The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! From my remarks yesterday, you will have gathered that the basis of the observation of the social problem on which this is built is not based on the aspirations or demands of this or that social class, this or that party, or on what emerges from interests that stem from very specific areas of economic, legal or other areas of life; but here we must build on what arises from the life forms and life necessities of contemporary humanity itself, insofar as these life necessities and life forms can be observed through a truly spiritual scientific investigation of what humanity has worked through in the course of its development to the present.

What use is it, dear attendees, to point out the necessity of this or that social legislative measure out of one-sided interest, out of a one-sided party tendency? And even if you succeed in realizing something that corresponds to such a demand, what if what you bring into the world as a result is beneficial on the one hand, but on the other hand, of necessity, must bring about all kinds of harm? That which is truly beneficial can only follow from an all-round, unprejudiced observation of the necessities of human society itself.

This observation of the necessities of life, as they exist in particular in present-day humanity, have actually, I might say, been revealed and revealed in abundance by that which has emerged, as I already indicated yesterday, from modern technical operations on the one hand – precisely that was to be shown yesterday – and from the capitalist economic system on the other. It is precisely these special forces, which have arisen out of modern technology and out of modern capitalism, that have produced demands of life, including social demands, demands of life that cannot be satisfied by a particular further development of capitalist or technical scientific forces, but whose satisfaction must be sought from quite a different direction.

I said yesterday: People's gaze has been hypnotized and focused solely on what the modern economic order has produced. And today's socialist agitator also has the opinion that what is effective in technology, in the economic order that has become through technology in the capitalist economic form, one must simply transfer it into something that can develop out of itself. For those who look more deeply into the developmental forces of humanity, it is clear that in our modern life through capitalism and technology, which as such were absolutely necessary in the course of human development and will continue to be necessary, that through technology and capitalism, phenomena have arisen that can almost be called forms of illness. These forms of illness must be cured. But some of the ideas of the modern man, whether he is a socialist or anti-socialist partisan, do not lead to a cure of the forms of illness that technology and capitalism have brought about, but rather to a continuation of these forms of illness. What must be striven for is to seek the healthy social organism behind those phenomena that are described as social forms of illness.

The one-sided view of economic life of the human being, of the modern human being, has certain ideas, such as you can find in the things that are eaten, so to speak, the extraordinarily justified striving of the modern proletarian. This view has given rise to certain ideas and certain connections between ideas which, if they were to permeate the social organism, could almost be compared, with regard to this social organism, to the ideas that Wagner in Goethe's “Faust” leads to his “homunculus”, to the creation of this homunculus! A social order could arise, an apparent, inanimate social order could arise from the realization of what is today often called, whether by socialist or antisocialist parties, the social idea, the will to socialism. For it is thought that there must be certain measures, there must be certain institutions that need only be realized, and then one has the right social organism. The considerations on which my present exposition is based proceed from something quite different. They do not at all want to give birth to such ideas, such concepts, such social aspirations, which lead to a kind of social homunculus; but they want to indicate the conditions under which a living social organism can arise!

For the starting point here is the realistic view that it would be just as foolish to try to build a social organism out of human ideas, however clever they may be, without that social organism having its own life force within it. It would be just as foolish to try to build a natural human organism from all kinds of chemical ingredients in a retort according to preconceived ideas of the connection between static forces.

The only thing that can be desired in social life is to seek out the conditions that must be realized if a social organism is to truly grow out of its own living conditions, out of its own necessities of life. This corresponds to a realistic, this corresponds to a truly practical way of thinking.

Therefore, it is important to recognize what the conditions of the social organism are. No matter how much the approach taken here is still regarded by some as impractical idealism today, the longer this realistic view of life and social life is regarded as impractical idealism, , the longer it will be inconvenient to address the true living conditions of the living social organism, the longer the disaster that has befallen humanity in such a catastrophic way will last.

If you know a little, dear attendees, what is alive in the development of humanity, you are not a “practitioner” in the sense of all those who sniff at the very closest things in life a little with the tip of their nose and then consider themselves practitioners from their narrow point of view and brutality rejects everything that does not want to follow their conditions, but is one a practitioner according to the general conditions of humanity, and one looks a little into the developmental conditions of humanity, so one knows that much of what can prevent later social disaster in the social fabric of humanity, very, very far back in its essence must be recognized! It is not easy to recognize too late what is happening in the social life of a nation, but it is very easy to do so in other fields. Once instincts are unleashed, as they are already beginning to be in a large part of the civilized world, the possibility of understanding is no longer there. Therefore, the appeal that arises in the heart of the one who recognizes the necessity that the seeds be sunk in the course of time, so that not disaster but salvation can occur in later time, is serious.

If we consider the social organism that is to emerge, which of course is not yet there, we first come to the conclusion that the following observation, the following premise, is necessary as a feeling, I could say: social forces have always present in the development of humanity; wherever any kind of cohesive human society had developed, whether a people, a state, a tribe or something similar, social impulses were always at work between people and their associations and organizations.

But up to that point in time, which I indicated yesterday as the point in the cycle at which human development passes from instinctive life to fully conscious life, up to that point in time, the social impulses also functioned more instinctively. And just the one sphere, the one area of our social life: the economic sphere with its modern technology, which has to be driven so consciously as an economy, with its modern capitalism, which has to be driven so consciously – just that has conjured up one-sidedness in one area of consciousness.

The old instinctive social life must give way to a fully conscious conception of the social organism. Our humanity must develop a sense of how the individual fits into the overall social organism. And without this social feeling, this social sense, arising from a real insight into the social organism, no salvation can come from the further development of humanity.

That people learn their multiplication tables, that people learn other things in life, is taken for granted today. It must gradually be taken for granted that the growing human being, through education, through school, takes in that which makes him feel like a member of the living social organism. And this living social organism, if it is healthy, is not an abstract homunculus-like unit, as it is often presented today: it is a structured organism.

And to make myself clear, esteemed attendees, I would like to start with a comparison today, but I will immediately note that this comparison is intended to be nothing more than a basis for establishing understanding and for averting misunderstandings.

I would like to say: just as the natural human organism is structured in such a way that it is actually a tripartite in the most eminent sense, so too is the social organism, when it is healthy, a tripartite structure in itself, not an abstract unity. The social organism is not any of these things: it is a threefold unity.

Dearly beloved, for decades I have tried to gain a truly scientific basis for the true threefold nature of the natural human organism. I have given hints about this in my book Von Seelenrätseln (The Riddle of the Soul). I have shown that present-day natural science, biology, will recognize the true organism as threefold when it passes over from that hustle and bustle which is now criticized by such biologists as, for example, [gap in transcript] himself, when it passes over from there to real science. This biology, this true science, which must first develop out of today's, will recognize the real organism as a threefold one.

I have tried to describe this threefold nature of the organism, as it is meant here, in such a way that the human being in his or her entirety is, firstly, the system that I would like to call the nervous-sensory system, which is more or less centralized in the human head. The second is the system that I would like to call the rhythmic system, which is more or less centralized in the rhythmic activities of the respiratory organs and the heart. And then, the third human being, so to speak, the third link of the human natural organism, that is the entire metabolic system. And it can be shown that the human being, insofar as he is active, is composed of these three systems.

But these three systems have a certain autonomy within them. The metabolic system, which is built on the digestive organs in the most eminent sense, cannot help but function independently and must be centralized independently within itself. Next to it, in a certain autonomy, is the lung-heart system, the rhythmic system, and next to that, in turn, is the head system, the nerve-sense system. And it is precisely through this that the living activity in the organism exists, that there is not an abstract centralization, but that these three systems each work within themselves with a certain relative independence; each wants to send the results of its activity into the other systems. The fact that they work alongside each other, on each other, is what makes the organism what it is.

Now I am far, far from simply bringing the social organism into a playful way, by an analogy game, into a comparison with the natural human organism. And the one who, from a superficial understanding of what I am going to present here, will say: Oh, yet another analogy game, as unfortunately created by Schäffle and now again in the book “Weltmutation”, yet another such analogical game in which the processes of the organism are transferred to the social order of society, which is governed by completely different laws; anyone who says that will judge what I actually want to present from a completely misleading point of view. My concern is not to transfer something that happens in the natural human organism to the social organism, but rather that realistic thinking, which teaches us to understand the human natural organism in the right way, realistic thinking is also applied to the social organism, and that the social organism, which is also a threefold nature, is objectively recognized in its living conditions, precisely by recognizing this threefold nature of it.

Those who seek analogies in a playful way, as in “Weltmutation” or in the works of Schäffle and many others, would simply say: the human natural organism has a spiritual part in the nervous-sensory system spiritual part, a regulating part in the rhythmic life of the respiratory and cardiac systems; and thirdly, in the metabolic system, it has that which is based on the coarsest material processes of the human organism. And what would such a system say by analogy with the social organism? It would compare the spiritual impulses that develop in the social organism with those that arise in the human head system, the nerve-sense system. It would thus compare the outer material economic life with that which is bound up in the human being with the coarsest material processes.

But anyone who simply observes the social organism in the same realistic way as one can observe the human being's natural organism, will, strangely enough, come to exactly the opposite conclusion! They will in fact come to observe all of it – whether one can describe it as the lowest or the highest, that is not the point here – but the first link of the social organism, the economic system. But this economic system cannot be analogously compared with the metabolic system of the natural human organism. Indeed, if one wants to use a comparison for the laws of economic life as they express themselves in the social organism, then these laws can only be compared with those laws that prevail in the so-called noblest system of the human organism, in the head system, in the nerve-sense system, the system from which human gifts arise, the system on which all human giftedness and also all human education must be based. In that which is connected with the natural gifts of the nerve-sense system, something enters into the natural, individual natural human organism that cannot be conjured up by mere learning, which brings the outside into the human being, but which must be brought out, depending on how it is predisposed in the human being, which must be demystified from a certain basis. Just as in the individual human development for education and shaping of life there is simply the intellectual gift, the physical and emotional disposition of the human being, so in the social organism there are natural foundations for all human living and working together, in addition to what can be achieved in this social organism through social thinking, that is, through the actions of people! By belonging to a social organism, man is related to certain natural foundations of all human existence through this social organism. The social organism is related to these natural foundations as the individual human organism is related to its innate talents, and no social thinking may deny these natural foundations in their influence on the shaping of all social life. No matter how beautiful the observations on the interaction of land, rent, capital, wages, entrepreneurial profit, and so on, and so on, if one does not understand how to correctly evaluate that which stands as a natural foundation, through which the social organism opens up to an element outside itself, then one does not arrive at a realistic observation if one cannot see this.

Just consider the following, esteemed attendees. Of course, it is of infinite, great importance what part human labor, as human labor, plays in the shaping of any social context of people. But this human labor is, after all, tremendously dependent on the natural foundation. Just as the developing human being is dependent on his or her predispositions, so the social organism is dependent on the natural foundation. Take the following example: Let us hypothetically assume a social organism whose main nutrient is bananas. The means necessary to transport the bananas from their place of origin to where they can be profitably consumed by humans, [to do so] a labor is necessary that is related to the labor necessary to bring the wheat from its point of origin to human consumption, a labor necessary from the material banana culture to the material wheat culture, a necessary labor in the social organism, which is approximately 1:100; that is to say: A hundred times more labor is required to develop labor power in the social organism where wheat production is concerned than where banana production is concerned.

Or assume something else: human labor must be employed to transform the natural product so that it can enter into the social process of circulation, to the point where it finds its end in consumption. You only need to consider the following: in Germany, in areas with medium yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the amount sown; in Chile, wheat yields twelve times the amount sown In northern Mexico, wheat yields seventeen times the amount sown, and in Peru seventeen times. In southern Mexico, it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times the amount sown! There you can see the influence that nature has. And this can also be applied to the yield of this or that raw material for any processing. There you see the relation, the ratio of the fertility of nature to human labor. What a different measure of labor is needed to produce the same yield, where wheat yields twenty-seven times its seed as a result, than where it yields only seven to eight times!

Now, these are radical examples. But the ratio of what nature, what ordinary production in general gives man to his labor, to the labor that is necessary, is just as different within each social context. There we have, I would say, the starting point of one link of the human social organism. Everything that flows out of the natural foundation into the process that takes place between the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities is just as much a closed system in the healthy social organism as the nervous-sensory system is a closed whole with relatively independent laws in the natural human organism.

And to allow something else to play a role in the economic organism, whose essential nature is in the circulation of goods, is just as unhelpful as it would be beneficial if the pulmonary-cardiac system were to play a role in the nervous-sensory system of the head. However strange it may still seem to people today when one speaks in this way, it is something that must underlie as a fundamental truth all, not only social thinking, but all social measures that can somehow be taken for the benefit of humanity in the healthy social organism in the present and future. That which takes place in the cycle of the commodity system must not flood and overwhelm the entire social organism, but must be a relatively independent system in its own right, with its own life. For anyone who then gets to the bottom of things in practice, this system of pure economic mechanism is already automatically distinguished from the other two systems.

The second system of the social organism is the one that encompasses everything that could be called public legal life and everything that regulates the other systems, in other words, that establishes the dignified relationship between people.

The establishment of a dignified relationship between people has nothing to do with the laws that govern pure economic life, with what leads to the circulation of goods within an economic body. The system of public law, the system of regulating life, the system that establishes the right relationship between people, will, just as the pulmonary and cardiac system, in the results of its activity, plays into the head system, so this system of public law, of public regulation of legislation, into what may be called political life in the broadest sense of the word; it will, especially if it develops relatively independently, also play a proper, vital role in economic life in the right, living way. Only the two systems must develop quite independently alongside one another, each according to its own laws, according to its own inner, essential impulses!

One could say that the great misfortune in recent times is that people have chaotically mixed up what can only flourish when it develops separately, in relative independence.

In older times, in keeping with human ideas and human needs in these older times, the three systems I have spoken of today were also in a corresponding relationship in the social organism.

The relationship that present and future humanity needs has yet to be found. However, we have started from many erroneous assumptions, out of a certain conservative attachment to what has been handed down from older times. Something has developed from older times, which was well founded in the old Roman conceptions of the state, developed through monarchies and other forms of state, that which one could call the constitutional state, the political state. Connected with this constitutional state, this political state, here and there was something of economic life, agriculture and forestry here and there. Other branches had claimed what was run as a state for themselves; so that, to a certain extent, the state, which was mainly a constitutional state, a political state, a political community, stood as a protective community with its armed forces against external influences, that this state also became an economist in a certain respect.

And when the modern era approached with its complicated economic systems of technology and capitalism, at first people found salvation in them, not separating the old economic areas that the constitutional state, the political state, had already incorporated, and establishing the two spheres neatly side by side: the rule of law, which aims to organize the relationship between people, and, on the other hand, the economic body. Instead, the two were conflated.

And more and more, the state, which actually has the task of regulating the relationship between people, was saddled with the postal system, telegraphy, railways, in short, the things that serve modern technology and modern economic life. What can be called the flooding of the purely political state system with the economic system developed. Under the influence of precisely those things that technology and capitalism have brought about for the detriment of modern humanity, modern socialist views have developed, so to speak, which, out of thoroughly good intentions and justified demands, want to take what can be called the “flooding of the constitutional state with economic life” to the extreme, but only out of a lack of understanding of old conditions that arise from a realistic observation of the social organism.

The salutary development does not lie in merging the economic social sphere with the political sphere, with the public legal sphere, with the sphere that has to regulate the relationship between people, but in separating each of these spheres to achieve relative independence.

We have seen, esteemed attendees, how damagingly the economic interest groups can operate when they do not organize according to economic impulses in their particular economic areas, but instead enter the representations of the political and legal state and want to push through what are purely economic interests, for which they want to establish rights and special privileges, where completely different foundations of political life should prevail. But what pulsates in economic life must be based solely and exclusively on the healthy conditions of economic life itself.

From what has arisen partly in external reality, partly in human perception, in human sentiment and in the elaboration of human demands from the confusion of economic life with pure politics, with pure state life, that is precisely what has been formed, disguised, and shaped into one of the most essential demands of the modern proletariat. The fact that economic life has flooded everything, that economic life has gradually, one might say, crept into political state life, has meant that an impulse in human activity has not been placed in its proper place – alongside other things, admittedly; but one of the most important, one of those that most deeply intervenes in the social problems of the present.

