XXX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM
The Service State vs. the “Sovereign State”
THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the people who advocate vocational representation believe in what they call an organic democracy. This leads them to believe that the group not the individual should be the unit of government: a man in an industry is to vote not as an individual but as a department member because he is thus representing his function. But man has many functions and then there is something left over. It is just because our place in the whole can never be bounded by any one function that we cannot accept the organism of the Middle Ages, the organic society of certain sociologists, or the “organic democracy” of the upholders of occupational representation.
Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many functions. The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating—with his family, at school, at work, with his play group, with his art group: the carpenter may join the Arts and Crafts to find there an actualization of spirit for which he is fitted, and so on and so on. All the different sides of our nature develop by the process of compounding. If you shut a man up in his occupation, you refuse him the opportunity of full growth. The task has been given to humanity to “Know thyself,” but man cannot know himself without knowing the many sides of his self. His essential self is the possibility of the multiple expression of spirit.
We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we cannot do one thing well by doing one thing alone. The interrelations are so manifold that each of us does far more than he wishes, not because our tendency is a senseless ramifying, but because we cannot do our own job well unless we do many other things: we do not take on the extra activities as an extension of our life, but simply as an intensification of our life at the point of our particular interest. Ideally one should fulfil all the functions of man in order to perform one function. No one ought to teach without being a parent! etc. etc. Man must identify himself with humanity. The great lesson which the pluralist school has to teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively but only actually, through his group relations. What it leaves out is that the task is manifold and infinite because man must identify himself with a manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced humanity.
Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all these various groups. There is a more subtle process going on—the interlocking of groups. And in these interlocking groups we have not only the same people taking up different activities, but actually representing different interests. In some groups I may be an employer, in others an employee. I can be a workman and a stockholder. Men have many loyalties. It is no longer true that I belong to such a class and must always identify myself with its interests. I may belong at the same time to the college club and the business women’s club, to the Players’ League (representing the actor’s point of view) and to the Drama Association (representing the playgoer’s point of view). I not only thus get opposite points of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite points of view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I may have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team, next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens’ league or neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross many times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable value in the development of society.
Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these groups may be working together for the satisfaction of some interest. This is recognized by law. A man can be a member of different corporations. Our possibility of association is not exhausted by contributing to the production of one legal person, we may help to create many different legal persons, each with an entirely different set of liabilities. Then there may be some sort of relation with a definite legal status existing between these bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation with myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere, this interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of the neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic social organization: not only in the sense of a flexible interaction between the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity which makes it possible for individuals to change constantly their relations, their groups, without destroying social cohesion. Vocational representation would tend to crystallize us into definite permanent groups.
The present advocacy of organic democracy or “functionalism” is obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to “individualism”: the functional group must be the unit because the individual is so feared. I agree with the denunciation of the individual if you mean the man who seeks only his own advantage. But have we not already seen that that is not the true individual? And do we not see now that man is a multiple being? Life is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity. Politics must be shaped for that. Our task is to make straight the paths for the coming of the Lord—the true Individual. Man is struggling for the freedom of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must have as many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man—this does away with “organic democracy.”
The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any number of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state demands the whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no one group can seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that having taken one-tenth there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not divisible into so many parts as a house into so many rooms. My group uses me and then the whole of me is still left to give to the whole. This is the constant social process. Thus my citizenship is something bigger than my membership in a vocational group. Vocational representation does not deal with men—it deals with masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of my personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what is left over—is that going to be lost? The whole of every man must go into his citizenship.
Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many “rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political recognition of these various functions. How the father as father is to be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.