The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

The point may be illustrated by the instance of a nation going to war. A large minority may be against war, for reasons which to them may seem to be of the highest kind; it may be that they judge the nation to be morally in the wrong in the matter in dispute, or very questionably in the right, as many Englishmen did during the Boer War; and yet, if, by the accepted organised channels of national deliberation and decision, war has been declared, then, although it was their duty to do what they could to make their opinion prevail before the decision was reached, there is no moral inconsistency in their supporting the war measures with all their strength. It is in fact implied in their loyalty, if they are loyal and patriotic, that they shall yield their individual opinion to the expression of the national will and shall accept the means chosen to the common end. That is the truth implied in the phrase—My country right or wrong. Of course, this phrase may be taken in a reprehensible sense, as meaning that any opportunity of forwarding the immediate interests of one’s country must be taken, regardless of the interests of other communities and of the obligations of common honesty and humanity upon which all human welfare depends.

In the same way, a man might disapprove of a particular tax, say on liquor, or of obligatory military service; and yet he may accept the national will and serve faithfully as a soldier, without inconsistency, and without ceasing to be a free agent truly willing the acts imposed by his position in the whole organisation; just as during the late war many priests served as soldiers in the French army. Or, to take an extreme instance, a man who has broken the law and even incurred the death penalty may be truly said to undergo his punishment of imprisonment or death as a morally free agent, if he is loyal to his country and its institutions, accepting the penalty, while yet believing his action to be right. Such perfect loyalty to the nation is of course rare; and in all actual nations men have progressed towards it in very different degrees. Most existing nations have emerged from preceding despotisms by the repeated widening of the sphere of freedom, as the growth of loyalty in strength and extension rendered such freedom consistent with the survival of the State and its administrative functions.

Thus a people progresses from the status of an organism, in which the parts are subordinated to the whole without choice or free volition on their part, or even against their wills, towards the ideal of a Nation-state, an organic whole which is founded wholly upon voluntary contract between each member and the whole, and in which the distinction between the State and the nation becomes gradually overcome and replaced by identity. For, as national self-consciousness develops and each man conceives more fully and clearly the whole nation and his place and function in it, and grows in loyalty to the nation, he ceases to obey the laws merely because he is constrained by the authority and force of the State. An increasing proportion of citizens obey the law and render due services voluntarily, because they perceive that, in so doing, they are contributing towards the good of the whole which they value highly; in so far as they act in this spirit, the actions and restraints prescribed by law become their voluntary actions and restraints.

Thus the theory that society is founded upon a Social Contract, which, if taken as a description of the historical process of genesis, is false, is true, if accepted as the constitutive principle of the ideal State towards which progressive nations are tending.

And, as the organisation of a nation becomes less dependent upon outer authority and upon mere custom and the unreasoning acceptance of tradition, and more and more upon free consent and voluntary contract, the nation does not cease to be an organism; it retains that formal and informal organisation which has developed in large part without the deliberate guidance of the collective will and which is essential to its collective life; the national mind, as it grows in force and extension and understanding of its own organisation, accepts those features which it finds good, and gradually modifies those which appear less good in the light of its increasing self knowledge; and so it tends more and more to become a contractual organism, which, as Fouillée has insisted, is the highest type of society.

It should be noticed that this ideal of the contractual organism synthesises the two great doctrines or theories of society which have generally been regarded as irreconcilable alternatives: the doctrine of society as an organism, and that of society as founded upon reason and free will. They have been treated as opposed and irreconcilable doctrines, because those who regarded society as an organism, taking the standpoint of natural science, have laid stress upon its evolution by biological accidents and by the interaction and conflict of many blind impulses and purely individual volitions, in which collective volition, governed by an ideal of the form to be achieved, had no part. While, on the other hand, the idealist philosophers, describing society or the nation as wholly the work of reason and free will, have been guilty of the intellectualist fallacy of regarding man as a purely rational being; they have ignored the fact that all men, even the most intellectual, are largely swayed and moulded by processes of suggestion, imitation, sympathy, and instinctive impulse, in quite non-rational ways; and they have ignored still more completely the fact that the operation of these non-rational processes continues to be not only of immense influence but also inevitable and necessary to the maintenance of that organic unity of society upon which as a basis the contract-unity is superimposed as a bond of a higher, more rational and more spiritual quality.

The former doctrine logically tends to the paralysis of social effort and to the adoption of extreme individualism, to the doctrine of each man for himself, and of laissez faire, doctrines such as those of Herbert Spencer. The other, the idealist theory of the state as being founded and formed by reason, tends equally logically towards extreme State socialism; because its overweening belief in reason leads it to ignore the large and necessary basis of subrational organisation and operation.

Only a synthesis of the two in the doctrine of the contractual organism can reconcile them and give us the ideal of a nation in which the maximum and perfection of organisation shall be combined with the maximum of liberty, because in it each individual will be aware of the whole and his place and functions in it, and will voluntarily accept that place and perform those functions.

The highest, most perfectly organised and effective nation is, then, not that in which the individuals are disposed of, their actions completely controlled, and their wills suppressed by the power of the State. It is, rather, one in which the self-consciousness and initiative and volition of individuals, personality in short, is developed to the highest degree, and in which the minds and wills of the members work harmoniously together under the guidance and pressure of the idea of the nation, rendered in the highest degree explicit and full and accurate.