If many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights, others have defined it as “the ascendancy of numbers,” as “majority rule.” Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us the political will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the state is not discovered by counting.65 This means a new conception of politics: it means that the organization of men in small, local groups must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.

A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize their power they can have what they want, since, their numbers being so great, they can outvote other classes. But the reason the working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is because it is not true⁠—we are never to be ruled by numbers alone.

Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees⁠—Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three⁠—which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold⁠—the full-fledged era of bosses is at hand, with the “consent of the governed” simply because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give us of their best⁠—tyranny.

Many workingmen are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes the rule of the few. If “industrial democracy” is to mean majority rule, let us be warned by our experience of it in politics⁠—it will rend whoever dallies with it.

Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us. Someone has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.

This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.

Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The composition of a political majority depends at present partly on inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice), partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of integration of the different ideas and the different forces of that particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this integration. When we use the expression “artificial majority” we mean chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the artificial stimulus of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an “interest”; majorities which represent unities are not so easily managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.

But “helpless majority” may sound amusing to those who are telling us of the tyranny of majorities. From one point of view indeed majority rule tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not want a majority in either case, either as a tyrant or as an inert mass. But those who talk of the tyranny of majorities are usually those who are advocating the “rights of minorities.” If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in certain quarters is also unsound. There is no inherent virtue in a minority. If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those in a minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more apt to be right than eleven. It may be one of those false assumptions more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age we shall not deny its value. Still sour grapes hang sometimes just as high and no higher than the majority, and it seems possible to find a working assumption that will work even better than this. In fact the assumption that the minority is always right is just as much an error as the assumption that the majority is always right. The right is not with the majority or minority because of preponderance of numbers or because of lack of preponderance of numbers.

But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of opinion at all, but of fact: all the great reforms of the past, they say, whose victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated by an intelligent and devoted few. You can indeed point to many causes led by a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a numerical and inert majority, but this minority was usually a majority of those who thought on the subject at all.

But all talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by which unity is attained. Our fetish of majorities has held us back, but most of the plans for stopping the control of majorities look to all kinds of bolstering up of minorities. This keeps majorities and minorities apart, whereas they have both one and only use for us⁠—their contribution to the all-will. Because such integration must always be the ideal in a democracy, we cannot be much interested in those methods for giving the minority more power on election day. The integration must begin further back in our life than this.

I know a woman of small school education, but large native intelligence, who spends her time between her family and the daily laundry work she does to support that family, who, when she goes to her Mothers’ Club at the “School Centre” penetrates all the superficialities she may find there, and makes every other woman go home with higher standards for her home, her children and herself. The education of children, the opportunities of employment for girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and all the many questions which touch one’s everyday life are considered in a homely way on those Thursday afternoons. Sometime these women will vote on these questions, but a true intermingling of majority and minority will have taken place before election day.

Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional representation,66 is always an interesting experiment, just because it is a method of representation and not a mode of association the party can circumvent it. We are told that minority representation tried in the lower house of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to their own ends by the politicians. And also that in Belgium, where proportional representation has been introduced, this system has become a tool in the hands of the dominant party. No electoral or merely representative method can save us.

Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern of politics is modes of association. We do not want the rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will through group organization⁠—when young men are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of democracy.