The New State

From Introduction: "Our political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at war, the nations of Europe are at one another's throats--because we have not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us. Group organization is to be the new method of politics, the basis of our future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after, for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved through the activity of the group life. We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy. Party or "interests" govern us with some fiction of the "consent of the governed" which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life. We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the individual. Our particularism--our *laissez-faire*, our every-man-for-his-own-interests--has little to do with true individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his all. Politics do not need to be "purified." This thought is leading us astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. "Representative government," party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose a collective will."