It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by refe...

A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself...

This doctrine has been qualified in practice by particular limitations to avert particular evils and to meet exceptional emergencies. But it is limited in special cases precisely because its general v...

Such happiness is not remote from achievement. In the course of achieving it, however, the world has been confronted by a group of unexpected consequences, which are the cause of its malaise, as the o...

The application of the principle that society should be organized upon the basis of functions, is not recondite, but simple and direct. It offers in the first place, a standard for discriminating betw...

The application to property and industry of the principle of function is compatible with several different types of social organization, and is as unlikely as more important revelations to be the secr...

Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer which drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice of a man. To extinguish royalties and urban ground-rents is merely to explode a superstitio...

What form of management should replace the administration of industry by the agents of shareholders? What is most likely to hold it to its main purpose, and to be least at the mercy of predatory inter...

Thus it is not only for the sake of the producers, on whom the old industrial order weighed most heavily, that a new industrial order is needed. It is needed for the sake of the consumers, because the...

The conversion of industry into a profession will involve at least as great a change in the position of the management as in that of the manual workers. As each industry is organized for the performan...

So the organization of society on the basis of function, instead of on that of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by t...

Reprinted in The Industrial Council for the Building Industry. ↩ Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. I, p. 2506. ↩ Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 9261⁠–⁠9. ↩ The Co...