The two problems of democracy today are: (1) how to make the individual politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the development of individualism; until we have become in some degree socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the individual.

From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray, involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century, fostered by Bentham’s ideas of individual happiness, by the laissez-faire of the Manchester school and the new industrial order, by Herbert Spencer’s interpretations of the recent additions to biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of “individual rights” became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously resisted, “individual” freedom was the goal of our desire, “individual” competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of progress. The title of Herbert Spencer’s book, The Man Versus the State, implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an unrelated individual.

But during the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to grow up, largely at first through the influence of T. H. Green, influenced in his turn by Kant and Hegel, an entirely different theory of the state. The state was now not to be subordinate to the individual, but it was to be the fulfilment of the individual. Man was to get his rights and his liberty from membership in society. Green had at once a large influence on the political thought of England and America, and gradually, with other influences, upon practical politics. The growing recognition of the right and duty of the state to foster the life of its members, so clearly and unequivocally expressed in the social legislation of Lloyd George, we see as early as the Education Act of 1870, the Factory Act of 1878 (which systematized and extended previous Factory Acts), and the various mines and collieries acts from 1872.

I do not mean to imply that the growing activity of the state was due entirely or mainly to the change of theory in regard to the individual and the state; when the disastrous results of laissez-faire were seen, then people demanded state regulation of industry. Theory and practice have acted and reacted on each other. Someone must trace for us, step by step, the interaction of theory and practice in regard to the individual and his relation to society, from the Middle Ages down to the present day.69

What has been the trend of our development in America? Particularism was at its zenith when our government was founded. Our growth has been away from particularism and towards a true individualism.70

It is usual to say that the framers of our constitution were individualists and gave to our government an individualistic turn. We must examine this. They did safeguard and protect the individual in his life and property, they did make the bills of rights an authoritative part of our constitutions, they did make it possible for individuals to aggrandize themselves at the expense of society, their ideal of justice was indeed of individual not of social justice. And yet all this was negative. The individual was given no large positive function. The individual was feared and suspected. Our early constitutions showed no faith in men: the Massachusetts constitution expressly stated that it was not a government of men. The law of the land was embodied in written documents with great difficulty of amendment just because the people were not trusted. As we look at the crudities of the Declaration of Independence, as we examine our aristocratic state constitutions, as we study our restricted federal constitution, as we read the borrowed philosophy of our early statesmen, we see very little indication of modern democracy with its splendid faith in man, but a tendency towards aristocracy and a lack of real individualism on every side.

To be sure it was at the same time true that the government was given no positive power. Everyone was thoroughly frightened of governments which were founded on status and resulted in arbitrary authority. The executive power was feared, therefore it was so equipped as to be unequal to its task; the legislative power was feared, so the courts were given power over the legislatures, were allowed to declare their acts valid or invalid; the national government was feared, therefore Congress was given only certain powers. Power was not granted because no man and no institution was trusted. The will to act could not be a motive force in 1789, because no embodiment of the will was trusted; the framers of our constitutions could not conceive of a kind of will which could be trusted. Fear, not faith, suspicion not trust, were the foundation of our early government. The government had, therefore, no large formative function, it did not look upon itself as a large social power. As the individual was to be protected, the government was to protect. All our thinking in the latter part of the eighteenth century was rooted in the idea of a weak government; this has been thought to show our individualism.71

But our government as imagined by its founders did not work.72 Our system of checks and balances gave no real power to any department. Above all there was no way of fixing responsibility. A condition of chaos was the result. Such complicated machinery was almost unworkable; there was no way of getting anything done under our official system. Moreover, the individual was not satisfied with his function of being protected, he wanted an actual share in the government. Therefore an extra-official system was adopted, the party organization. The two chief reasons for this adoption were: (1) to give the individual some share in government, (2) to give the government a chance to carry out definite policies, to provide some kind of a unifying power.

What effect has party organization had on the individual and on government? The domination of the party gives no real opportunity to the individual: originality is crushed; the aim of all party organization is to turn out a well-running voting machine. The party is not interested in men but in voters⁠—an entirely different matter. Party organization created artificial majorities, but gave to the individual little power in or connection with government. The basic weakness of party organization is that the individual gets his significance only through majorities. Any method which looks to the fulfilment of the individual through the domination of majorities is necessarily not only partial but false. The present demand that the nation shall have the full power of the individual is the heaviest blow that party organization has ever received.