It will never be possible to separate the mere economic sphere from human labor, from character, from the character that everything in the economic sphere has, from the character of a commodity!

But, as I explained yesterday, the modern proletarian perceives this as the real inhumanity, that there is a labor market, a labor market in which the economic value of the commodity that is his labor power is simply determined according to the law of supply and demand. However the modern proletarian may express his demands, this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it: this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it, is the main thing: the removal of the commodity character from human labor. Human labor should no longer be a commodity!

If you were to socialize in the way that a large proportion of people, those people who want to socialize, intend to carry it out today, then you will not detach the labor force from the commodity, but on the contrary you will make this human labor force more and more into a commodity!

No abstract remedy can be given as to how the human labor force can be stripped of the commodity character – a commodity that can be bought and sold; rather, as stated at the beginning of today's lecture, it can only be said: Do not look for magic remedies, for remedies that are superstitious in the modern sense of the word, to cure socially, but look for the living conditions of the social organism. Then this social organism will develop with its own vitality. And as economic life, according to its own impulses, and the political body of the state, which has to establish the relationship between people, will simply develop side by side, again according to its own laws and impulses. This will happen in such a way that - not in such a way that one can say theoretically: This is how human labor will detach itself from the economic process, and human activity will develop. And it will fall naturally into that link of the social organism that can be described as the political link, as the link that regulates the relationship between people.

There is – and I already pointed this out at the beginning of the century in an article I wrote on the social question for my magazine Lucifer-Gnosis, which was published at the time – there is a certain law for human labor in the totality of a social organism. This law is evident to the true observer of the social organism as something fundamental in social life. So one could then, and still can today, speak of this law, which can be proven in all its details and is important for real knowledge of social life. One preaches to deaf ears with such a fundamental law among those who are there or there to teach people “correct concepts” about economics and the like.

This law, dear attendees, is the following: When someone works, be it manual labor or intellectual work within a larger social community, not within a small one, since the law is not expressed in the same way, but in a larger social community, as it alone comes into consideration in today's consideration of the social question, when a person works in a larger social community, it is impossible for him to benefit personally from what he has worked for as an individual within the social process, within what goes on in the body of society! He can never, so to speak, have the fruits, the results of his own labor. Today, of course, there would not be enough time for this, because it would require hours of individual observations to substantiate this in detail. I can only say that the law I have stated is a law that can be fully substantiated scientifically. What the individual works through his activity can only seemingly serve him in his result. In reality, what the individual works is distributed among the social organism to which he belongs. All people benefit from his work; and he, what he has within a social organism, cannot come from his own pocket if the social organism is healthy; but it comes from the work of other people.

This is simply due to the objective circumstances that take place. If I may use a rough comparison: you can no more live [in an economic sense] on what you work [...] than you can live in a physical sense by eating yourself!

It is a basic law of economic life that one cannot live on one's labor. If one lives on it, it works to the detriment of the social organism. The social organism is only healthy when each individual works for the others, and all others work for the individual.

This is not just a matter of ethical altruism, it is a law of a healthy, organic structure. Therefore, esteemed attendees, it falsifies the basic laws of the social organism if you simply pay for labor like a commodity - for the reason that you are starting from something that is not real. You want to give the worker his earnings; you want to let the person live off his life force. You do not integrate him into the social organism by doing this, but exclude him.

And because the modern economic order has led to the outward, masked, and seemingly settlement of the proletarian with what is supposed to be the product of his labor, it has, precisely through the counter-effect of resistance, produced in him that which he himself, with all his other astute knowledge, cannot develop, that which arises from the killing of social connections, that which is produced in him and he wants to be part of the social connection. He is exposed by that which commodifies his labor power; he wants to be reintroduced; he wants the deadly element to be set aside. This is contained in the one form of social demands that I already mentioned yesterday and to which I must return in this form today.

But if what is introduced into the social organism by labor, by human labor, what, under socialist ideas, wants to introduce more and more of this labor into the purely economic organism, were to take hold, then the proletariat would be increasingly pushed out of the social body.

The fundamental issue depends on the fact that alongside the mere economic body there is another, political body, with relative independence, which does not have to deal with what the circulation of goods is, but has to deal with what establishes the relationship between people. And in the most eminent sense, you can see it as soon as you can gain a relationship to the law that you do not work for yourself but for other people.

In the truest sense, human labor, the regulation of human labor, belongs in this second link of the social organism, in the political organism. It is the duty of the state to see that human labor is not abused. But human labor can never be accorded its rights among other human beings if these rights are to come from the mere economic body - the mere economic body, which is supposed to exist according to its own laws, independently, separate from the political, the purely political body, from the pure state body!

What has come about today, because people are so often accustomed to regarding it as right, what is often regarded as right today, yes, that does indeed speak against what is stated here. However, esteemed attendees, either we will make an effort to live according to the laws of a healthy social organism, or we will be driven into even more terrible catastrophes than we have already been driven into, simply because we have not striven for such a clean-cut distinction between the individual members of the social organism.

We can trace the causes of the war back to the confusion of economic and state affairs.

We will study, because we will be forced to study more and more closely the factors that led to the catastrophe in which we are now mired up to the point of crisis. We will find that among the many causes – I cannot, of course, discuss them exhaustively in this context – is the fact that states could be driven against each other by economic circles that had simply taken control of the political bodies for their own interests! If the political bodies had not allowed themselves to be led by the confounding of certain purely economic interest groups, dear attendees, then the catastrophe could not have taken on this character! The international politics of people, the international will of people, also depends on recognizing the laws of the social organism.

A third link of the social organism is then the spiritual life, dearest ones, this spiritual life, as it has gradually formed into a kind of ideology in the present stage of human development, into which old forms only protrude like remnants - I described it yesterday. But this spiritual life, which arose from certain social instincts and existed in a certain independence until the middle, until the end of the Middle Ages, has also been absorbed. Just as economic life is to be absorbed influence of certain modern aspirations, economic life has been absorbed by state life or vice versa, one could also say: this spiritual life has been absorbed by that life which should only regulate the relationship between people. How people should relate to each other, purely by the fact that they are legal subjects, must be the subject of a special social link in the social organism.

Spiritual life must be a special link in the social organism with relative independence. For the entire social organism, what comes from the spiritual life in its true form is just as important as the absorption of food and metabolism is for the individual human organism. This spiritual life in the social organism must be compared with the most primitive system - the so-called most primitive system - in the natural human organism.

Everything that can only arise from the physical and mental abilities of the human being belongs in this system; everything that can only be placed on the basis of the individual freedom of the human being. Everything that plays a role in the religious life of human beings belongs in this system. This includes everything that belongs in the school and education system, in the broadest sense, from the lowest to the highest level. In addition to much else, in addition to the cultivation of all the arts, in addition to all other cultivation of free spirituality, this also includes - and it would lead too far to give the details here, because it would take hours again - private and criminal law. Public law belongs to the second link of the social organism, public law that establishes the relationship between people in healthy human coexistence.

If, with regard to violated private interests, if, with regard to criminal offenses, a person is to judge another person, then such an individual relationship between the judge and the judged person is necessary before a true observation of reality, that the whole process can only be placed in the realm of individual freedom. One must, as a real judge, submerge oneself in the subjectivity of the person one has to judge, whether in a civil or criminal matter, to such an extent that it is not possible otherwise than for the impulse of individual human freedom to prevail.

I could cite many examples; I will mention just one: anyone who, like me, has observed for decades, through direct experience, the conditions that prevailed where, [officially] and [inofficially], many more individual nationalities lived alongside and mixed with each other than in Austria. Anyone who has observed this, anyone who has observed how much the court relationships contributed to the chaos into which the tremendous Austrian catastrophe has now led, knows the importance that must be attached to the incorrect regulation of the court relationships!

However, within such circumstances, it only manifests itself in a radical way. Consider this: we have an area where Germans and Czechs live together. If a Czech has committed some crime, he is tried by a judge who speaks German, because that is simply the way it is under the current political conditions. The Czech does not understand a word of what is being said about him. He knows he cannot trust his judge, who, according to national characteristics, is different from him.

All this – I can only touch on it briefly – should have led to the conclusion decades ago, in order to avoid this terrible present catastrophe, that it would have been necessary, however the other territorial borders were drawn, with regard to the legal relationships of private and criminal law, to proceed in such a way that for five or ten years everyone freely elects their judges, just as, incidentally, in the field of intellectual life, everyone is free to choose the school for their descendants and so on. This liberation of the school system, of the education system, of the whole of intellectual affairs, includes infinitely much more of the rest of the economic and purely state-run affairs of the social organism.

Naturally, people will be least willing to accept this necessary idea, because many see the nationalization of the school system, the extension of the state's tentacles over free spirituality, as the most sacred of all. Nevertheless, this is the opposite of what is salutary. That which should or can develop as spirituality with a real character can only develop if this spirituality is based purely on itself in the social organism, if the state organism has only to ensure that this spiritual life can develop freely.

The socialist agitators and their supporters have so far discovered only one area, and that out of a misunderstanding, which they treat in this way: the religious area. They hear within the socialist agitation areas: religion is a private matter - but not really because one wants to protect religion in its freedom from state and economic intervention, but because one has no real interest. They want to isolate it; they want it to live for itself, and perhaps die for itself.

The right thing would be to have the greatest respect for the spiritual life in all its individual aspects; then one would know that this spiritual life can only flourish if it has its own administration, its own organization, its adequate, relative independence. This spiritual life must be conceived in the broadest sense, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual ideas, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual achievements that emanate from these spiritual realms, but also in the sense of everything that extends as spiritual impulses to the other two realms. It must emanate from these realms; the technical ideas, that which actually sets the economic life in motion, will emanate from the spiritual-soul work.

But this spiritual and mental work must not be maintained, administered or legislated by the other two spheres; it must govern itself with relative independence so that it can act in the appropriate way, just like the [digestive] system on the two remaining systems of the natural organism, that it can act in the right way through its freedom, through its independence, on the two other social systems.

Thus, it is to be thought that the economic link of the social organism, the area that regulates the relationship of man to man, and the area that, as the actual spiritual area, is based on the individual freedom of all that arising from the spiritual, mental and physical faculties of man, that these areas live side by side in such a way that each has its own administrative and legislative body, as befits its own nature. Not the one parliament that confuses everything together is the salutary thing for the social development of the future, but the three representative bodies, of which one concerns all people: that of the political organism, which will probably be purely democratic in most of the territories of the earth, the civilized world; while the other two will be appropriate in their representation.

The economic body will be built on an associative basis. We can already see the beginnings of this today, in that man must grow together with what is available to him as a natural basis for his economic life, how he must join forces with other people; this union, as it is attempted today in cooperatives and union, and so on, must be built on purely economic foundations: the economic foundations of production, the economic foundations of consumption, the economic foundations of trade, which will regulate each other according to purely economic principles.

The political body, which is based on the legal relationship between people, will become more and more democratic in essence, because it deals with each person's relationship to the circulation of goods. That which is the spiritual realm will be built on what follows from the spiritual life of the individual's advancement in the spiritual life.

These three areas, in a healthy social organism, are effectively sovereignly juxtaposed, and thus responsible to each other like sovereign states. It is precisely because the individual members of the social organism are relatively independent that the delegations can work together in the right community!

One can admit that these ideas may seem too radical for many people today. However, they are not intended, esteemed attendees, to transform any social community overnight in the way that might seem natural when such things are expressed. No, the thinker of reality — and that is always the spiritual scientist, the true spiritual scientist — thinks extremely little of the formation of such theories as theories. He thinks much more of people permeating themselves in their whole will and in their immediate life with what follows as impulses from such a view of life, so that they give the corresponding direction to all the details of their actions, their measures.

It would certainly be a mistake to try to remodel the social organism overnight, as is being attempted in many fields today; but people have always been confronted with the necessity of organizing this or that. You can organize it in such a way that you are obsessed with the idea that everything, in a state of confusion, must be a state entity; or you can take what is most common to everyone and shape it in such a way that it is integrated into the gradual realization of these three coexisting links in the social organism. even more than many socialist thinkers of the present day, who do not dream of bringing about a different organization of the social organism overnight, but think of a slow development, the one who, because his observation is based entirely on these explanations, thinks that a direction is given to social development that is slowly being realized.

This realistic thinking does not speak of any kind of confused social revolutions, for example, that take place quickly. But what is discussed, dear attendees, is that one should be comfortable directing one's thoughts towards what follows from the realistic observation of the social organism itself.

What I have presented to you here, esteemed attendees, appears to me, from what I believe is an objective consideration of present-day events, to be particularly important for this present time, and particularly necessary for this present time to heal many things that need healing. And I may say: it is not merely on theoretical considerations that the ideas which I have presented to you today have been given their final form.

What I have explained to you – I could only give you an outline due to the short time – can be justified in all its details

can be expanded in all its details. This can already be done today in a completely scientific way! Anyone who wants to take this direction can already do so today by working together with those who are willing to devote their energy to giving the social organism a form that makes it truly healthy in the face of a realistic view of life. This can be done; it can be carried out in detail today – in detail, that which I could only present to you today in a comprehensive sketch.

These ideas did not arise out of mere theoretical consideration; they arose out of the observation of the conditions under which these conditions have developed, so that in the end nothing else could result from them but this European catastrophe.

Those who have immersed themselves in the inner workings of these conditions in the contemporary civilized world may have experienced something like, for example, - I could also cite others - me with regard to a certain point. I truly do not want to boast about these things in any way. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, these things are serious; and even if something that one uses for understanding looks like something personal, then perhaps it may be said today in the face of the terrible seriousness of the times.

It was still the time that preceded this [war] catastrophe, when [diplomats], politicians and statesmen and other clever people in Europe had a sunny smile when it was mentioned how peace, or something similar, was established and firmly established in the world. At the time, I had to give a lecture in Vienna, as part of a series of lectures, about what the deeper foundations of our social conditions are heading towards. I spoke at a time when the approaching catastrophe was not yet being noticed from the outside, when diplomats still had a sunny smile on their faces about the good deeds they had done. I spoke of the fact that something like a social carcinoma, like a cancer, was creeping through our social order long before the amateurish book “Weltmutation” (World Mutation) had appeared, with all sorts of socialism gimmicks! And I said at the time: The times are so serious that one feels something like an obligation to cry out to humanity, so that souls may be shaken, so that they may know: The right thing must be done at the right time, so that disaster later, unspeakable disaster would be averted.

That was said before the war.

During the war, however, urged on by the seriousness of the burning social issues, which were brought to the surface in their true form and manner during the catastrophe of war, I had presented to many an influential person within the social organism what was necessary for recovery. Outwardly, in theory, some people understood this; but they could not bridge the gap between theoretical understanding and will, because their understanding was not thorough enough.

Now one would like to believe that what influential people refused to understand during the war catastrophe, now, one would like to believe, now some of those who were brought to misfortune by this war catastrophe in Central and Eastern Europe and some others who have been given a reprieve, now they should understand, at the right time, show understanding for things! For two or three years ago, when things could still have taken a different course from that which they took in the autumn of 1918, I said to many people in Central Europe: What is expressed in these ideas of the threefold social organism must become foreign policy; then the whole course of events will be given a different direction, a more salutary direction. And I then said: You have the choice of either accepting these things at the right time through reason, because these things are not made up, these things are not programs, these things are not an abstract ideal, as abstract ideals have certain societies or parties, but these things are observed from the developmental forces of humanity; they simply want to and must be realized in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. Whether I or you or anyone else wants something in this direction is not what it depends on. What it depends on is whether the developmental forces that humanity must go through themselves want this, whether it is their will that this must happen. You have the choice of either using reason to help shape such a social organization, or revolutionary catastrophes and cataclysms will take place in the field, for which you are now also responsible. The choice between reason and the unleashing of the most terrible instincts, which can then no longer be overcome by mere understanding, this choice is set before people.

