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 centur...

Politics must have a technique based on an understanding of the laws of association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology. Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency...

Politics must have a technique based on an understanding of the laws of association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology. Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency...

Let us begin at once to consider the group process. Perhaps the most familiar example of the evolving of a group idea is a committee meeting. The object of a committee meeting is first of all to creat...

What then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differe...

The unification of thought, however, is only a part of the social process. We must consider, besides, the unification of feeling, affection, emotion, desire, aspiration⁠—all that we are. The relation ...

From the group process arise social understanding and true sympathy. At the same moment appears the social will which is the creative will. Many writers are laying stress on the possibilities of the c...

We have seen that the common idea and the common will are born together in the social process. One does not lead to the other, each is involved in the other. But the collective thought and the collect...

As the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose, are born within the all-sufficing social process, so here too the individual finds the wellspring of his life. The visible form in wh...

The idea of liberty long current was that the solitary man was the free man, that the man outside society possessed freedom but that in society he had to sacrifice as much of his liberty as interfered...

The new freedom is to be founded on the new individualism. Many people in their zeal for a “socialized” life are denouncing “individualism.” But individualism is the latest social movement. We must gu...

We have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at the same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the individual is not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal and ce...

It is now evident that self and others are merely different points of view of one and the same experience, two aspects of one thought. Neither of these partial aspects can hold us, we seek always that...

Many people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a partial understanding of it, many people today are advocat...

I Have said that the essence of the social process is the creating of ever new values through the interplay of all the forces of life. But I have also tried to show that these forces must be organized...

Our rate of progress, then, and the degree in which we actualize the perfect democracy, depend upon our understanding that man has the power of creating, and that he gets this power through his capaci...

But perhaps nowhere in our national life is the growing recognition of the group or community principle so fundamental for us as in our modern theory of law. Mr. Roscoe Pound has opened a new future f...

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, sha...

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, sha...

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 mean...

When we define democracy as the “rule of the whole,” this is usually understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the meaning of “all,” we run the danger of falling a victim to the cr...

Democracy is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believe...

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...

We have outgrown our political system. We must face this frankly. We had, first, government by law,74 second, government by parties and big business, and all the time some sort of fiction of the “cons...

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely ou...

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely ou...

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely ou...

How can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then h...

Many of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood o...

Neighborhood organization will prove fatal to party organization not only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the ...

We have said that neighborhood organization must replace party organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible governme...

How can the will of the people be the sovereign power of the state? There must be two changes in our state: first, the state must be the actual integration of living, local groups, thereby finding way...

All that I have written has been based on the assumption of the unifying state. Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood organization as if it were possible to take it for granted that the neighborhood ...

All that I have written has been based on the assumption of the unifying state. Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood organization as if it were possible to take it for granted that the neighborhood ...

What does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each one giving up his sovereignty? Never. By someone from ou...

The idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the people who advocate vocational representation believe in w...

In the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of life⁠—the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1) Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the group⁠...

I have spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logi...

From the confessedly embryonic stage of thinking in which the movement for group organization still is, two principal questions have emerged: (1) shall the groups form a pluralistic or a unifying stat...

We see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle must be more than a coordinating agency. It must appear as the great moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is ...

We see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle must be more than a coordinating agency. It must appear as the great moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is ...

We have seen the true state emerging through the working of the federal principle, dual in its nature: (1) created by the law of interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing the ...

The training for the new democracy must be from the cradle⁠—through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government clas...

See William McDougall, Social Psychology. ↩ Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common. ↩ The old definitio...