The Rudolf Steiner Archive

47. State Policy and the Politics of Humanity

[ 1 ] Those who want to form a political opinion today must bid farewell to the ideas and programs with which parties were formed and public discussions were held only a short time ago. And where such parties continue to exist, where such discussions continue, they fall far short of events.

[ 2 ] The powerful socialist movement that shook modern civilization should not be captured in the terms with which it was approached a decade ago. At that time, it was thought that it could be overcome with state policy. This state policy was shaped differently depending on whether one was conservative, liberal or socialist, but there was no doubt that state policy had to deal with public affairs in some way. But at present these affairs clearly show that everywhere they do not want to submit to state policy. And if one takes a closer look at the course of events, one will find that the views on the state that people want to assert today do not coincide anywhere with the overall aspirations of mankind. In the European East, fanatics want to carpenter a state in the form they have in mind as an economic community. They assure us that their distant goal is the abolition of any kind of state structure. For the time being, however, they want to create a militaristically organized economic state. It carries the seeds of decay. For there is currently a political-democratic drive at work in humanity that cannot come to the fore in a militarized economic state. The "dictatorship" of the proletariat could paralyze this drive for a short time; it cannot eradicate it. Nor can the purely economically oriented state create a spiritual life that could satisfy the needs of humanity.

[ 3 ] The latter is recognized by idealistically inclined people. That is why they strive to revive religious and spiritual ideas. Catholics, Protestants and people with free religious sentiments can be seen on the way to this goal. But their often powerful and well-intentioned efforts are powerless. They do not penetrate into the depths of people's souls, where the forces that determine war and peace or that create sustainable economic conditions are at work. In Switzerland, American representatives of intellectual life are speaking in order to lend support to the ideas of the League of Nations from their point of view. The unbiased person must come to the conclusion that they will speak in vain. For their words will find no access to the hearts of those whose instincts urge only a reorganization of economic life.

[ 4 ] In England, the miners' strike has stirred up emotions. Even if Parliament succeeds in getting it under control now, it will have to do so through institutions that will not be able to keep the economy going in a few years' time. What the parliament has done in this case shows with complete clarity that a state parliament can indeed discuss public affairs and, through discussion, order them in a provisional manner, but that it is nevertheless powerless to master economic life.

[ 5 ] Europe breathed a sigh of relief because Bolshevism did not succeed in defeating the Poles. Many would breathe a sigh of relief if they were to experience the "victory" of one power or another over Bolshevik Russia. Those who think this way have no idea that, if they continue to work in the old sense of "state politics", they will see another terrible entity rise up out of the declining Bolshevism in the not too distant future. One that would probably be closer to them than Russian Bolshevism.

[ 6 ] State policy, which has extended its sphere over the intellectual and the economic life, which wants to educate and instruct man at the same time and also take care of his economy, has brought it to educate in such a way that the intellectual life is powerless over the organization of social life. It lives through parliaments and administrative institutions which talk and act without regard to the real course of intellectual life. In the end, it leads the broad masses and their leaders to an ideal of the state that seeks to embody a tyrannical and, what is more, inadequate economic dilettantism.

[ 7 ] Why is spiritual life powerless? Because it must become powerless when states set the norms of education and teaching. For the spirit can only attain the power it deserves if it can pursue its own goals in complete freedom. The self-administration of intellectual life emancipated from the state, especially in its most important area, teaching and education, is the only way to open up access to the hearts of men for intellectual impulses. Schools that are completely independent of the state and economic life will produce people whose intellectual power can have a formative effect on the state and the economy. It is argued that this leads back to uneducation. For where there is no state-school compulsion, most children are not sent to school. Instead, we should be looking at the solution to the problem: how to get children into schools without state coercion?

[ 8 ] Economic life demands the same separation from the state and self-administration as intellectual life. The state can extend itself only over those matters in which all men who have come of age are capable of judgment as equals. Democratic parliamentarianism is its vital element. But this parliamentarism must be organically supplemented by a self-governing intellectual and an equally self-governing economic life. Both must be governed by forces other than those that can develop in democratic parliaments.

[ 9 ] The old state formations, which have incorporated intellectual life and the economy to a large extent, will not be entities of the human community in which the modern questions of humanity can be solved. The unrest of modern civilization has its origin in the striving of intellectual and economic life out of these state formations.

[ 10 ] The East is in chaos. In the West, there should be enough discerning minds who, through the liberation of intellectual and economic life, seek a way out of the increasingly widespread paralysis of public intellectual forces. As long as there are not enough people who can succeed with such views, modern civilization will shake in unrest, and the threat will remain that world chaos will develop from the chaos of the East.