It is essential that people move away from the mere search for comfortable thinking, that people come to the point where those who are the real practitioners of life, because they see the formative forces of humanity development, that these people are no longer portrayed as “impractical idealists” and are thus rendered harmless or avoided, but that precisely what they have to say be made fruitful - that is what matters! In many areas, real life practice is quite different from the narrow-mindedness of those who often consider themselves the ultimate practitioners. What these “practitioners” have done over decades has led directly to the misfortunes of the present.

These ideas were also misunderstood in the opposite direction, in that it was believed that they were merely internal ideas, for shaping some kind of closed social organism within.

Now, it is understandable that people who have not learned anything, could not have learned anything, nor through the military catastrophes of recent years, could not understand the intervention and incisiveness of such social ideas coming from reality. Of course, such ideas could not find their way into a state-run country, for example, into a state-run country and life whose leader was able to write such a book over a long period of time, as Bülow did under Wilhelm II; that this book could still be taken seriously, that this book was not taken as an historical document of how Germany's misfortune was brought about by a lack of understanding of modern human development, is one of the special characteristics of our time, which will often give cause to be judged according to a special scientific field - I already mentioned it yesterday: “social pathology” or “social psychiatry”. I don't use that just as a “witticism”, I mean it very seriously.

But what would be necessary to realize, which has not been understood by those to whom I have presented these ideas so far, is that these ideas do not just apply to the inner shaping of some social territory, but that they must gradually become the basis of a true international foreign policy for every state, although each state can start them individually, on its own.

The issue at hand is that, furthermore, states do not negotiate with each other as if they were closed territories, but that each social entity negotiates with every other social entity – it can also be done unilaterally, so each state can start with it – or that each state negotiates with each other state, or one state negotiates with another state that still adheres to the old confounding, and gives its trust to the fact that on the one hand, the representatives of the purely economic body come into consideration, who in turn deal with the economic life of the outside world for themselves, from the foundations of the economic body, in political thought, political relationships, those factors that deal with the relationship between people in general, with the corresponding factors of the other social territory. Likewise, the spiritual representatives of the other territory with the spiritual representatives.

Thus, the so-called “national borders” take on a completely different meaning; what leads to conflicts through national borders is no longer, as it happens now, that everything is thrown together and welded together, but a conflict in one area is balanced by the other areas that work alongside it.

We need only look at the way in which this threefold structure will function across the whole earth in the international relations of nations [and establish something different] that is deeply organic compared to what is attempted out of good will but only out of abstract thinking: a league of nations, intergovernmentalism and the like. All this will not be built up like a human organism, but, brought about according to its conditions, it will become like a living social organism when the threefold nature outlined today is brought into the current that is expressed in the flowing social will and thinking and feeling of humanity.

The contradiction between these three ideas seems just as clear as the great, obvious power of these ideas.

Only when one advances from a mere abstract, from a merely theoretical thinking, which would have to lead to a social homunculus, to a realistic feeling, can one understand how these three ideas must relate to human social reality:

Freedom leads to the area in which spiritual life must unfold.

Equality leads to the place where the relationship between people develops in the political arena, which is what it should properly be called.

Brotherhood leads into the realm of economic life, where everyone should give and receive according to their economic means.

If one knows that the social organism is structured according to three relatively independent links, then one knows that these ideas must contradict each other, just as the laws of development contradict the threefold structure of a natural human organism. If one knows that the great, decisive ideas and impulses; then one is not surprised at the contradictions that arise when one wants to believe that these three ideas must be applied to a social organism in which everything is supposed to be jumbled up and welded together.

Thus, what humanity felt was necessary for social life at the dawn of modern times will only be able to become established in the true social reality of humanity if the three elements of this social reality of humanity are incorporated into the social organism through a realistic [observing, acting and willing] in the social organism.

I know how much prejudice and preconception still speak against these things today. However, without in any way lapsing into vanity or pride, I would like to express what it is all about in conclusion by means of a comparison. Many a person will say: Well, someone with a background in the humanities wants to solve a social problem in such a simple way. Yes, esteemed attendees, I may perhaps compare, for the sake of someone to whom this attempt at a solution seems so simple, so primitive, and does not seem appropriate in comparison to the great erudition economics teachers and other people, I may perhaps venture the comparison for such a person: Once upon a time there was a poor boy who worked as a servant on a Newcomen steam engine. He had to manually operate the two cocks that had to be pushed and pushed all the time, one of which was to let the condensation water into the engine and the other to let the steam into the engine. Then the little boy noticed that this opening and closing of the two cocks, which he had to push back and forth with his hands at the appropriate time, with regard to their swinging up and down, he came up with the idea of tying the cocks together with strings, to control the cocks with strings. And it turned out that the cocks opened and closed by themselves in his up and down, so the cocks that let the condensation water flow in on one side and the steam flow back out on the other. And from this observation of the little boy, one of the most important inventions of modern times emerged: the self-regulating steam engine.

It could also have happened that a “very clever person” would have come and said to the boy: You good-for-nothing, what are you doing there? Get rid of the strings! Take care of your cocks as before by hand, do what you are told! And don't think you can do anything special there!

As I said, you can compare things, but a comparison always has something of a limp. You can use the comparison for something else, that is, for something you look down on with a certain arrogance: for this humanities that now also wants to extend its experience to the social problem! But perhaps I may venture the comparison with the little boy after all. If the “very clever people” today find it extraordinarily foolish for someone from the humanities to dare to tackle the social problem, I would like to say to them: Such people just want to be nothing more than the little boy who just notices what the others have not noticed in all their cleverness and erudition, perhaps also wrong erudition.

For I believe I can be convinced of this, precisely from an insight into the social workings and rule of today's humanity and its demands. I believe I can be convinced of this: What matters is that if one observes in the right way how the three areas of the social organism can develop in their independence, one has discovered the life of this social organism. And just as life itself is control and regulation, so the social organism will regulate itself if only the laws of its individual areas are found in the right way.

That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is what inspires anyone who is serious, especially in today's serious times, with what is necessary for humanity in terms of social demands.

Let me conclude by saying that I actually compress everything that needs to be said in this regard into one sentiment: May there at least be enough people in the present who are moved by what must happen in the next 20 to 30 years because it lies within the developmental forces of humanity, may there be enough people today who open their hearts and minds to what humanity must do to lead the future, so that even greater disaster does not occur! Because if that which is believed by most of those who consider themselves practical – in their own sense, in the right sense – disappears, then there will not be a healing of the misfortune, but rather an immeasurable increase of this misfortune!

Therefore, may as many people as possible be found who open their hearts and minds to what must be done to make possible an understanding, an understanding between heart and heart, an understanding between soul and soul within the social coexistence of humanity, before the instincts are unleashed to such an extent that such an understanding between people, given the terribly animalistic instincts, will no longer be possible.

The only way to get a sound judgment as to what action is needed in the social field is through insight into the basic forces at work in the social organism. The basic idea behind the preceding chapters was an attempt to arrive at such an insight. The facts of social life show that the social disturbances are not merely on the surface but are fundamental. Vision that penetrates to the foundations is needed to cope with them.

It is in capital and capitalism that the worker looks for the cause of his grievances. But to arrive at any fruitful conclusion as to capital's part, for good or ill, in the social structure, one has first to be perfectly clear as to how capital is produced and consumed. One has to learn how this process takes place as a result of the individual abilities of people and the effects of the rights system and the forces of economic life.

One points to human labor as the factor that, together with capital and the nature-basis of the economy, creates the economic values. Through these three factors, the worker becomes conscious of his social situation. To reach any conclusion as to the way in which human labor must be placed into the social organism without injuring the worker's self-respect, requires keeping in mind the relation of human labor to the development of individual abilities, and to the rights-consciousness.

Today, quite rightly, people are asking what the first step must be (the most immediate action) if the claims presented by the social movement are to be met. Even a first step will not succeed unless we first know how it is to be related to the basic principles of a healthy social order. Once this is known, then, in whatever part of the social structure one is working, one will discover the particular thing that requires doing. What keeps people from this insight is the fact that they take their opinions from the social institutions themselves. Their thoughts follow the lead of the facts instead of mastering them. Today, however, we need to see that no adequate judgment can be formed without going back to those primal creative thoughts that underlie all social institutions.

The body social requires a constant, fresh supply of the forces residing in these primal thoughts. If the suitable channels for these thoughts are not there, then social institutions take on forms that impede life instead of furthering it. Yet the primal thoughts live on in men's instinctive impulses, even if their conscious thoughts are mistaken and build up stumbling blocks. It is these primal thoughts that come to expression, openly or in a hidden way, in the revolutionary convulsions of the social order.

Such convulsions will only cease when the body social takes a form in which two things are possible: First, an inclination to notice when an institution is beginning to deviate from its original intention, and second, the counteracting of every such deviation before it becomes strong enough to be a danger.

In our times the actual conditions have come to deviate widely from the demand of the primal thoughts. We need to turn vigorously back to these primal thoughts and not dismiss them as “impractical” generalities. From them we need to learn the direction in which the actual realities must now be consciously guided, for the time has gone by in which the old, instinctive guidance sufficed for mankind.

One of the basic questions raised by the practical criticism of the times is how to put a stop to the oppression the worker suffers under private capitalism. The owner, or manager, of capital is in a position to put other men's bodily labor into the service of what he undertakes to produce.

It is necessary to distinguish three elements in the social relation that arises in the cooperation of capital and human labor-power. First, there is the enterprising activity, which must rest on the individual ability of some person or group of persons. Second, the relation of the entrepreneur to the worker, which must be a relation in right. Third is the production of an object, which acquires a commodity value in the circuit of economic life.

For the enterprising activity to come to expression in a healthy way, there must be forces at work in social life that let individual abilities function in the best possible way. This can only happen if the body social includes a sphere that gives an able person the freedom to use his capacities, and leaves the judgment of their value to the free and voluntary understanding of others.

It is clear that what a man can do socially by means of capital comes into the sphere of society where the laws and the administration are taken care of by the spiritual life. If the political state interferes to influence these personal activities, the decisions will unavoidably show a lack of understanding of individual abilities. This is because the political state is necessarily based on what is similar and equal in all men's claims on life. It is its business to translate this equality into practice. Within its own domain it must make sure that every man has a fair chance to make his personal opinion count. Its proper work has nothing to do with understanding individual abilities, so it ought never to have any influence on the exercise of these.

Just as little, where capital is needed for something, should the prospect of economic advantage determine the exercise of individual abilities. Many, weighing the pros and cons of capitalism, put great stress on this prospect. In their opinion it is only this incentive that can induce individual ability to exert itself. As “practical men,” they refer to the “imperfections of human nature.” There is no doubt that in the social order under which the present state of things developed, the prospect of economic advantage has come to play a very important part. The fact is that to no small extent, this is the cause of the state of things today. Thus there is need for the development of some other, different incentive. This can only be found in the social sense that will develop out of a healthy spiritual life. Out of the strength of the free spiritual life, a man's education and schooling will send him into activity equipped with impulses that will lead him, thanks to this social sense, to making real the things toward which his individual capacities drive him.

Visionary illusions have certainly caused tremendous harm in social endeavor, as in other fields, but such a point of view as that expressed above need not come into the “visionary” category. What is stated here does not rest on any notion that “the spirit” will work wonders if only the people who think they are filled with it, continually speak about it. It comes, on the contrary, out of observation of how people actually do work when they work together freely in the spiritual field. This work in common takes on a social character of its own accord, provided only that it can develop in real freedom.

It is only the lack of freedom in spiritual life that has kept its social character from coming to expression. The spiritual forces of social life have come to expression among the leading classes in a way that has, anti-socially, restricted their use and value to limited circles. What was produced in these circles could only be brought to the workers in an artificial way. They could get from it no support for their souls, because they did not really have any part in it. Schemes for popular education, for “uplifting the masses” to appreciation of art, etc., are no way of spreading spiritual property among “the people,” for “the people” are not within its life. All that can be given them is a view of these treasures from a point outside.

This also applies to those offshoots of spiritual activity that find their way into economic life on the basis of capital. In a healthy social order the worker should not merely stand at his machine while the capitalist alone knows what is going to become of the products in the circuit of economic life. The worker should be able to form a conception of the part he is playing in society through his work on the production line. Conferences, regarded as much a part of the operation as the work itself, should be held regularly by the management. Their aim will be the developing of a common set of ideas for the employed and the employer. Such activity will bring the workers to a sense of the fact that control of capital, properly carried out, benefits the whole community, including the worker. Also, an approach aimed at promoting a full understanding, will make the employer careful to keep his business methods above suspicion.

Only those unable to appreciate the effects of the community of feeling that arises from sharing a common task will consider the foregoing to be meaningless. Others will see clearly the benefits to economic productivity that will come from having the direction of economic affairs rooted in the free spiritual life. If this preliminary condition is fulfilled the present interest in capital and its increase merely for the sake of profits, would be replaced by a practical interest in producing something and getting work done.

The socialistic-minded thinkers of today are struggling to get the means of production under the control of society. What is legitimate in their aims can only be achieved if this control is exercised by the free spiritual sphere of society. In that way economic compulsion, which goes out from the capitalist and which is felt as something unworthy of human beings, will be made impossible. Such compulsion arises when the capitalist acts out of the forces of economic life. At the same time the crippling of men's individual abilities, which results when these abilities are governed by the political state, will not arise.

Earnings on everything done through capital and individual ability must result, like the results of all other spiritual work, from the free initiative of the doer and the free appreciation of those who wish the work done. A man himself must estimate what these earnings must be, taking into consideration preliminary training, incidental expenses, etc. Whether he finds his claims gratified or not depends on the appreciation his services meet with.

Social arrangements on such lines will lay the basis for a really free contractual relationship between the employer (work-director) and the work-doer. It will rest, not on barter of commodities, or money, for labor, but on an agreement as to the share due to each of the two joint producers of the commodity.

The sort of service rendered to the body social on the basis of capital depends, from its very nature, on the way in which individual human capacities reach into the social organism. Nothing but the free spiritual life can give men's abilities the impulse they need for their development. Even in a society where this development is tied up with the political state administration or with the forces of economic life, real productivity in things requiring the expenditure of capital depends on the extent to which free individual capacities can force their way through the hindrances imposed on them. Under such conditions, however, the development is not a healthy one. This free development of individual ability, using capital as a basis, is not what has brought about the commodity status of human labor power, but, rather is it the shackling of labor-power by the political state or by the circuit of economic processes.

Recognition of this fact is a necessary preliminary to everything that has to be done by way of social organization. For the superstition has grown up that the measures needed (for the health of society) must come from either the state or the economy. If we go any farther along the road on which this superstition has led us, we shall be setting up all sorts of institutions that will make oppressive conditions increasingly worse instead of leading man towards the goal he is striving for.

People learned to think about capitalism at a time when it had induced a disease in the body social. They experience the disease, and see that something must be done about it, but they must see more, namely, that the disease originates in the absorption into the economic circuit of the forces at work in capital. If one wants to work in the direction called for by the forces of human evolution, one must not be deluded into considering as “impractical idealism” the idea that the management of capital should be in the sphere of the free spiritual life.

At present people are little inclined to connect the idea that is to lead capitalism in a healthy direction, with the free spiritual life. Rather they connect it with something in the circuit of the economic life. They see how production has led to large scale industry and this, in turn, to the present form of capitalism. Now they propose to replace this by a system of syndicates that will work to meet the wants of the producers themselves. Since, of course, industry must retain all the modern means of production, the various industrial concerns are to be united into one big syndicate. Here, they think, everyone will be producing to meet the orders of the community, and the community cannot be an exploiter because it would simply be exploiting itself. Since they must link onto something that already exists, they turn their attention to the modern state, with the idea of converting it into a comprehensive syndicate.

What they leave out of account is that the bigger the syndicate, the less likelihood of its being able to do what they expect of it. Unless individual ability finds its place in the organism of the syndicate, in the manner and the form already described, the community control of labor cannot lead to healing of the social organism.