Now consider, on the other hand, what party organization has done for the government. The powers of government moved steadily to political bosses and business corporations. Boss-rule, party domination and combinations of capital filled in the gaps in the system of government we inaugurated in the eighteenth century. The marriage of business and politics, while it has been the chief factor in entrenching the party system, was the outcome of that system, or rather it was the outcome of the various unworkabilities of our official government. The expansion of big business, with its control of politics, evasion of law, was inevitable; we simply had no machinery adequate to our need, namely, the development of a vast, untouched continent. The urge of that development was an overwhelming force which swept irresistibly on, carrying everything before it, swallowing up legal disability, creating for itself extralegal methods. We have now, therefore, a system of party organization and political practice which subverts all our theories. Theoretically the people have the power, but really the government is the primaries, the conventions, the caucuses. Officials hold from the party. Party politics became corrupt because party government was irresponsible government. The insidious power of the machine is due to its irresponsibility.

The evils of our big business have not come because Americans are prone to cheat, because they want to get the better of their fellows, because their greed is inordinate, their ambition domineering. Individuals have not been to blame, but our whole system. It is the system which must be changed. Our constitutions and laws made possible the development of big business; our courts were not “bought” by big business, but legal decision and business practice were formed by the same inheritance and tradition. The reformation of neither will accomplish the results we wish, but the nationwide acceptance, through all classes and all interests, of a different point of view.

The next step was the wave of reform that swept over the country. The motive was excellent; the method poor. The method was poor because the same method was adopted which these reform movements were organized to fight, one based on pure crowd philosophy. It was a curious case of astigmatism. The trouble was that the reformers did not see accurately what they were fighting; they were fighting essentially the non-recognition of the individual, but they did not see this, so they went on basing all their own work on the non-appreciation of men. Their essential weakness was the weakness of the party machine⁠—all their efforts were turned to the voter not the man. Their triumphs were always the triumphs of the polls. Their methods were principally three: change in the forms of government (charters, etc.), the nomination of “good” men to office, and exhortation to induce “the people” to elect them.

The idea of “good” men in office was the fetish of many reform associations. They thought that their job was to find three or four “good” men and then once a year to hypnotize the electorate to “do their duty” and put these men into office, and then all would go well if before another year three or four more good men could be found. What a futile and childish idea which leaves out of account the whole body of citizenship! It is only through this main body of citizenship that we can have a decent government and a sound social life. That is, in other words, it is only by a genuine appreciation of the individual, of every single individual, that there can be any reform movement with strength and constructive power. The widespread fallacy that good officials make a good city is one which lies at the root of much of our thinking and insidiously works to ruin our best plans, our most serious efforts. This extraordinary belief in officials, this faith in the panacea of a change of charters, must go. If our present mechanical government is to turn into a living, breathing, pulsing life, it must be composed of an entire citizenship educated and responsible.

This the reform associations now recognize, in some cases partially, in some cases fully. The good government association of today has a truer idea of its function. The campaign for the election of city officials is used as a means of educating the mass of citizens: besides the investigation and publication of facts, there is often a clear showing of the aims of government and an enlightening discussion of method. Such associations have always considered the interests of the city as a whole; they have not appealed, like the party organizations, to local sentiment.

I have spoken of the relation of the reform movement of the last of the nineteenth century to the body of citizenship. What was its relation to government? The same spirit applied to government meant patching, mending, restraining, but it did not mean constructive work, it had not a formative effect on our institutions. Against any institution that has to be guarded every moment lest it do evil, there is a strong a priori argument that it should not exist. This until recently has not been sufficiently taken into account. Now, however, in the beginning of the twentieth century, we see many evidences that the old era of restraint is over and the constructive period of reform begun. We see it, for instance, in our Bureaus of Municipal Research; we see it in the more progressive sections of our state constitutional conventions. But the chief error of the nineteenth-century reformers was not that they were reactionary, nor that they were timid, nor that they were insincere, nor that they were hedgers. They were wanting in neither sincerity nor courage. Their error was simply that they did not appreciate the value of the individual. Individualism instead of being something we are getting away from, is something we are just catching sight of.

