The Rudolf Steiner Archive

46. The Threefold Structure During and After the War

[ 1 ] In 1917, I spoke in close circles with a number of personalities about the threefolding of the social organism. My intention was to persuade political thinkers to oppose Wilson's policy with another. Wilson's ideas seemed to me to be no way out of the confusion in which the world found itself. By making these thoughts widely audible as slogans, one could set armies in motion, one could send warships across the world's oceans, but they contained nothing of what was unconsciously struggling in contemporary humanity to get out of the old conditions, and what, because it could not express itself rationally, had discharged itself in the irrationality of the world war.

[ 2 ] Wilson's fourteen points were abstract and unrealistic. One can give such ideas an illusory reality, because people can also carry out what proves to be impossible in execution. These fourteen points could never lead to true peace. For civilized mankind has reached a point in its development where what had emerged from the spheres of the traditional states as spiritual life, as legal relations in the broadest sense and as economic conditions of existence could no longer be carried forward within the framework of these states. Until the present day, the unified state formations were needed in order to cultivate the spiritual life and give birth to the newer economic forms through the legal coexistence of people. But both intellectual life and the world economy have reached forms that cannot be advanced by these state formations. Without prejudice, the world war was nothing other than the expression of the fact that the states clashed because those forces were looking for an unreasonable way out whose true nature was to seek new forms for intellectual life and the economy.

[ 3 ] They could not bring themselves to realize this true nature, and so they let the disastrous happen. Wilson's policy was only an abstract summary of the old ideas of the state. The people were to form themselves into a certain kind of state. In this way the causes of war were to be eliminated. But this was the kind that had produced the causes of war. My intention in 1917 was to oppose Wilson's fourteen points with that which replaces this kind with another which gives self-government to the forces of intellectual and economic life, the non-existence of which has led to confusion. Without this species becoming the soul of the foreign policy of nations, no true way out of this confusion can be found.

[ 4 ] The world war has led to Versailles, to Spa. But the unconscious striving of mankind has not found the sensible way to create the necessary forms for intellectual life and the world economy. And that is why the continuation of the world war is the devastating Bolshevism in Russia and that which, like it, goes through humanity in order to further destroy what the war has left behind.

[ 5 ] Just as in 1917 one had to point to the threefold structure of the social organism in order to counter Wilson's impotent fourteen points with something that could lead to a real way out for peace, so now one must point to the same threefold structure in order to counter the spectre that threatens civilization. How impotent the "Fourteen Points" were was demonstrated by the helplessness of their promoter at Versailles. John Maynard Keynes, who was present at the Versailles negotiations, stated this clearly enough in his book on the economic consequences of the war.

[ 6 ] But as powerless as Wilson proved to be at Versailles, all those who confront the international social upheavals with the old ways of thinking will prove to be just as powerless. One is glad when something is revealed somewhere on the basis of which one can say: Bolshevism is on the wane; it will soon suffer its collapse. Have we no idea how such things only seem to go down in order to revive in other forms? Those who cling to such evasive phrases should remember how often "statesmen" before 1914 spoke of the political situation having "eased".

[ 7 ] The movement for the threefolding of the social organism will lead to what it must lead to if a sufficiently large number of people free themselves in their judgment from those who do not want to look at what is necessary for humanity, but who only look into this or that corner of the world to see whether something is "relaxing" here or there, so that they do not need to ponder ideas that do not "relax" what will later collide wildly, but that develop what wants to be developed according to the course of development of humanity.