People are unwilling to look without bias at the idea of the spiritual life taking an active part in the social organism because they are used to thinking of it as at the opposite pole from everything material and practical. Many will find something grotesque in the view presented here, namely, that a part of the spiritual life should manifest itself in the activity of capital in the economic life. It is conceivable that on this point members of what have been up to now the ruling classes, may find themselves in agreement with socialistic thinkers. To see what this supposed absurdity means for the health of the body social requires that we examine certain present-day currents of thought. These, springing from impulses in the soul, are quite honest in their fashion, but they check the development of any really social way of thinking wherever they find entrance.

These thought currents tend, more or less unconsciously, away from everything that gives energy and driving power to inner experience. They aim at a world conception, an inner life, that strives for scientific knowledge as an island in the general sea of existence. One finds people who think it “distinguished” to sit in cloud castles meditating abstractly on all sorts of ethical and religious problems, such things as virtue and how best to acquire it, how to find an “inner significance” for one's life, etc. One sees how impossible it is to build a bridge between what these people call good, and everything that is going on in the outer world. There, in men's everyday surroundings, we see what is happening with the manipulation of capital, the payment of labor, the consumption, production and circulation of commodities, the system of credit, of banking, and the stock exchange.

One can see two main streams running side by side even in people's very habits of thought. One of them remains aloft, as it were, in divine-spiritual heights, and has no desire to build a bridge from spiritual impulses to life's ordinary activities. The other stream runs on, void of thought, in the everyday world.

But life is a single whole. It cannot thrive unless the forces that dwell in all ethical and religious life bring driving power to the commonplace, everyday things of life—that life that some people may think a bit beneath them. For if people neglect building a bridge between the two regions of life, then not only their religious and moral life, but also their social thinking degenerates into mere wordy sentiment, far removed from everyday reality. This reality then has its revenge. Out of a sort of “spiritual” impulse man goes on striving after every imaginable ideal, and everything he calls “good,” but to those instincts that underlie the ordinary daily needs of life (the ones that need an economic system for their satisfaction), he devotes himself minus his “spirit.” He knows no pathway between the two realms, and so everyday life gets a form that is not even supposed to have any connection with those ethical impulses. Then the ordinary things of every day are avenged, for the ethical, religious life turns to a living lie in men's hearts because (without this being noticed) it is being separated from all direct contact with life.

How many people there are today who, out of a certain ethical or religious quality of mind, have the will to live on a right footing with their fellow men. They really want to deal with others only in the best way imaginable, but they cannot lay hold of any social conception that expresses itself in practical habits of life.

It is people like these who, at this epoch-making moment when social questions have become so urgent, are actually blocking the road to a true practice of life. They see themselves as practical while they are, in fact, visionary obstructionists. One can hear them making speeches like this:

“What is really needed is for people to rise above all this materialism, this external material life that drove us into the disaster of the great war and into all this misery. People must turn to a spiritual conception of life.”

To illustrate man's path to spirituality, they harp on great men of the past who were venerated for their spiritual way of thinking. When one tries to bring the talk around to the thing the spirit has to do for practical life, the creation of daily bread, one is reminded that the first thing, after all, is to bring people again to acknowledge the spirit.

At this moment, however, the urgent thing is to employ the powers of the spiritual life to discover the right principles of social health. For this it is not enough that men make a hobby of the spirit. Everyday existence needs to be brought into line with the spirit. It was this taste for turning spiritual life into bypaths that led the classes that have been ruling up to now, to favor the social conditions that ended in the present state of affairs.

In contemporary society, the management of capital for the production of commodities, and the ownership of the means of production (thus also of capital) are tightly bound together. Yet the effects in the social system of these two relationships between man and capital—management and ownership—are quite different. The control, the management, of capital by individual ability is, when suitably applied, a means—to everybody's interest—of enriching the body social with goods. Whatever a person's position in life, it is to his interest that there should be no waste of those individual abilities that flow from the springs of human nature. Through them are created goods that are of use to the life of man. Yet these abilities are never developed unless the people endowed with them have free initiative in their exercise. Any check to the free flow from these sources means a certain measure of loss to human welfare, but capital is the means for making these abilities available for wide spheres of social life.

To administer the total amount of capital in such a way that specially gifted individuals or qualified groups can get the use of it to apply it as their particular initiative prompts them, must be to the true interests of everybody in a community. Everybody, brain-worker or laborer, must say (if he steers clear of prejudice and consults his own interests):

“I not only wish an adequate number of persons, or groups of people, to have absolutely independent use of capital, but I should also like them to have access to it on their own initiative. For they themselves are the best judges of how their particular abilities can make capital a means of producing what is useful to the body social.”

It does not fall within the scope of this work to describe how, as individual human abilities came to play a part in the social order, private property grew up out of other forms of ownership. Up to the present day this form of ownership has, under the influence of the division of labor, gone on developing within the body social. It is with present conditions, and the necessary next stage of their evolution, that we are concerned here.

In whatever way private property arose—by the exercise of power, conquest, etc.—it is an outcome of the social creativeness that is associated with individual human ability. Yet Socialists today, with their thoughts bent on social reconstruction, hold the theory that the only way to get rid of what is oppressive in private ownership is to turn to communal ownership. They put the question this way: How can private possession of the means of production be prevented, so that its oppressive effect on the un-propertied masses may cease? In putting the question this way, they overlook the fact that the social organism is something that is constantly developing, growing. About a growing organism one cannot ask: What is the best arrangement for preserving it in the state one regards as suitable for it? One can think in that way about something that goes on essentially unchanged from the point at which it was when it started. That will not do for the body social. Its life is a continual changing of each thing that arises in it. To fix on some form as the best, and expect it to remain in that form, is to undermine the very conditions of its life.

One of the requisites for the life of the social organism is that, as already stated, those who can serve the community through their individual abilities should not lose the possibility of doing so on their own initiative. This includes independent use of the means of production. I shall not use the common argument that the prospect of the gains associated with the means of production is needed as a stimulus. The concept presented here, of a progressive evolution in social conditions, must lead to the expectation that this kind of stimulus to social activity can drop away. This result can come through the setting free of the spiritual life from the political and the economic social entities.

The liberated spiritual life will of itself inevitably evolve a social sense, and out of this will arise stimuli of quite a different sort from those that lie in the hope of economic advantage. The question here is not so much concerned with the kind of impulse that makes men like private ownership of the means of production. We must ask whether the independent use of them, or use directed by the community, meets the requirements for the life of the social organism. We cannot here draw conclusions from conditions supposed to be found in primitive communities, but only from what corresponds to man's present stage of development.

At this present stage, the fruitful exercise of individual ability through the use of capital cannot make itself felt in the economic life unless the access to it is free and independent. Where there is to be fruitful production, this access must be possible, not because it will bring advantage to an individual or group but because, directed by a social sense, such use of the means of production is the best way of serving the community.

Man is connected with what he (alone or with others) is producing, as he is connected with the skill of his own arms and legs. Interfering with this free access to the means of production is like crippling the free exercise of bodily skill.

Private ownership is simply the means of providing this free and independent use of the means of production. As far as the body social is concerned, the only significance of ownership is that the owner has the right to use his property on his own free initiative. One sees, joined together in the life of society, two things of quite different significance for the social organism. There is the free access to the capital basis of social production, and on the other hand there is the rights relationship that arises between the user and other people. This comes up through the fact that his right of use keeps these other people from any free activity on the basis of this same capital.

It is not the original free use that leads to social harm but the continuance of the right of use after the conditions that tied it to his individual abilities have come to an end. One who sees the social organism as something growing, developing, cannot fail to understand what is meant. For what is living, there exists no fruitful arrangement by which a finished process does not later, in its turn, become detrimental. The question is entirely one of intervening at the right moment, when what had been opportune and helpful is beginning to become detrimental.

There must be the possibility of the free access of individual capacities to the capital-basis. It must also be possible to change the right of ownership connected with it in the moment that this right starts to change into a means for the unjust acquisition of power. There is an institution, introduced in our times, that meets this social requirement, but only partially since it applies simply to “spiritual property.” I refer to copyrights. Such property, after the author is dead, passes after a certain length of time into the ownership of the community, for free use. Here we have an underlying conception that accords with the actual nature of life in a human society. Closely as the production of a purely spiritual (cultural) possession is bound up with the gifts and capacities of the individual, it is at the same time a result of the common social life and must pass, at the right moment, back into this. It is just the same with other property. By the aid of his property the individual produces for the service of the community, but this is only possible in cooperation with the community. Accordingly, the right to the use of a piece of property cannot be exercised separately from the interests of the community. The problem is not how to abolish ownership of the capital-basis, but how this ownership can be so administered that it serves the community in the best way possible.

The way to do this can be found in the Threefold Order of Society. The people united in the social organism act as a totality through the rights state. The exercise of individual abilities comes under the spiritual organization.

Everything in the body social, viewed from a sense of actualities (and not from subjective opinions and theories), indicates the necessity for the three-folding of this organism. This is especially clear as regards the relation of individual abilities to the capital-basis and its ownership. The rights state will not interfere with the formation and control of private property in capital so long as the connection of this with personal ability remains such that the private control represents a service to the whole social organism. Moreover, it will remain a rights state in its dealings with private property. It will never, itself, take over the ownership of private property. It will only bring it about that the right of use is transferred at the proper moment to a person, or group of persons, who are, again, capable of establishing a relation to this ownership that is based on individual abilities. This will benefit the body social in two quite different ways. The democratic foundation of the rights state being concerned with what touches all men equally, there will be a watch kept to see that property rights do not in the course of time become property wrongs. The other benefit is that the individual human abilities into whose control the property is given (since the state itself does not administer property), are thus furnished the means of fructifying the whole social organism.

Under an organization of this sort, property rights, or their exercise, can be left attached to a personality for as long as seems opportune. One can conceive the representatives of the rights state as laying down quite different laws at different times concerning the transfer of property from one person or group to another. Today, when all private property has come to be regarded with great distrust, the proposal is to convert it wholesale into community property. If people go far on this road they will see that they are strangling the life of the social organism and, taught by experience, they will then pursue a different path. It would surely be better now, at this time, to take measures that would secure social health on the lines here indicated.

So long as an individual (alone or with a group) continues to carry on that productive activity that first procured him a capital-basis to work on, he shall retain the right to use accumulations arising as gains on the primary capital, if these are used for the productive extension of the business. As soon as this particular personality ceases to control the work of production, this accumulation of capital shall pass on to another person or group, to carry on the same kind of business or some other branch of productive industry useful to the whole community. Capital accumulating from a productive industry, that is not used for its extension, must from the beginning go the same way. Nothing shall count as the personal property of the individual directing the business except what he gets in accordance with the claims for compensation that he made when he first took over the business. These were claims he felt able to make on the ground of his personal abilities, and that appear justified by the fact that he was able to impress people sufficiently with his abilities for them to trust him with capital. If the capital has been increased through his personal exertions, then a portion of this increment will also pass into his private ownership—this addition to his original earnings representing a percentage of the increase of the capital. Where the original person controlling an industry is unable or unwilling to continue in charge, the capital used to start it will either pass over to the new person in charge (along with all its incumbent obligations), or will revert to the original owners, according to their decision.

In such an arrangement one is dealing with transfers of a right. The legal regulation of the terms of such transfers is a matter for the rights state. It will also be up to the rights state to see that these transfers are carried out and to administer them. It is conceivable that details of such regulations for transfers of a right will vary greatly in accordance with how the common sense of right (the rights-consciousness) varies in its view of what is right. No mode of conception, which, like this one, aims at being true to life, will ever attempt to do more than indicate the general direction that such regulation should take. Keeping to this direction and using one's understanding, one will always discover the appropriate thing to do in any concrete instance. One must always judge the right course according to the circumstances and from the spirit of the thing. For instance, it is obvious that the rights state must never use its control of rights-transfers to get any capital into its own hands. Its only business will be to see that the transfer is made to a person or group whose individual abilities seem to warrant it.

This way of thinking also presupposes, as a general rule, that anyone who has to undertake such a transfer of capital from his own hands will be free to select his successor in the use of it. He will be free to select a person or group, or else transfer the right of use to a corporate body of the spiritual organization. For anyone who has given practical services to society through his management of capital is likely, from native ability and social sense, to be able to judge what should be done with the capital afterwards. It will be more to the advantage of the community to abide by what he decides than to leave the decisions to people who have no direct connection with the matter.

Some settlement of this kind will be required in the case of capital accumulations over a certain amount, acquired through use of the means of production—and land also comes under this category. The exception is where the gains become private property by terms of the original agreement for the exercise of the individual's capacities.

In the latter case, what is so earned, as well as all savings coming from the results of a person's own work, will remain in the earner's private possession until his death, or in the possession of his descendants until some later date. Until this time, these savings will draw interest from any person who gets them to create means of production. The amount of interest will be the outcome of the general rights-consciousness and will be fixed by the rights state.

In a social order based on the principles described here it will be possible to draw a complete distinction between yields resulting from the employment of the means of production and sums accumulated through the earnings of personal labor, spiritual or physical. It accords with the common sense of right, as well as being to the general social interest, that these two things should be kept distinct. What a person saves and places at the disposal of a productive industry is a service in the interests of all, since this makes it possible for personal ability to direct production. Where, after the rightful interest has been deducted, there is an increase that arises out of the means of production, that increase is due to the collective working of the whole social organism. This must accordingly flow back into it again in the way described above. All that the rights state will have to do is to pass a resolution that these capital accumulations are to be transferred in the way prescribed.

The state will not decide which material or spiritual branch of production is to have the disposal of capital so transferred, or of capital savings. For it to do so would lead to the tyranny of the state over spiritual and material production. But anyone who does not want to select his successor to exercise the right of disposal over capital he has created, may appoint a corporate body of the spiritual sphere to do this.

Property acquired through saving, together with the interest on it, will also pass at the earner's death, or a little while later, to some person or group actively engaged in spiritual or material production, but it must only go to a producer; if it went to an unproductive person, it would simply become private income. The choice will be made by the earner in his last will. Here again, no person or group can be chosen direct; it will be a question of transferring the right of disposal to a corporation of the spiritual organism. Only when a person himself makes no disposition of his savings will the rights state act on his behalf and require the spiritual organization to dispose of them.

In a society ordered on these lines, due regard is paid both to the free initiative of the individual and to the social interests of the general community. In fact these are fully met through the setting free of private initiative to serve them. Whoever has to give his labor over to the direction of another person can know that under such an order of things their joint work will bear fruit to the best advantage of the community, and therefore to that of the worker himself.

The social order here conceived will establish a proportionate relation, satisfactory to healthy human feeling, between the prices of manufactured goods and the two joint factors of their production. These two factors are, as has been shown, human labor and the right of use over capital (embodied in the means of production), which are subject to the common sense of right.

No doubt all sorts of imperfections may be found in what is presented here. Imperfections, however, do not matter. The important thing, if we want to be true to life, is not to lay down a perfect and complete program for all time but to point out the direction for practical work. The special instances discussed here are simply intended as illustrations, to map out the direction more clearly. Any particular illustration may be improved upon, and this will be all to the good, provided the right direction is not lost.

The claims of general humanity and justified personal and family interests can be brought into harmony through social institutions of this kind. For instance, it may be pointed out that there will be a great temptation for people to transfer their property during their lifetime to their descendants or some one of them. It is quite easy to give such a person the appearance of a producer while in fact he may be quite incompetent as compared with others who would be much better in the place he holds. The temptation to do this can be reduced to a minimum: the rights state has only to require that property transferred from one member of a family to another must under all circumstances be made over to a corporation of the spiritual system after a certain period of time following the first owner's death. Or an evasion of the rule may be prevented in some other way by rights-law. The rights state will merely see to it that the property is made over in this fashion. The spiritual organization must make provision for the choice of the person to inherit it.

Through the fulfilling of these principles there will arise a general sense that the next generation must be trained and educated to fit them for the body social, and that one must not do social damage by passing capital on to non-productive persons. No one in whom a real social sense is awakened cares to have his own connection with the capital-basis of his work carried on by any individual or group whose personal abilities do not warrant it.

