As a
matter of experience, the representatives of a guild society would
find, just as the higher trade union officials find today, that on a
great number of questions which they have to decide there is no
"actual will as understood" by the shops.
5
The guildsmen insist, however, that such criticism is blind because it
ignores a great political discovery. You may be quite right, they
would say, in thinking that the representatives of the shops would
have to make up their own minds on many questions about which the
shops have no opinion. But you are simply entangled in an ancient
fallacy: you are looking for somebody to represent a group of people.
He cannot be found. The only representative possible is one who acts
for "some particular function," [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 23-24.]
and therefore each person must help choose as many representatives "as
there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."
Assume then that the representatives speak, not for the men in the
shops, but for certain functions in which the men are interested. They
are, mind you, disloyal if they do not carry out the will of the group
about the function, as understood by the group. [Footnote: _Cf._
Part V, "The Making of a Common Will."] These functional
representatives meet. Their business is to coordinate and regulate. By
what standard does each judge the proposals of the other, assuming, as
we must, that there is conflict of opinion between the shops, since if
there were not, there would be no need to coordinate and regulate?
Now the peculiar virtue of functional democracy is supposed to be that
men vote candidly according to their own interests, which it is
assumed they know by daily experience.
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