The purpose of this book is to indicate certain changes which must be made in our political methods in order that the group principle, the most fruitful principle of association we have yet found, shall have free play in our political life. In part III we shall devote ourselves specifically to that purpose. Here let us examine some of our past notions of democracy and then trace the growth of true democracy in America.

Democracy has meant to many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.” The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything particularist is ruled out. When we accept fully the principle of rights involved in the group theory of association, it will change the decisions of our courts, our state constitutions, and all the concrete machinery of government. The truth of the whole matter is that our only concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.63

As an understanding of the group process abolishes “individual rights,” so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except as an essential member of a group. The particularist idea of liberty was either negative, depending on the removal of barriers, or it was quantitative, something which I had left over after the state had restrained me in every way it thought necessary. But liberty is not measured by the number of restraints we do not have, but by the number of spontaneous activities we do have. Law and liberty are not like the two halves of this page, mutually exclusive⁠—one is involved in the other. One does not decrease as the other increases. Liberty and law go hand in hand and increase together in the larger synthesis of life we are here trying to make.

We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying ourself. Ideally the state is such a group, actually it is not, but it depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression, not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state.

There has been long a kind of balance theory prevalent: everything that seems to have to do with the one is put on one side, everything that has to do with the many, on the other, and one side is called individuality and freedom, and the other, society, constraint, authority. Then the balancing begins: how much shall we give up on one side and how much on the other to keep the beautiful equilibrium of our daily life? How artificial such balancing sounds! We are beginning to know now that our freedom depends not on the weakness but on the strength of our government, our government being the expression of a united people. We are freer under our present sanitary laws than without them; we are freer under compulsory education than without it. A highly organized state does not mean restriction of the individual but his greater liberty. The individual is restricted in an unorganized state. A greater degree of social organization means a more complex, a richer, broader life, means more opportunity for individual effort and individual choice and individual initiative. The test of our liberty is not the number of limitations put upon the powers of the state. The state is not an extra-will. If we are the state we welcome our liberty.

But liberty on the popular tongue has always been coupled with equality, and this expression too needs revaluation. The group process shows us that we are equal from two points of view: first, I am equal to everyone else as one of the necessary members of the group; secondly, each of these essential parts is the tap from an infinite supply⁠—in every man lives an infinite possibility. But we must remember that there are no mechanical, no quantitative equalities. Democracy in fact insists on what are usually thought of as inequalities. Of course I am not “as good as you”⁠—it would be a pretty poor world if I were, that is if you were no better than I am. Democracy without humility is inconceivable. The hope of democracy is in its inequalities. The only real equality I can ever have is to fill my place in the whole at the same time that every other man is filling his place in the whole.

Much of our present class hatred comes from a distorted view of equality. This doctrine means to many that I have as much “right” to things as anyone else, and therefore if I see anyone having more things than I have, it is proper to feel resentment against that person or class. Much legislation, therefore, is directed to lopping off here and there. But such legislation is a negative and therefore non-constructive interpretation of equality. The trouble with much of our reform is that it is based on the very errors which have brought about the evils it is fighting. The trade-unionists say that the courts give special privileges to employers and that they do not have equal rights. But this is just the complaint of the employers: that the unionists are doing them out of their time-honored equal rights.64

Our distorted ideas of rights and liberty and equality have been mixed up with our false conception of the state, with the monstrous fallacy of man vs. the state. But as we now see that the individual and society are different aspects of the same process, so we see that the citizen and the state are one, that their interests are identical, that their aims are identical, that they are absolutely bound up together. Our old political dualism is now disappearing. The state does not exist for the individual or the individual for the state: we do not exalt the state and subordinate the individual or, on the other hand, apotheosize the individual and give him the state as his “servant.” The state is not the servant of the people. The state must be the people before it can reach a high degree of effective accomplishment. The state is one of the collective aspects of the individual; the individual is from one point of view the distributive aspect of the state. The nonexistence of self-sufficing individuals gives us the whole of our new theory of democracy. Those who govern and those who are governed are merely two aspects of the common will. When we have a state truly representative of our collective citizenship, then the fear of the state will disappear because the antithesis between the individual and the state will have disappeared.

To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not something outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves and control our social life. But it must “control” our life by expressing it. The state is always the great Yes, not the great No. Liberty and restraint are not opposed, because ideally the expression of the social will in restraint is our freedom. The state has a higher function than either restraining individuals or protecting individuals. It is to have a great forward policy which shall follow the collective will of the people, a collective will which embodied through our state, in our life, shall be the basis of a progress yet undreamed of. When we can give up the notion of individual rights, we shall have taken the longest step forward in our political development. When we can give up the idea of national rights⁠—but it is too soon to talk of that yet.