Nobody who has a sense for what is practicable will regard these proposals as Utopian. For the kind of institutions here proposed are such as can grow directly out of existing circumstances anywhere in life. The only thing is that people will have to make up their minds to give up administering the spiritual life and industrial economy within the rights state. This includes not raising opposition when what should happen really happens—when, for instance, private schools and colleges are started, and the economy is put on its own footing. There is no need to abolish state schools and the state economic undertakings at once. Beginning perhaps in a small way, it will be found increasingly possible to do away with the whole structure of state education and state economy.

The first necessity is for people who are convinced of the correctness of these social ideas, or similar ones, to make it their business to spread them. If such ideas find understanding, they will arouse in people confidence in the possibility of a healthy transformation of present conditions into conditions that do not show the evils we see about us. Only out of this sort of confidence can a really healthy evolution come. To achieve such confidence one must be able to see clearly how new institutions can be connected with what exists at present. The essential feature of the ideas being developed here is that they do not propose to bring about a better future by destroying the present social order further than has already been done. Their realization builds on what already exists, and in the process brings about the falling away of what is unhealthy. A solution that does not establish confidence in this respect will fail to attain something that is absolutely necessary: a further evolution in which the values of the goods already transformed through human labor, and the human faculties men have developed, will not be cast away but be preserved.

Even a radical person can acquire confidence in a form of social reconstruction that includes the preservation of already accumulated values if he is introduced to ideas capable of initiating really sane and healthy developments. Even he will have to recognize that whatever social class gets into power, it will not be able to get rid of existing evils unless its impulses are supported by ideas that can put life and health into the body social. To despair because one cannot believe there will be enough people with understanding for these ideas—provided the ideas are spread with the necessary energy—would be to despair of human nature's capacity for taking up healthy and purposeful impulses. All one should ask is, what must be done to give full force to the teaching and spread of ideas that can awaken men's confidence?

The first obstacle will be in current habits of thought. It will be objected that any dismemberment of social life is inconceivable, that the three branches cannot be torn apart because, in actual practice, they are everywhere intertwined. Or else there will be the opinion that it is quite possible to give each of the branches its necessary independent character under the One-fold State, and thus these ideas are mere empty cobweb-spinning. The first objection comes from unreal thinking. Some people believe that unity of social life is only possible when it is brought about by law. The facts of life itself require just the opposite: that unity must be the result, the final outcome, of all the streams of activity flowing together from various directions. Recent developments have run counter to this principle and so men resisted the “order” brought about from outside. It is this that has led to present social conditions. The second prejudice (the idea that these things could be accomplished under the One-fold State) arises from the inability to distinguish the radical differences in the operation of the three organs of the body social. People do not see that man stands in a separate and peculiar relation to each of the three. They do not see that each of these relationships needs the chance to evolve its own form, apart from the other two, so that it may work together with them.

People think that if one sphere of life follows its own laws, then everything needed for life must come out of this one sphere. If, for example, economic life were regulated in such a way as to meet men's wants, then a proper rights life and spiritual life would spring out of this economic soil as well. Only unrealistic thinking could believe this to be possible. There is nothing whatever in economic life that provides any motive for guiding what runs through the relations of man to man and comes from the sense of right. If people insist on regulating this relationship by economic motives, the result will be that the human being, his labor and his control of the means of labor, will all be harnessed to the economic life. The economy will run like clockwork but man will be a wheel in this mechanism. Economic life has a tendency always to go in one direction, a direction that we must balance from another side. It is not a question of rights regulations following the course set by economic life, but rather, economic life should be constantly subject to the rules of right that concern man simply as man. In this way a human existence within the economy then becomes possible. Economic life itself can develop in a way beneficial to man only when individual ability grows on its own separate soil (detached from the economic system) and continuously conveys to it the forces that economics and industry themselves are powerless to produce.

It is a curious thing that in purely external matters people can readily see the advantage of a division of labor. They do not expect a tailor to keep a cow in order to get milk. When it comes to a recognition of the individual functions of the different spheres of human life, however, they think no good can come of anything but a one-fold system.

It is clear that social ideas that are related to life as it really is, will stimulate objections from every side. Real life breeds contradictions, and anyone accepting this fact will work for social arrangements whose own contradictions will be balanced out by means of other arrangements. He dare not believe that an institution that is “ideally perfect” according to his thinking will involve no contradictions when it is realized in practice.

It is an entirely justified present-day demand that institutions in which production is carried on for the benefit of the individual be replaced by institutions in which production is carried on for the general consumption. Anyone who fully recognizes this demand will not be able to come to the conclusion of modern Socialism, that therefore the means of production must go over from private to common ownership. Indeed, he will be forced to a quite different conclusion, namely, that proper methods must be used to convey to the community what is privately produced by individual energy and capacity.

The tendency of the more recent economic impulses has been to obtain income by mass production. The aim of the future must be to find out, by means of economic Associations, the best production methods and distribution channels for the actual needs of consumption. The rights institutions will see that a productive industry does not remain tied up with any individual or group longer than personal ability warrants. Instead of common ownership, there will be a circulation of the means of production through the body social. This will constantly bring them into the hands of those whose individual ability can employ them best in the service of the community.

That same connection between personality and the means of production, which previously existed through private ownership, will thus be established for periods of time. For the head of a business and his assistants will have the means of production to thank for being able to earn, by their personal abilities, the income they asked. They will not fail to improve production as far as is possible, since every improvement brings them, not indeed the whole profit, but nevertheless a portion of the added returns. For profits, as shown above, go to the community only to the extent of what is left over after deducting the percentage due to the producer for improvements in production. It is in the spirit of the whole thing that if production falls off, the producer's income must diminish in the same proportion in which it rises with increased production, but at all times the manager's income will come out of the spiritual work he has done. It will not come out of the profits that are based on the interplay of forces at work in the life of the community.

One can see that with the realization of social ideas such as these, institutions that already exist will acquire an altogether new significance. Property ceases to be what it has been up until now, and it will not be forced back to an obsolete form, such as that of communal ownership. It is, rather, taken forward, to become something quite new. The objects of ownership will be brought into the stream of social life. The individual cannot, motivated by his private interests, control them to the injury of the general public. Neither can the general public control them bureaucratically to the injury of the individual. It is rather that the qualified individual will have access to them as a means of serving the public.

A sense for the general public interest will have a chance to develop when social impulses of this sort are realized, with approaches that place production on a sound basis and safeguard the social organism from the danger of sudden (economic) crises. Also, an Administrative Body occupied solely with the processes of economic life, will be able to bring these back into balance when this appears to be necessary. Suppose, for instance, that a concern were not in a position to pay its creditors the interest due them on their invested personal savings. Then, if the firm is nevertheless recognized as meeting a need, it will be possible to get other business concerns, by free agreement, to make up the shortage in what is due to these investors.

A self-contained economic life that gets its rights basis from outside, and is supplied from without by a constant flow of fresh human ability as it comes on the scene, will, itself, have to do only with economic matters. Through this fact it will be able to facilitate a distribution of goods that procures for everyone what he can rightfully have in relation to the general state of prosperity of the community. If one person seemingly has more income than another, this will only be because this “more” resulting from the individual's talents benefits the general public.

In a social organism that shapes itself in the light of these conceptions, the taxes needed for the rights life can be regulated through agreement between the leaders of the rights life and those of the economic life. Everything needed for the maintenance of the cultural-spiritual life will come as remuneration resulting from voluntary appreciation on the part of individuals active in the body social. This spiritual life rests on a healthy basis of individual initiative, exercised in free competition among the private individuals suited to spiritual-cultural work.

Only in the kind of social organism meant here will the rights administration develop the necessary understanding for administering a just distribution of goods. In an economic life that does not have the claim on men's labor prescribed by the single branches of production, but rather has to carry on business with the amount of labor power the rights-law allows it, the value of goods will be determined by what men actually put into it in the way of work. It will not allow the work men do to be determined by the goods-values, into the formation of which human welfare and human dignity do not enter. Such a social organism will keep in view rights that arise from purely human conditions.

Children will have the right to education. The father of a family will be able to have a higher income as a worker than the single man. The “more” that he gets will come to him through agreement among all three branches of the body social. Such arrangements could meet the right to education in the following way. The administration of the economic organization estimates the amount of revenue that can be given to education, in line with general economic conditions, and the rights state determines the rights of the individual in this regard, in accord with the opinion of the spiritual organization. Here again, since we are thinking in line with reality, this instance is merely intended to indicate the direction in which such arrangements can go. It is quite possible that for a specific instance quite other arrangements may be found to be the right thing. In any case, this “right thing” will only be found through the working together of all three independent members of the social organism. For the purposes of this presentation, our concern is merely to discover the really practical thing—unlike so much that passes for practical today. We refer to such a membering of the social organism as shall give people the basis on which to bring about what is socially useful.

On a par with the right of children to education is the right of the aged, of invalids and widows to a maintenance. The capital basis for this will flow to it through the circulatory system of the social organism in much the same way as the capital contributed for the education of those who are not yet capable of working. The essential point in all this is that the income received by anyone who is not personally an earner should not be determined by the economic life. Rather should it be the other way round: the economic life must be dependent on what develops in this respect out of the rights consciousness. The people working in an economic organism will have so much the less from what is produced through their labor, the more that has to go to the non-earners. Only, this “less” will be borne fairly by all the members of the body social when the social impulses meant here are really put into practice. The education and the support of those who cannot work, concerns all mankind in common. Under a rights state, detached from economic life, it will become the common concern in actual practice. For in the rights state there works what in every grown human being must have a voice.

A social organism so arranged will bring the surplus that a person produces as a result of his individual capacities into the general community. It will do it in just the same way as it takes from the general community the just amount needed for the support of those less capable. “Surplus value” will not be created for the unjustified enjoyment of the individual, but for the enhancement of what can give wealth of soul and body to the whole social organism, and to foster whatever is born of this organism even though it is not of immediate service to it.

Someone might incline to the thought that the careful separation of the three members of the body social only has a value in the realm of ideas (ideal value), and that it would come about “by itself” under a one-fold state or under a cooperative economic society that includes the state and rests on communal ownership of the means of production. He should, however, consider the special sorts of social institutions that must come into being if the three-folding is made a reality. For instance, the political government will no longer have to recognize the money as a legal medium of exchange. Money will, rather, owe its recognition to the measures taken by the various administrative bodies within the economic organization. For money, in a healthy social organism, can be nothing but an order for commodities that other people have produced and that one can draw out of the total economic life because of the commodities that one has oneself produced and given over to this sphere. It is the circulation of money that makes a sphere of economic activity into an economic unit. Everyone produces, on the roundabout path of the whole economic life, for everyone else.

Within the economic sphere one is concerned only with economic values. Within this sphere, the deeds that arise out of the spiritual and the state spheres also take on the character of a commodity. What a teacher does for his pupil is, for the economic circuit, a commodity. The teacher's individual ability is no more paid for than is the worker's labor-power. All that can possibly be paid for in either case is what, proceeding from them, can pass as a commodity or commodities into the economic circuit. How free initiative, and how rights, must act so that the commodity can come into being, lies as much outside the economic circuit itself as does the action of the forces of nature on the grain crop in a bountiful or a barren year. For the economic circuit, both the spiritual sphere—as regards its claim on economic returns—and the state, are simply producers of commodities. Only, what they produce is not a commodity within their own spheres. It first becomes one when it is taken up into the economic circuit.

The purely economic value of a commodity (or an accomplishment), as far as it is expressed in money terms, will depend on the efficiency, in the economic organism, that is developed by the management of the economy. On the measures taken by management, will depend the progress of economic life—always on the basis of the spiritual and the rights foundation developed by those other members of the social organism. The money-value of a commodity will then indicate that the economic organization is producing the commodity in a quantity corresponding to the demand for it. If the premises laid down in this book are realized, then the body economic will not be dominated by the impulse to amass wealth through sheer quantity of production. Rather will the production of goods adapt itself to the wants, through the agency of the Associations that will spring up in all manner of connections. In this way the proportion, corresponding in each case to the actual demand, will become established between the money-value of an article and the arrangements made in the body social for producing it.¹

In the healthy society, money will really be nothing but a measure of value, since behind every coin or bill there stands the tangible piece of production, on the strength of which alone the owner of the money could acquire it. The nature of these conditions will necessarily bring about arrangements that will deprive money of its value for its possessor when once it has lost the significance just pointed out. Arrangements of this sort have already been alluded to. Money property passes back, after a fixed period, into the common pool, in whatever the proper form may be. To prevent money that is not working in industry from being held back by its possessors through evasion of the provisions made by the economic organization, there can be a new coinage, or new printing of bills, from time to time. One result of this will no doubt be that the interest derived from any capital sum will gradually diminish. Money will wear out, just as commodities wear out. Nevertheless, such a measure will be a right and just one for the state to enact.

There can be no compound interest. If a person puts aside savings, he has certainly rendered past services that gave him a claim on future counter-service in terms of commodities. This is in the same way as present services claim present services in exchange. Nevertheless, his claims cannot go beyond a certain limit. For claims that date from the past require the productions of labor in the present to satisfy them. Such claims must not be turned into a means of economic coercion. The practical realization of these principles will put the problem of the currency standard on a sound basis. For no matter what form money may take owing to other conditions, its standard will lie in the intelligent arrangement of the whole economic body through its administration. The problems of safeguarding the currency standard will never be satisfactorily solved by any state by means of laws. Present governments will only solve it when they give up attempting the solution on their own account and leave the economic organism—which will have been detached from the state—to do what is needful.

There is a lot of talk about the modern division of labor in connection with its results in time-saving, in perfecting the manufacture and facilitating the exchange of commodities. Little attention is paid to its effect on the relation of the human individual to his work. Nobody working in a social organism based on the division of labor really earns his income himself. He earns it through the work of all those who have a part in the social organism. A tailor who makes a coat for his own use does not have the same relationship to it as does a person who, under primitive conditions, still has all the other necessities of life to provide for himself. The tailor makes the coat in order to enable him to make clothing for other people, and its value for him depends entirely on what other people produce. The coat is really a means of production. Many people will say this is hair-splitting. They won't say this when they come to consider the formation of values in the economic process. Then they will see that in an economic organism based on the division of labor one simply cannot work for oneself. All a person can do is work for others and let others work for him. One can as little work for oneself as one can eat oneself up. One can, however, establish arrangements that are in direct opposition to the very essence of the division of labor. That happens when the production of goods only takes place in order to transfer to the individual as private property what he can only produce because of his place in the social organism.

The division of labor makes for a social organism in which the individual lives in accordance with the conditions of the whole body of the organism. Economically it precludes egoism. If, then, egoism nevertheless persists in the form of class privileges and the like, a condition of social instability sets in, leading to disturbances in the social organism. We are living under such conditions today. There may be people who think it futile to insist that rights conditions and other things must bring themselves into line with the non-egoistic production resulting from the division of labor. Such a person may as well conclude, from his own premises, that one cannot do anything at all, that the social movement can lead nowhere. As regards the social movement, one can certainly do no good unless one is willing to give reality its due. It is inherent in the mode of thought underlying what is written here, that man's activities within the body social must be in line with the conditions of its organic life.

Anyone who is only capable of forming his ideas by the system he is accustomed to, will be uneasy when he is told that the relation between the employer (work director) and the worker is to be separated from the economic organism. For he will believe that such a separation is bound to lead to the depreciation of money and a return to primitive conditions of industrial economy. (Dr. Rathenau takes this view in his book, After the Flood, and from his standpoint it is a defensible one.) This danger is, however, counteracted by the three-folding of the social organism.

The autonomous economic organism, working jointly with the rights organism, completely detaches the money relationships from the labor conditions, which rest on the rights laws. The rights conditions cannot have any direct influence on money conditions, for these latter are the result of the administration of the economic organism. The rights relationship between employer and worker will not one-sidedly show itself in money values at all. For with the elimination of wages, which represent a relation of exchange between commodities and labor, money value remains simply a measure of the value of one commodity, or piece of work, as against another. If one studies the effects of the three-folding upon the social organism, one will become convinced that it will lead to institutions that do not as yet exist in the forms of the state as we have experienced them up to now.

