a great advantage in that authority being multiple and varied, but a static pluralism, so to speak, would be as bad as a static monism. The groups are always reaching out towards unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is that every fresh unity means (as I have tried to show in [chapter III]) the throwing out of myriad fresh differences—our safeguard is that the universe knows no static unity. Unification means sterilization; unifying means a perpetual generating. We do not want the unified sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group first, you get unifying sovereignty.[[119]]