The social center

by Woodrow Wilson

I used to teach my classes in the university that liberty was a matter of adjustment and I was accustomed to illustrate it in this way; when you have perfectly assembled the parts of a great steam engine, for example, then when it runs, you say that it runs free; that means that the adjustment is so perfect that the friction is reduced to a minimum, doesn’t it, and the minute you twist any part out of alignment, the minute you lose adjustment, then there is a buckling up and the whole thing is rigid and useless. Now to my mind, that is the image of human liberty; the individual is free in proportion to his perfect accommodation to the whole, or to put it the other way, in proportion to the perfect adjustment of the whole to his life and interests.

Take another illustration; you are sailing a boat, when do you say that she is running free, when you have thrown her up into the wind? No, not at all. Every stick and stitch in her shivers and you say she is in irons; nature has grasped her and says: “You cannot go that way;” but let her fall off, let the sheet fill and see her run like a bird skimming the waters. Why is she free? Because she has adjusted herself to the great force of nature that is brewed with the breath of the wind. She is free in proportion as she is adjusted, as she is obedient, and so men are free in society in proportion as their interests are accommodated to one another, and that is the problem of liberty.

Analysis Accomplished—Now Assembled

Liberty as now expressed is unsatisfactory in this country and in other countries because there has not been a satisfactory adjustment and you cannot readjust the parts until you analyze them. Very well, we have analyzed them. Now this movement is intended to contribute to an effort to assemble them, bring them together, let them look one another in the face, let them reckon with one another and then they will coöperate and not before.

You cannot bring adjustment into play until you have got the consent of the parts to act together, and then when you have got the adjustment, when you have discovered and released those forces and they have accommodated themselves to each other, you have that control which is the sovereignty of the people.

There is no sovereignty of the people if the several sections of the people be at loggerheads with one another; sovereignty comes with coöperation, sovereignty comes with mutual protection, sovereignty comes with the quick pulses of sympathy, sovereignty comes by a common impulse.

You say and all men say that great political changes are impending in this country. Why do you say so? Because everywhere you go you find men expressing the same judgment, alive to the same circumstances, determined to solve the problems by acting together no matter what older bonds they may break, no matter what former prepossessions they may throw off, determined to get together and do the thing.

Enlightened Control in Place of Management

And so you know that changes are impending because what was a body of scattered sentiment is now becoming a concentrated force, and so with sympathy and understanding comes control, for, in place of this control of enlightened and sovereign opinions, we have had in the field of politics as elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration.

You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the people of a state, you cannot manage a great population, you can manage only some central force; what you do, therefore, if you want to manage in politics or anywhere else is to choose a great single force or single group of forces, and then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to manage the business without being discovered. And that has been done for a generation in the United States.