These arrangements can be swept clear of all that today is felt as class straggle, for this straggle is based on the wages of labor being tied up in the economic processes. Here, we are describing a form of the social organism in which the concept of the wages of labor undergoes a transformation, no less than does the old concept of property. Through this transformation there is created a social relationship between human beings that is vital, is related to life.

Only a superficial judgment would find that these proposals amount in practice merely to converting hourly wages into piece wages. One might be led to this conclusion by a one-sided view of the matter, but this one-sided view is not what we are considering here. Rather, the point is the elimination of the wage-relation altogether and its replacement by a share-relation (based on contract) between employer and workers. We approach this in terms of its connection with the whole organization of the body social. It may seem to a person that the portion of the product of labor that falls to the worker is a piece wage. This is because one fails to see that this “piece wage,” which is not a “wage” at all, finds expression in the value of the product. Furthermore, it does so in a way that puts the worker in a position with relation to other members of the social organism that is quite different from the one that arose out of class supremacy based one-sidedly on economic factors. Therewith, the demand for elimination of the class straggle is satisfied.

To those who hold the theory (heard also in Socialist circles) that evolution must bring the solution of the social question and that it is impossible to present views and say they ought to be realized, we must reply: Certainly evolution will bring about what must be, but in the social organism men's idea-impulses are realities. When time has moved on a little and what today can only be thought, can be realized, then this will be present in the evolution. If one waits until then, it will be too late to accomplish certain things that are required now by today's facts. It is not possible to observe evolution in the social organism objectively, from outside, as one does in nature. One must bring about the evolution. That is why views bent on “proving” social requirements as one “proves” something in natural science are so disastrous for healthy social thinking. A “proof” in social matters can only exist if it takes into account not only what is existing but also what is present in human impulses like a seed (often unknown to the people themselves) that will realize itself.

One of the ways in which the three-folding of the social organism will prove that it is founded on what is essential in human social life will be the removal of the judicial function from the sphere of the state. It will be up to the state institutions to determine the rights that are to be observed between individuals or groups of men. The passing of judgment, however, is the function of institutions developed out of the spiritual organization. In passing judgment, a great deal depends on the opportunity the judge has for perceiving and understanding the particular circumstances of the person he is trying. Nothing can assure this except those ties of trust and confidence that draw men together in the institutions of the spiritual sphere. These must be the main consideration in setting up the courts of law.

Possibly the administration of the spiritual organization might nominate a panel of judges who could be drawn from the widest range of spiritual professions and would return to their own calling at the expiration of a certain period. Within definite limits, everybody would then have the opportunity of selecting a particular person on the panel for five or ten years. This would be someone in whom he feels sufficient confidence to be willing to accept his verdict in a civil or criminal suit, if it should come to that. There would always be enough judges in the neighborhood where anyone was living, to give significance to this power of choice. A complainant would always have to apply to the defendant's judge.

Only consider the importance such an institution would have had for the territories of Austria-Hungary. In districts of mixed language, the member of any nationality would have been able to choose a judge of his own people. Apart from nationality, there are many fields of life where such an arrangement can be of benefit to healthy development.

For more detailed acquaintance with points of law, the judges and courts will have the help of officials (also selected by the spiritual administration) who will, however, not themselves decide cases. The same administration will also have to set up courts of appeal. The kind of life that will go on in society through a realization in practice of the conditions we are presuming here will bring it about that a judge is in touch with the life and feelings of the ones brought before him. His own life—outside the brief period of his judgeship—will make him familiar with their lives and the circles they move in. The social sense developed in such a society will also show in the judicial activity.

The carrying out of a sentence is the affair of the rights state.

It is not necessary at this time to go into arrangements that will be necessitated in other fields of life by the realization of what has been presented here. This would obviously take up unlimited space.

The instances of social arrangements given here make clear that this is not an attempt to revive the three old “estates” of the Plough, the Sword and the Book. The intention is the very opposite of such a division into classes. It is the social organism itself that will be functionally membered, and just through this fact man will be able to be truly man. He himself will have his own life's roots in each of the three members. He will have a practical footing in that member in which he stands by way of occupation. His relation to the other two will be actual and living, developing out of his connection with their institutions. Threefold will be the social organism as apart from man, forming the groundwork of his life, and each man as a man will unite the three members.

• 1. Authors Note. A sound proportion between the prices of the various goods produced can only be achieved in economic life as an outcome of a social administration that springs up in this way from the free cooperation of the three branches of the body social. The proportion between prices of various goods must be such that anyone working receives as counter-value for what he has produced as much as is necessary to satisfy his total wants and the wants of his dependents until he has again turned out a product requiring the equivalent labor. It is impossible to fix such a price relation officially in advance. It must come as the result of the living cooperation between the Associations actively at work in the body social. Prices will however certainly settle down into such a normal relationship, provided the joint work of the Associations rests on a healthy cooperation between the three members of the social organization. It must develop with the same sureness that a safe bridge must come into being when it is built according to the proper laws of mathematics and mechanics. It may be said that social life does not invariably obey its own laws, like a bridge. No one, however, will make this objection who is able to recognize that it is primarily the laws of life and not those of mathematics that, throughout this book, are conceived as underlying social life.

Dear attendees! The events unfolding today in the field of the social movement, which are alarming for some, seem to truly lead people who observe them to a new language, a language that is unfamiliar compared to everything that has been experienced in the course of human history. In view of what is coming to the surface today from the depths of social life, must we not conclude that, despite the fact that what is called the social question has been in the making in humanity for more than half a century, the thoughts and will impulses of people are actually quite poorly prepared for what is being expressed in facts today? For decades, anyone who has had the opportunity to gain access to the real social movement has very often had the opportunity to notice how socialist thinkers, those thinkers who, with all their hearts, believe they are in line with the proletarian will , how such thinkers repeatedly pointed out that the economic facts themselves, which have emerged in the development of people through modern technology and capitalism, that these economic facts themselves, through their own progression, will, as it were, bring about something like a solution to the social question. If I am to briefly indicate what was thought there, it is something like the following:

The spread of economic life, with the division of labor and everything else that goes with it, has all led to the fact that the private capitalist economy has gradually been concentrated in the hands of a few, and that ever larger and larger masses of the proletariat have been harnessed to this will of a few. It was hoped that that which had so to speak extended an economic power over the proletariat would be driven to the point where it would destroy itself, as it would to a certain extent no will be able to advance on its own path, and where the proletariat, as I said, will be in a position, through the development of economic facts, to take power into its own hands, which it was previously dominated by. From radical revolutionary views, which played a role in this direction in earlier times, one has moved on to more reformist ones, through which it was expected that the gradual transition of economic power from the capitalist enterprise to the proletarian enterprise itself would take place through the measures that could be brought about by the proletariat within the regulated life of the state. So, to a certain extent, it was thought that objective facts independent of people would bring about a certain crisis, and with this crisis a certain solution to the social question.

Do we not already see clearly today that it has become different, that all thoughts that have moved in this direction actually miss the point? Do we not see that it is now the proletarian as such, with his will, with his demands, who is bringing about the facts that are now, as I said, appearing on the horizon of historical life in such a frightening way for many people? Does this not force us to look at proletarian life and to demand that we should no longer allow ourselves to be beguiled by what has been regarded as the right thing for decades by the doctrine?

In the lectures that I have recently been allowed to give on this question, I have already pointed out that these present facts, above all, force us to direct our consideration of the social question to the realm of the proletarian himself. And I have already stated why the proletarian has become what he actually appears today. What is the position of the proletariat, with its desires, its impulses, its demands, in the light of the present situation? Is it not that of a powerful criticism of world history, of that which the leading circles of humanity have hitherto regarded as correct and have made the basis and guiding principle of their actions? A criticism that could not be expressed in words is expressed by this criticism, which simply lives in the characteristics and actions of the present proletariat.

This present proletariat sees itself harnessed into pure economic life by the economic process that has been looming for a long time. And again I must emphasize, for the sake of the context, what I have already discussed in the earlier lectures, that in that this modern proletariat finds itself harnessed into bare economic life with its entire destiny, it above all, in the deepest sense, as unworthy of it that the proletarian's labor power for this present economic life means the same as the commodity that is brought to market, the circulation of which is regulated according to supply and demand, and which can be bought. However things may be expressed, even by socialist thinkers in this field, the feelings that prevail among the proletariat, that which lives in the unconscious depths of the proletarian soul, is much more important than that which is consciously thought and expressed. And these feelings are as follows: How is it possible, within the capitalist economic order, to divest the human labor power that the proletarian has to offer on the market and that can be bought, of the character of a commodity?

By stating this, attention is drawn to the first link in today's social question, to the extent to which this social question is an economic question, to what extent it is a wage question. Now, anyone who has learned over the decades not just to think about the proletariat, but to think with the proletariat, knows how the Marxist doctrine, which pointed out to the proletarians with particular intensity how their labor power as a commodity is integrated into the economic process, has taken hold. One must refer again and again to the illumination that Karl Marx has given to this matter, since this illumination lives on intensely in the faith and perception of the proletariat. The capitalist, within today's economic system, is the one from whom the proletarian worker sees how he is called to the factory, how he is called to the machine, how he is paid for his labor.

Marx then tried to make the following clear to the proletarians. He tried to show them that the proletarian's labor is actually essentially underpaid. This labor power must be continually produced by the food and other means of subsistence that the proletarian needs. If the proletarian is able to obtain food and other means of subsistence, then he can restore his labor power that has been expended in the economic process, and then he can perform his work. This leads to the situation – or so the view goes – that the employer pays the worker what is necessary to produce this labor, but that he lets him work far beyond the time that would be necessary to earn what is necessary to produce this labor. This is how the added value arises, which, as I said, had such a profound effect on the proletarians' perceptions. The worker produces for the entrepreneur. He produces more than the entrepreneur compensates him for. And what he produces more is the entrepreneur's profit. Achieving this added value by changing the economic process has become the ideal of proletarian endeavor.

Now, esteemed attendees, the opinions that have been formed about these matters, in both bourgeois and non-bourgeois circles, basically all point in the same direction. These opinions all suggest that proletarian labor for the production of goods must itself necessarily be treated as a commodity. In the face of this, one is indeed compelled to look deeper into economic life and to ask oneself the question: Is there perhaps something quite different at the bottom of it all than what proletarians and non-proletarians believe? Has this part of the social question been grasped correctly at all? The development of the facts, which the present shows, proves that this cannot be the case, that the matter has been grasped correctly. If we examine the matter more closely, we see that the economic process must necessarily be exhausted by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities.

We may ask: What is it that actually gives this economic process its laws? What does what happens in the economic process depend on? Nevertheless, everything that happens in the economic process comes down to human needs and interests, however it is disguised. Everything that happens in the economic process boils down to the production of what is demanded by human needs and, as a result, consumed by people. And every view of what a commodity is, my dearest present, proves to be false in the face of a real economic study; every other view, except the one that regards the commodity as that which acquires its value by being consumed in the most expedient way [by] human society, by man in general. It is through the most expedient use that the commodity acquires its value. And everything that is the exchange of the commodity in the economic process is determined precisely by this. The mutual values of the commodities can only depend on the extent to which these commodities are consumed.

Anyone who now delves into this fundamental character of the commodity within the economic process will realize something that unfortunately many people have not realized: that human labor power is something that cannot be compared at all with what a commodity is, and that therefore, because it cannot be compared in real terms, because there is no relationship between labor power and a commodity, it cannot be a commodity. A strange contradiction, isn't it? On the one hand, one must actually recognize that human labor power is quite incomparable to a commodity and therefore cannot be exchanged for one; on the other hand, one sees that within today's economic order, proletarian labor power has truly become a commodity. What is the basis for this contradiction of life? This contradiction of life is based on the fact that the employee cannot actually buy the labor power from the worker. And by believing that he can buy it, one is labouring under a great fallacy. It is a fundamental economic fallacy that expresses itself in the belief that one can buy human labour at all. In reality, one does not buy it. What does the employer buy from the employee? In truth, the employer buys the services from the employee. The goods produced by the employee and the value of these goods are determined by their relation to other goods on the labor market. And the real fact of the matter is that the employer does not pay at all for the goods produced by the employee, that he, as a result of today's economic process, so to speak, evades payment – one can put it so radically – and that he pays for something else that, in principle, should never be paid for within the human social order because it can never be a commodity: he pays for labor. And he pays for this labor to the extent that he is able to do so, in that he holds the economic power, that he can, so to speak, exert a compulsion on the employee, that this employee, in order to live, goes to the machine, goes to the factory.

Thus we have the fact, the serious and significant fact, that something in our economic life has shifted, that something is being hidden, concealed. The fact is hidden that in reality one buys goods from the employee or purchases services, but evades the payment for this purchase, that is, one does not actually buy them, but forces the worker to give them up voluntarily in return for something else. By feeling like today's proletarian, he feels that his existence is degrading. And we will never be able to properly penetrate the souls of the modern proletariat if we are unable to see the matter in this way, if we are unable to rise to the view that a commodity must be consumed in the most expedient way if it is to serve the economic process in the right way. When proletarian labor power is commodified, it must take on the character of the commodity, that is, it must be consumed in the economic process. In this way, the human being is consumed, and it is in this mere consumption that proletarian man perceives what is degrading about it.

But how is it possible that such a concealment, that such a masking of the facts has actually occurred? Here again, proletarians and non-proletarians in the present day are not at all in agreement. What must be seen in this area is that the integration of human labor into the social process, into the coexistence of human beings, cannot be a question of economic life at all, that what regulates this labor must be taken out of the economic process.

This brings us to what is so necessary for the recovery of the social organism, and to being able to shed light on the damage caused by the fact that the social organism, in its own structure, is not understood in the right way. This social organism is viewed as if it were a unified, centralized structure. This view is just as wrong as it would be wrong to believe – as I have already pointed out in earlier lectures – that the human natural organism is a single centralized system. This centralized natural organism has, for example, the processes of rhythmic life, of breathing and of the heart, and the processes of the sensory-nervous system, in addition to the processes of metabolism. All of this is merely centralized in one place – and it works, each with a certain independence and serves the other precisely through its independence. The lungs take in air from the outside, quite independently of what is going on in the processes of the sensory nervous system and in the processes of metabolism. But it is precisely because these organs are independent that they harmonize best with each other. With regard to the social organism, such a consideration has not yet been reached. The necessary relationship between all economic aspects of social organization and all legal aspects has not yet been recognized.

In more recent times, it has become apparent that, to begin with, the leading classes have, as they say, nationalized certain branches of economic life. It has been deemed right and in the interest of human progress to nationalize, or one might say socialize, such branches of economic life as the postal service, the telegraph, the railways and the like. In doing so, they added further branches of this economic life to those already previously administered by the state. The leading and governing circles were the first to take this step of socializing economic life. But they were followed along this path by the views of the proletarian circles and their leaders. And today, what is being thought in this [area] comes to a head in the demand for the total socialization of the entire economic life. Thus, the proletariat is only drawing the final conclusion of what the leading circles have begun and which they have indeed limited according to their advantage. But if it were to be realized, the entire social organism would become a unified, centralized system. This is detrimental to its health. If it is to be healthy, it must be just as internally structured as the natural human organism. For just as air enters the natural human organism to be further processed in that natural human organism in a completely different way, in a completely different way than the food that enters the metabolism, so too must that which lies in the legal life, what is effective in the legal life, in the system of public rights, must enter the social organism in a completely different way than that which is in the economic life and leads to the production of goods, to the circulation of goods and to the consumption of goods.

What is the basis of economic life? As I have already pointed out, it is human interest. The laws that serve human interest must be realized in economic life. In this process, one person is always confronted with another person, depending on their interests: the consumer with the producer, one professional group with another, and so on. In a healthy social organism, alongside what takes place purely as a result of the effect of human interests, another element of this social organism must exist: the element in which the life of public law unfolds. This life of public law is based on human impulses that develop in a completely different, radically different way than impulses that lie in human needs and lead to the economic process. That which expresses itself as a need in human life and leads to the economic process arises from the elementary nature of human nature and the human soul. This is something that does not directly depend on man as such.

