A Habit-Building View of Democracy: Mary Parker Follett and Motor Activities

Citizens of democracies should live democratic lives and develop democratic habits. That is one of Mary Parker Follett’s core insights on democracy. A child of the Gilded Age, Follett experienced the erosion of communal relationships, the intensification of socio-economic inequalities, and the alienation of ordinary people from the complex political system that governed their lives. She saw democracy become remote and foreign to citizens who had little control over what happened to them. Her solution was simple: to reinject a dose of democracy into the everyday life of citizens. This paper retrieves Follett’s embodied and habitual vision of democracy for contemporary political theory. Follett claimed that citizens should participate actively in the democratic life of their society; however, she conceived of democratic participation as going beyond decision-making and deliberative activities. She thought that participation in simple forms of embodied joint actions, like recreation and collective chores, could also benefit democracy. Drawing from Follett, I argue that participation in a wide variety of embodied practices of collective action provides benefits to individuals and society by instilling democratic habits in citizens. Those habits incline those who develop them to enter and maintain relationships as free and equal peers with all sorts of people to reach common ends. When faced with collective problems, therefore, these individuals are more likely to choose democratic collective action and to do so more effectively.