And if our institutions were founded on a false political philosophy which taught “individual rights,” distorted ideas of liberty and equality, and thought of man versus the state, if our political development was influenced by a false social psychology which saw the people as a crowd and gave them first to the party bosses and next to the social reformers, our whole material development was dominated by a false economic philosophy which saw the greatest good of all obtained by each following his own good in his own way. This did not mean the development of individuals but the crushing of individuals⁠—of all but a few. The Manchester school of economics, which was bound to flourish extensively under American conditions, combined with a narrow legal point of view, which for a hundred years interpreted our constitutions in accordance with an antiquated philosophy and a false psychology, to make particularism the dominant note in American life.

The central point of our particularism was the idea of being let alone. First, the individual was to be let alone, the pioneer on his reclaimed land or the pioneer of industry. But when men saw that their gains would be greater by some sort of combination, then the trusts were to be let alone⁠—freedom of contract was called liberty! Our courts, completely saturated with this philosophy, let the trusts alone. The interpretations of our courts, our corrupt party organization, our institutions and our social philosophy, hastened and entrenched the monopolistic age. Natural rights meant property rights. The power of single men or single corporations at the end of the nineteenth century marked the height of our particularism, of our subordination of the state to single members. They were like pâté de foie gras made by the enlargement of the goose’s liver. It is usual to disregard the goose. The result of our false individualism has been non-conservation of our national resources, exploitation of labor, and political corruption. We see the direct outcome in our slums, our unregulated industries, our “industrial unrest,” etc.

But egotism, materialism, anarchy are not true individualism. Today, however, we have many evidences of the steadily increasing appreciation of the individual and a true understanding of his place in society, his relation to the state. Chief among these are: (1) the movement towards industrial democracy, (2) the woman movement, (3) the increase of direct government, and (4) the introduction of social programs into party platforms. These are parallel developments from the same root. What we have awakened to now is the importance of every single man.

The first, the trend towards industrial democracy, will, in its relation to the new state, be considered later. The second, the woman movement, belongs to the past rather than to the present. Its culmination has overrun the century mark and makes what is really a nineteenth-century movement seem as if it belonged to the twentieth. It belongs to the past because it is merely the end of the movement for the extension of the suffrage. Our suffrage rested originally in many states on property distinctions; in New Hampshire there was a religious and property qualification⁠—only Protestant taxpayers could vote. Gradually it became manhood suffrage, then the immigrants were admitted, later the negroes, then Colorado opened its suffrage to women, and now in thirteen states women have the full suffrage. The essence of the woman movement is not that women as women should have the vote, but that women as individuals should have the vote. There is a fundamental distinction here.

The third and fourth indications of the growth of democracy, or the increase of individualism (I speak of these always as synonymous)⁠—the tendency towards more and more direct government and the introduction of social programs into party platforms⁠—will be considered in the next chapter together with a third tendency in American politics which is bound up with these two: I refer to the increase of administrative responsibility.

The theory of government based on individual rights no longer has a place in modern political theory; it no longer guides us entirely in legislation but has yielded largely to a truer practice; yet it still occupies a large place in current thought, in the speeches of our practical politicians, in our institutions of government, and in America in our law court decisions. This being so it is important for us to look for the reasons. First, there are of course always many people who trail along behind. Secondly, partly through the influence of Green and Bosanquet, the idea of contract has been slowly fading away, and many people have been frightened at its disappearance because Hegelianism, even in the modified form in which it appears in English theory, seems to enthrone the state and override the individual.73 Third, the large influence which Tarde, Le Bon, and their followers have had upon us with their suggestion and imitation theories of society⁠—theories based on a pure particularism. The development of social and political organization has been greatly retarded by this school of sociology. Fourth, our economic development is still associated in the minds of many with the theories of individual rights.

A more penetrating analysis of society during recent years, however, has uncovered the true conception of individualism hidden from the first within the “individualistic” movement. All through history we see the feeling out for the individual; there are all the false trails followed and there are the real steps taken. The false trails led to the individual rights of politics, the laissez-faire of economics and our whole false particularism. The real steps have culminated in our ideas of today. To substitute for the fictitious democracy of equal rights and “consent of the governed,” the living democracy of a united, responsible people is the task of the twentieth century. We seek now the method.