The situation is different with law, with everything that can be established as public law through the coexistence of people. This law is formed in a similar way to human language itself. Human needs are there by nature, insofar as they intervene in economic life. Human law, which has to do with the relationship from person to person, must, insofar as you are human, must ignite in the direct intercourse from person to person, as language is formed, or at least formed, in the intercourse from person to person. While political economy is concerned with the relationship between circles of interests, what is the life of public law is concerned with relationships that may take place only between human and human, independently of everything else. Relationships must be justified by the law, by which man feels himself within human society, worthy only as a human being. Such legal impulses cannot arise out of economic life itself. If such legal impulses were to be formed out of economic life itself, then they would always be only a transformation of economic interests. However you imagine the state or human society, or however you want to call it, to be formed, if rights are established in it according to economic interest, then these rights will only be the expression of revelation, only the transformation of economic interests. Just as little can arise from the economic organism that is present in the legal system as can arise from the metabolism that is present in the respiratory process.

What is important, dear attendees, is not that it goes without saying that people who are involved in economic life know what rights between people are, but rather that, in addition to the independent economic life in a healthy social organism, an equally independent legal life must arise, which, precisely because of its relative independence, can in turn intervene in the economic life in just the right way.

Nothing has shown more forcefully that this is a necessity than the relationship in which human labor power has been incorporated into the modern economic process. To understand this, one need only realize what is meant here by public law. In the economic process, one is concerned only with goods, the exchange of goods, and so on. The economic process does not include, for example, the ownership relationship; the ownership relationship belongs in the legal sphere. Why? What does it actually mean if I am the owner, say, of a piece of land? It means that the human institutions within which I live have been established in such a way that I alone have the right to use that land in the economic process. This is a right to this land; this is a right that is quite different from what can take place according to the laws of the economic process. And so one could cite many things that would define the opinion one must have about the difference between the actual economic life and the legal life.

Human labor power, by its very nature, because it is incomparable to the commodity, as I have discussed, does not belong in economic life, but in legal life. Today, there is a lot of talk about the socialization of economic life. The only question, dear attendees, is whether this socialization can really be achieved with the means and ways in which we are trying to achieve it today. What matters is not that we have this or that view based on certain human demands, but that we can also realize them, that they make the life of the social organism possible.

It is not considered that everything that can develop in an independent life of public law must have a social character from the outset, that it works from the outset towards socialization, towards the socialization of human society. And only when this public law is not brought about by the pure relationship between human beings, not brought about from the elementary sense of right itself, but from political or economic power, then it bears not a social character, but an anti-social character. The rights that we have in today's social body largely bear this anti-social character, because they do not serve to establish a relationship between people that arises from the elementary sense of right and wrong, but rather they serve to offer advantages to one class or another, to one profession or another, and so on.

In a healthy social organism, the relationship between employer and employee must not be based on an economic relationship, but must be based on a legal relationship. The relationship between employer and employee with regard to the labor force must be established not within the economic process, not within the institutions that are established within the economic process, but in a separate legal organism. This has certainly already been attempted in the course of modern life with the establishment of trade unions and the like and employment certificates and the like. However, anyone who understands this modern life will know that all these are only surrogates for what the proletarian actually feels as his natural demand from the foundations of human nature. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you say that the relationship between employer and employee is a legal one, and in truly civilized countries it is based on a contract between employer and employee, then you are only obscuring the real facts. Of course, this contract is concluded, and a great deal is made of it; but what use is this contract in real life when it is concluded about something that should never be concluded about, according to the nature of the economic process and the legal process? According to the nature of the social organism, an employment contract can only be concluded about what the employee produces for the employer as goods. If it is concluded for the purpose of regulating the relationship between the employee's labor and the employer, then it is based on a false social foundation.

As you can see, esteemed attendees, one must look for things at much greater depths than one usually does today, otherwise one will increasingly encounter the objection: Yes, what you want is actually already there, that is already being striven for. But if it is pursued in the very wrong way, it destroys the healthy organism instead of contributing to its healing. Since human labor can never be compared to a commodity, it must be lifted out of the mere economic process and placed in the realm of the legal, and no contract should be made at all about it. It should be placed in human social life by means of quite different forces and impulses. Contracts that are concluded within the economic sphere between the person who manages the work and the person who does the work should relate only to the services. Then, if they were based on performance, the proletarian would be able to see how he actually stands within the economic process; then he would have an overview of what can flow from his own free will into his own upkeep from this economic process, and what is necessary for the upkeep of the entire social order. However strange it may still sound to people today, the worker would be in complete agreement with what is withdrawn from his own labor, from his work performance, for his own gain. Because he would reasonably understand: I must be part of the social organism, I must serve it, and I enter into a contract with the entrepreneur, by which I do not sell my labor, but through which what I achieve is regulated in a healthy way in the social organism.

What is important, dear attendees, in real life, is not that rights develop out of economic life, but rather that life itself is shared, so to speak, on the one hand economic life, on the other the legal life, that on the one hand people integrate themselves into the circumstances of economic life according to human interests, human needs and according to what must be produced afterwards, and that on the other hand they in turn lift themselves out of this mere economic process and can place themselves in such a human coexistence in which only the relationship between human being and human being plays a role. What matters is that we really separate these two areas in life, not just in thought, not just in institutions, but really separate them in life.

Therefore, when we speak of the recovery of the social organism today, we must also speak of the fact that, in addition to other needs, this healthy organism has, on the one hand, the economic body, which is concerned solely with the circulation of goods, and, on the other hand, the legal body. Both bodies have their own legislation and their own administration. The legislation and administration of the economic body arise out of the economic process of circulation, out of the needs of this process of circulation. What is determined by the legal body in relation to the relationship between people will arise out of quite different prerequisites. And one can say: the actual state life, which has to include the determination of public rights, security, what is called political in the narrower sense, and economic life – must stand side by side like sovereign states. They will best interact like the individual parts of the human organism when they are independent.

If this seems too complicated to you, dear attendees, then you should also remember that what really matters is not whether something seems complicated or not, but whether it is necessary for life; because life itself is complicated. As soon as legal life is distinguished in a healthy way from mere economic life, the socialization of the social organism occurs. For the legal life as such has an effect, proceeding from the democratic principle on which it must be based, socializing.

Of course, you may already believe that some of the things being tried are similar to what is being called for here. But anyone who delves deeper into the matter will find that the very thinking of today's world is moving in the opposite direction. A certain idolatry of the state is what has taken hold in all minds. That is why economic life and the state, political life and the economic process should become one.

As I said, in this point proletarians and non-proletarians do not see eye to eye. It is not a matter of drawing up a social program, but of realizing how human social life must develop so that out of this social life, through what people will do, the healthy will arise, the healthy will form. But in modern times, this healthy element has been resisted. Nationalization has become more and more popular. And those who wanted to retain control over their private economic lives sought at least some kind of support from the state, so that they could then use the state to further their private interests. Confusion, a merging of economic life with political life, which should be kept strictly separate for the healthy organism, has become the ideal for many.

The situation is similar with regard to intellectual life. Today, the social question is not only a unified one, but, in the sense that I have just tried to explain, it is first of all an economic question, because ways and means must be sought to lift labor out of the circulation of commodities in the social organism itself, through the right interaction of humanity. This social question is a legal question because it must first be comprehended in a comprehensive way as an independent legal life, which is precisely what will have a socializing effect. This independent legal life, of which we do not even have the beginnings today due to the course of recent history. But something similar must be said with regard to the intellectual life. In the last two lectures I have already indicated how deeply it actually intervenes in the proletarian question of the present, without proletarians and non-proletarians having the right ideas about it. And I have already pointed out one thing: Again and again, those who, as I said, do not think about the proletariat but with the proletariat, can hear from the proletariat itself or from the leaders of the proletariat: What is going on in intellectual life, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, customs, law and so on, that is actually an ideology, that is not something that has its own independent reality in itself, but it is something that arises out of the economic process, which is, so to speak, a spiritual superstructure of the economic process, depending on the relationship between the economic classes in the historical course of humanity, depending on how they stand today, depending on the way in which the individual is connected to what he does in economic life, depending on that he forms ideas, artistic perceptions, religious beliefs. This economic, purely material life is reflected in these ideas and feelings. Indeed, they may in turn have an effect on economic institutions, arising from these ideas and feelings. But originally these ideas and feelings are rooted entirely in purely material economic life, they are merely its reflection. This is the fundamental conviction of the proletarian soul today. You can hear this over and over again, and it is encapsulated in the saying: All spiritual life is actually just an ideology. And you can see how this attitude towards spiritual life, arising from the proletariat's entire disposition, fills the proletarian soul, even if it does not yet realize this, but all of this takes place in subconscious concepts. You see, these things can actually only be learned from life. What has emerged, I would say, simultaneously with the development of modern technology and modern capitalism in the historical development of humanity, modern, scientifically oriented thinking, has a completely different effect on the members of the previously ruling class and on the proletarian. No matter how much the ruling classes may be inclined to say, “Oh well, the proletarian doesn't want what he demands out of some scientific way of thinking, but it's a bread question or something like that.” Of course it is also a bread question; but how this bread question comes to light depends on completely different things, it is by no means as banausically oriented as many members of the ruling circles believe. And it is true that at the time when a certain form of scientific orientation had taken hold of the intellectual life of people in the leading circles, it was precisely at that time that the worker was tied to the machine, to the factory, that he was torn out of other life contexts and had no other context. Because the bleak machine and soulless capitalism do not provide him with a sense of life. He was forced to answer the question, “What am I as a human being in the world and in social science?” from within himself. Then he turned his great trust, his boundless trust, to the leading circles and took from these leading circles, as his heritage, the scientific orientation. The proletarian was in a completely different situation from the members of the leading circles. These leading circles could easily turn to the modern science that provides good information about nature and the natural course of human development from the lowest living creature to today's perfect human being. But these leading circles did not need to ask themselves the question: How do I actually stand within human society if this is true about man? They had their old traditions, even if they no longer believed in these old traditions, even if they were or are free spirits, even if they are atheists. They are part of human society, as it has been formed, certainly not according to the principle of scientific orientation, but out of old religious, out of old social impulses that really have nothing to do with today's scientific orientation.

Yes, dear attendees, one can be a naturalist, a natural scientist like Büchner, one can be completely convinced that everything that happens is only in the natural order, but one will only come to a certain theoretical conviction for the head. With one's whole being, one is part of the human social order, the structure of which is conditioned in a completely different way than by such a scientific foundation. One must learn in life what it means that the bourgeois-oriented person can gain a scientific conviction through the scientifically oriented way of thinking. The proletarian, however, needs what religion gives the other person, and he demands that from the scientific orientation.

If you let life teach you, you can see the difference in how the scientific orientation speaks from the soul of the member of the previously leading circles, and how differently it enters into the soul of the proletarian when you speak to him of this fully scientific orientation, which is supposed to instruct him about his position as a human being among other human beings, as a human being in the world and in human society in general. Let me give you an example that could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, even if I have to go into the personal for a moment. I once stood on the same podium, directly in front of a rather large gathering of the Berlin proletariat, giving a speech together with Rosa Luxemburg, who recently met a tragic end. Rosa Luxemburg spoke to the proletarians about science and the workers. She spoke in her own simple and inspiring way. She spoke like someone who speaks in the spirit of modern scientific orientation. She made it clear to these people that it is a prejudice to believe that man descended from something angelic, that he was somehow rooted in a spiritual life of the distant past. No, she said, man was not such an angel in prehistoric times, man was not such an angel at all in the place of prehistoric man; he behaved most indecently by climbing like monkeys in trees, and from such beginnings he had raised himself to his present existence. This does not justify the distinctions that are made in the human order today, it justifies a completely different consciousness of man as man.

You see, dear attendees, this is something that the proletarian has heard over and over again. And when one speaks of the uneducated proletariat, one simply does not know what is going on in the proletarian movement. But this is also something that seizes his soul quite differently, seizes it with the power of a creed, than the soul is seized by the leading circles. One must look at it. And then one will be trained to reflect on where it actually comes from. Then one arrives at the following. Then one arrives at being able to answer the question of how it actually happened that, as I said, another thing developed at the same time as modern technology and modern capitalism. The other thing that has developed is that the earlier, relatively independent spiritual life has developed out of the instincts of humanity, which today, however, must be transformed into conscious impulses. The leading circles, whose interests were linked to the emerging state, were guided by these instincts. What we call the “state” today is actually only four centuries old. And it is a prejudice to believe that there have always been states in our sense in our historical development. The earlier development was something quite different. But with what has developed there, the interests of the leading, guiding circles have become connected. Only the interests of the modern proletariat have been excluded from this, they have simply been excluded by the modern economic process. The consequence of this was that just as individual circles and individual areas of economic life have been introduced into the state in modern times, so has intellectual life been introduced into the state, schools, secondary schools, universities; and efforts are being made to introduce more and more and more into this purely political life of the state.

What happened as a result? The state sucked out the spiritual life. And anyone who follows the process that took place here closely knows that not only did the administration and legislation of this spiritual life become dependent on the state, but the content of so-called science and the other branches of the spiritual life became very dependent on the state life of the circles that had previously been in charge. The state became the decisive factor for the impulses of humanity's intellectual activity. Therefore, the state had its interests represented by these intellectual powers. And the consequence of this was that what emerged in intellectual life now really became only a reflection, only a superstructure, of those interests that were connected with state life by the ruling circles. It is the truth that through an historical process, the spiritual life has become a reflection, a superstructure, an ideology at the time when the proletariat was excluded from participating in this state life. What could it want other than to participate in this state life like the other classes?

And so we see how this intellectual life – it can't just be mathematics, but it can be in other branches – has really become a mirror image of what is happening outside in purely political life according to the interests of the ruling circles. Perhaps especially in the present catastrophe of humanity one will already be able to see this for oneself. Anyone who has taken the trouble to follow the course of German history, culminating in this world war catastrophe, will be able to see quite well that what the scholars have told the people as “history” was only an expression of the various areas of the state will of the ruling powers. For I would like to ask the question: Will the history of the Hohenzollerns perhaps look the same in the future as it has done so far? It will very much reveal how it has so far been a reflection of what the leading circles wanted according to the powers they had. (Applause.) That is particularly striking in such an example. But these examples could be multiplied, where the corresponding thing may not be so radical, but perhaps all the more effective precisely because it is hidden.

The modern proletarian saw this, dear attendees. From this he formed the view that all intellectual life is merely a reflection, merely a superstructure of what is happening below in the real process. And since he was deprived of participation in political life, he formed the view that everything intellectual is only a reflection of the economic process as such.

Those who really have the opportunity, and even the ability, to penetrate these processes will come to the realization that, at the dawn of modern times, the proletariat great confidence in the leading circles, to accept from them as inheritance what had been developed in the intellectual life, [this germination, which became an unhappily soul-destroying inheritance]

And so it has come about that the modern proletarian has indeed been placed in circumstances that he, in his nature, perceives as inhumane, but that he still thinks today, continues to think about the circumstances in the same way as he has learned from the leading circles. In this regard, esteemed attendees, one makes the strangest experiences about human illusions. Those who know that the last consequences of bourgeois thinking are rampant in the proletarian soul and in the soul of thinkers who serve proletarian life know that it is necessary for the social question to be understood as a spiritual question in its third aspect as well. It will only be understood as a spiritual issue if the proletariat also experiences the fact that it will want to think differently from what it has learned from the leading circles in addition to everything else that it experiences in its soul.

This is perhaps not what one would expect if one looks more deeply into the events of recent history. Perhaps it will be even more terrible than what is happening today, for those who are frightened by such things, when not even the proletarians have come to the conclusion that they do not have to transform the conditions in which they feel unhappy, but that humanity has to rethink, to think differently about the conditions themselves. Then they will realize that what must be overcome is the modern scientific orientation, and that a new spiritual life must be accepted – a new spiritual life for which perhaps the proletarian, precisely because he can be the first to be disillusioned with the old, is being prepared in the right way. Perhaps he, the proletarian, is the right modern man, while the others cannot break away from that which is old tradition.

