Motor Activities and Power-With: The Political Philosophy of Mary Parker Follett

• In Event: Democracy beyond Politics in Late Modern Thought

Abstract

Mary Parker Follett’s (1868-1933) work was reviewed in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Journal of Philosophy and the Political Science Quarterly; praised and criticized by such illustrious scholars and political figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Viscount Haldane, Roscoe Pound, Bernard Bosanquet, Herbert Cooley, Harold Laski and many others. In her work, she grappled with some of the core theoretical problems of politics, such as how to conceive of the relationship between the individual and the collective, how to reduce the prevalence of coercion, and how to define and understand power. She was, for all practical purposes, among the most well-respected and renowned political theorists of her time. And yet, since then, she has almost been entirely lost to the field. She is most well-known today for her writings in business management, a discipline in which she is heralded as a prophet. But contemporary political theory has, for the most part, disregarded her work. This paper aims at correcting that injustice, and at recovering and reconstructing her political philosophy as a theory of participatory democracy that emphasizes the motor aspect of politics. I argue that Follett helps us understand democracy as a “network of human relations,” where “concrete activities,” such as common menial tasks, sports, and everyday interactions, contribute to an everlasting process of community-building that reduces the need for overt coercion in politics. Motor actions in the social realm produce group-consciousness and power-with, that is, a form of collective empowerment based on the realization of the individuals’ interdependence, which increases the likelihood of common identification and therefore of seeing the common good as tightly related to one’s own. Follett, in that sense, contends with the intractable puzzle of how to reconcile individual freedom with collective agency, or how to increase the individual’s willingness to subordinate his or her interests to the well-being of all freely. Her answer differs from the mainstream theories of democracy by emphasizing the motor, or embodied element of participation, instead of its deliberative variant.

Author

• Etienne Cardin-Trudeau