Now, one can, again, especially me – forgive me for mentioning something personal for a moment – one can perhaps make the objection to me in particular: Well, you usually speak of an intellectual life, you must think that is the right thing. Do you think that today's proletarians are more willing to accept this intellectual life than the bourgeois or other leading classes? I certainly do not believe that for the present time, for the facts clearly indicate the opposite. But in this respect, do the proletarians as proletarians judge at all? Have the proletarians become free enough to gain an inner judgment, a truly inner judgment? Have they not received the scientific orientation, the whole way of thinking of the inner man, from the leading circles? The ruling circles are opposed to this new spiritual life because they live in old traditions, and because the newer school of thought must radically break with the newer traditions with regard to the thinking, feeling and willing of man. And to be against it, the others have learned from these ruling circles – except for a few exceptions, of course. When the time comes that the proletarian realizes that the human soul must become desolate through the lack of a spiritual life, that something quite different is needed than a mere ideology, a mere reflection of purely material reality, then he will certainly not go back to the old world-view traditions; but he will need the realization of the connection between man and the spiritual world. This knowledge of the connection between man and the spiritual world can only be properly integrated into the social organism if a third element is added to the two already mentioned. This means that the developments of recent centuries, which have been pushed forward to a certain extent, must be reversed. what has been nationalized in the field of intellectual life is denationalized, when, alongside the independent economic body and the independent legal body, a third area of the social organism is the area of intellectual life, which is immediately freed from all other influences and impulses and is left to its own devices. It is only when it can arise out of free human initiative that the spiritual life can flourish and take hold of people. Of course, one can learn something when forced to do so by circumstances. But one cannot let the spirit take effect on one, experience the spirit as it can only truly be effective for human coexistence when the spirit is left to its own devices. And however strange it may sound to the thinking habits of today's people, we must strive for a time when not only the economic body receives its own legislation [and] administration from its own relationship, when not only the legal life receives its democratic structure from the relationship between human and man, but where the spiritual life is also completely independent of the economy and the state, purely on its own, so that it can only give the state and the economy even more good through its achievements, because it only develops them energetically in its own field.

I would say that people today still think very retrogressively about this matter. Above all, they think according to comfortable habits of thought. Time and again, the question is raised, also with regard to the spiritual part of the social question: what do the proletarians actually want? Are there not enough aspirations today? Are not all kinds of educational associations being founded here and there, lectures being given by the leading circles, and other educational opportunities being provided for the proletariat? Well, dear attendees, the proletariat may go to all of this. What does it receive there? It receives what it has received for centuries and what it perceives as an ideology, as a mere spiritual superstructure of the economic order, which it basically cannot use for the real development of its soul. One may well-intentionedly justify all of this, but it has no value for the recovery of the social organism. For the recovery of the social organism, it has value only if one turns to a school of thought that makes itself independent of the other two social fields, which is therefore suited to bring real spiritual life into the development of humanity.

What will be the consequence of this spiritual life also imprinting itself on the human being for his entire human existence and for the consciousness of his human dignity, so that it can be a real asset in life for him? The proletariat can only think of the intellectual life that has passed from the ruling circles to the proletariat as a legacy in the manner described, as being there more or less for the entertainment of the ruling circles. And finally, in most cases it is only there to serve these leading circles, for they have ultimately managed to form a closed society for themselves with their intellectual life. There is an abyss between what the members of the leading circles receive for themselves as art, religion, science, custom and even as law, and what those outside these leading circles, as proletarians, cannot understand at all, because it is born out of the mere impulses of the ruling circles, which are aimed at making these ruling circles a closed society.

Mutual understanding would only be possible if there were a common spiritual life. This common spiritual life can only develop on the basis of a socializing constitutional state that has been established from the economic body. And it can develop on the other side when there is complete emancipation from the other two powers, the spiritual life itself. For this spiritual life will have a completely different impact than what is regarded as the spiritual life today. And this spiritual life will be soul-bearing, will be able to fulfill man quite differently than religious views once fulfilled, to which the modern proletariat will certainly not return.

Thus the social question is indeed, in the most eminent sense, a spiritual question, ladies and gentlemen. What is needed is a yearning for a new spiritual life. And an attempt at a solution in this area can only come about by acquiring a sense of what such an independent new spiritual life wants to bring into humanity. Objections are always easy. You can start with the very lowest objections; you can say: No, let's free the school so that, firstly, its maintenance is based only on what people voluntarily give for it, then we will return to the age of illiteracy. We shall not do that, dearest attendees, nor will the highest studies suffer if they are freed from the other powers; but we will see how, precisely when this spiritual life is emancipated from the other powers, it will have the right effect on those people who are otherwise involved in economic or legal life. It will have an effect because they and those who lead them will then be aware that they are voluntarily leading to this spiritual life so that they can grow into the rest of the healthy social organism. What matters is not what one or the other wants today with regard to this healthy social organism, but what people will do when it is striven for, or when it is at least realized to a certain extent. People will then most certainly, let us say, for example, only admit to the administrative body of the constitutional state those who have a certain school education. And I really believe that I am one of those who can not only think about the proletariat, but can think with the proletariat. I know that which will prevail in the people who grow out of the modern proletariat and integrate themselves into the tripartite, healthy social organism. These people will certainly not refuse to admit only those into political life who have received a certain education. But illiteracy will have ceased to exist wherever it still exists today; it will certainly not begin again.

This is how specific questions are answered, because today it is important above all to point out the major impulses as such. Today we need a realistic view of these things, a view that can be immersed in life and can form ideas about the forms that life must take so that, in this life, people gradually turn their impulses into a healthy social organism. Because it must be repeated again and again: The social question has emerged, is manifesting itself, revealing itself in powerful facts, in facts that are quite terrible for some. It has not emerged in such a way that it will be solved by doing this or that tomorrow, and then it will be solved, then it will cease to exist – no, the development of humanity is such that this social question is now here, that it must be viewed in this threefold way as an economic, legal and as a spiritual question, and that when people see it this way, when a feeling about it becomes a social feeling in such a way that it becomes a self-evident demand for people to distinguish between the three parts of the social organism, then the ongoing solution of this social question will always arise from human behavior. For economic life will always consume people to a certain extent. The legal system must always protect him from this consumption, always protect him from what economic life wants. The social question cannot be solved all at once; the social question is solved in a continuous process of becoming. And to gain insight into it means to delve into the becoming of humanity from the outset, as its dawn is in the present, as the sun must rise for it more and more towards the future.

Thus it turns out that a realistic view of the social question must be seen in a completely different way than it is usually seen. One thinks that it can be solved by this or that; it could be solved by offering one's hand to a reorganization of the social organism itself, indeed only to a real formulation of the social body, to an organism that has the three limbs described, which, if they are independent, can then work together in the right way. As long as we do not engage with these things, we will not be able to practice a real healing art of the social organism in the social question. Wherever the attempt may come from, from the proletarian or non-proletarian side, it will be quackery. And things have come so far today, esteemed attendees, that one should truly ask oneself the serious question: how do you practice real healing in this field, rather than quackery?

Of course, I do not think that such a thing can be achieved overnight. The socialists do not think that either; they talk about a slow development, insofar as they are based on a certain rationality. But with every single measure that man takes, he can already orient his thinking and acting towards the threefold social organism. If those who want to take part at all - and basically, every human being is granted this, to one with greater, to the other with lesser responsibility - if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take The social organism must be structured into the three distinct parts described, if everything that is done in legislation, everything that is done in administration, and everything that is done in ordinary life is oriented in this way, then we are moving towards what we must move towards. It is easy to think about how happiness is established by the social organism. It is not a proper thought. A proper thought, Most Excellent Presence, is to realize, above all, how the social organism can be made viable and healthy. Then, precisely because the spiritual life is emancipated from other powers, because the legal life stands in its independence, because this legal life, in its independence, has a socializing effect on economic life, precisely because of this, the possibility will arise that in this healthy social organism, through completely different factors than through its processes themselves, what people call a dignified, perhaps even a happy existence, will be established. The human organism, the natural organism, must be healthy. Does its healthiness already give us the elevation of the soul, the satisfying soul life? No, it does not give us that. Our organism, when it is sick, certainly it depresses the soul life, it makes us unhappy, humanly speaking. But when it is healthy, we must still strive for something else in order to have a gladdened, a contented soul, one that is inwardly filled with spiritual life, in a healthy organism. We will only be able to do this if we have a healthy organism, if we are not paralyzed by illness. The social organism must be made viable; then the people who live in the viable, healthy social organism will be able to base their happiness on other factors of life. The proletarian world – we must not harbor any illusions about this – cannot do it today, because it is tied to the mere economic organism. It must be liberated from the mere economic life in the healthy social organism. Only then will the social impulse be able to take on the right modern character, especially in the proletarian masses of humanity.

Simply by saying these things, the weight they carry for present-day life must be felt, esteemed attendees. In these matters, he who devotes himself to them, as I believe with real inner understanding, is not so absorbed that he merely wants to gain a view or merely wants to be right in some form or another, but is so absorbed that he thinks above all of gaining something that can have an effect on real life, that can enter into people's hearts, into their souls, from which their actions and their life situation must surely arise.

What I am saying here in these lectures is what I have been saying for a long time, even while the terrible catastrophe of war raged. I have said it to many who were in leading positions at the time, saying on the one hand: It is not invented, it is not that one should think that I am representing something imagined, but what is represented here has been taken from the views of the developmental forces of humanity, namely of European humanity for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. This wants to be realized. That it wants to be realized does not depend on any of us, it will be realized because it is inherent in the development of humanity and wants to be realized objectively. One can only say to the person who wants to intervene in social life in some way: You have the choice either to intervene in the sense of these forces or to oppose them. In the first case it is possible to serve the development of the times through reason; in the other, one simply has to wait idly for revolutions and cataclysms. These revolutions and cataclysms have come more quickly than many people believed, to whom I spoke of them years ago.

And now it is taking on different forms, though. And there are already more people who are sympathetic to such things because the facts speak even more clearly today. But on the other hand, I also said the following to those to whom I was allowed to speak about the same thing that I have already discussed here: I could imagine that people would set about attacking things in reality in such a way that they would move in the direction indicated in the treatment of the social question. Then something could arise from it that might not leave a stone unturned in what I myself say today, but that would be beneficial. Because I don't have the faith that I am so clever as to know every single thing that needs to be done, but I do have the unquestioning faith that reality itself is tackled with these things. And if you open yourself to such reality, then those people who place themselves in this threefold organism will be so clever that they will work together to achieve the right thing. Therefore, of what I say today, no stone need be left unturned; everything can turn out differently, but it will turn out as it lies in the direction of developmental reality. That is what matters.

Therefore, it was a certain satisfaction for me – everyone tries to do what they can do in the place where the fate of life has put them – it was a certain satisfaction for me to see how an appeal that wants to speak to people about the terrible catastrophe of the last few years, an appeal that also contains in brief words, with a few suggestive sentences only, but which indicates that this can be justified in full detail, that this appeal has found well over a hundred signatures in Germany, and around a hundred signatures among the Germans of Austria, in a relatively short time, and now also signatures of Swiss personalities, which we must value particularly highly for this cause.

And I believe that through this appeal, which is to appear in the near future, supported by those personalities who today can already more or less intensively, or less intensively, identify with such a will as it is characterized here, that with this appeal, I believe a beginning will be made. I will then support what is only hinted at in this appeal, what one must feel more through this appeal, with what one already understands oneself. This booklet is already in print. And so I hope, dear readers, that precisely those ideas which I believe correspond to a realistic social view can enter the human soul in these difficult times, now supported by a larger number of people reflecting on them. And that is necessary. The facts that are emerging today on the horizon of world-historical becoming challenge us to do so.

And it would be a failure if everyone did not try, in their own place, to arrive at some kind of judgment that can be realized in their actions, to arrive at a judgment about what is actually needed. What is actually the true nature of what is called the social movement? Today we have to start with what later has to be a kind of schooling like the multiplication table is today, or like the four types of arithmetic. We must begin with the insight: how is the social question shaped as an economic, legal and spiritual question? And will humanity be able to live in the future if it must continually solve recurring problems within the development of the social structure as an economic, legal and spiritual question?

Today's facts speak so strongly, and they are already intervening so strongly in the lives of many people. And it is already becoming apparent that they will intervene in the life of every single person. These facts are so strong. They reveal themselves in such a way that they must lead people to the conclusion, to the feeling: I must acquire some kind of view in this area, I cannot continue to stand in the present turmoil of facts with a sleeping soul. Otherwise, if it is impossible to find any understanding for a development in these matters that is born out of the soul, then it would have to come to the point where people's instincts simply gain the upper hand, that these instincts bring about the decision, which would then be not a decision but a terrible test for humanity, a gruesome test for humanity, that the instincts bring about this test, this horrible fate. In view of what is now emerging, but which can perhaps still be averted if only each individual consults with himself, the words repeatedly come to our lips, welling up from the heart that wants to take part in the fate of the times and in the fate of people in this time: one tries to penetrate into the essence of the social movement before it is too late.

In the present grave situation of a large part of humanity, especially of humanity in Central Europe, it would be disastrous if the cure for various serious social ills were sought with small and petty means. It is necessary today to strive for comprehensive, forceful impulses that are based on a real understanding of what has driven us into confusion and chaos. It is necessary to turn our eyes, impartially, honestly and sincerely, to what actually is there and from which we want to escape. These considerations, which are characterized by the few sentences just quoted, were the starting point for the writing of that appeal for the threefold social order, which you know and which I also want to talk about today. It is only possible, I might say, to point out the necessity of what is said in this appeal and, in somewhat more detail, in my book, The Essential Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life, from this or that point of view. And many lectures would be needed if one wanted to point out everything that underlies the impulses that led to this appeal. Therefore, I must ask you to accept that what I can say in a single lecture can only be a part of what is actually needed to understand the social ideal that is meant by the appeal. Above all, however, I would like to point out today that a glance at the international situation that led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years, if viewed objectively and without prejudice, must lead to this appeal. Foreign political conditions and domestic political conditions, if we speak from the point of view of Germany, seem to force us to the impulses that are meant here. The basic idea of this appeal is that the terrible situation in which we find ourselves is essentially due to the fact that in modern times there has been a tendency to mix and blend three areas of life that must now develop independently: the three areas of intellectual life, the actual political or legal or state life, and economic life.

In the unitary state, which has increasingly been regarded as the panacea for the social order, hypnotizing humanity, all the forces of these three areas of life have been merged. Today, salvation for our social organism must be sought in the independence of these three areas of life, as a practical goal. This is, in the abstract, the basic impulse underlying this appeal. If we want to understand from one of the many points of view that come into consideration, we must look to the left and to the right, so to speak, if we want to understand what has led Central European humanity, in particular, into today's terrible and dreadful catastrophe. Germany and the German people were involved in the war to the west and to the east, and it can be said that it is only by looking at the circumstances in the west and the east and how they interacted that we can understand our current situation in Central Europe.

If we look to the West, we will see, if we first consider social hardship, how, especially in the countries of the West, in those countries with which the war lasted the longest, in the historical development of modern times, clear fusion of economic life with political life has taken place, so that from the national instincts, especially of the English-speaking population, I might say, in this part of the world, as if naturally and elementarily, a striving for the state has arisen, above all, from the particular point of view of economic life. Everything political was permeated by the economic. The economic laws became political laws. Thus we see the fusion of political and economic life when we turn our gaze to the West.

In another way, we see the fusion of political life with cultural life initially in the form of nationalist folk cultures and their intellectual life, which emerges from this nationalism. Looking eastward, we see the fusion of intellectual life with political life. Everything – here it can only be hinted at, but a thorough study of the European and American situation proves it – everything indicates that the explosive materials which have gradually accumulated between Central Europe and the West can only be understood from the conflict that arose in the West itself between economic and state life due to the fact that economic and state life, but with a particular predominance of economic life, had merged in a chaotic way. In the East, the explosive materials were stored due to the merging of the individual spiritual cultures of the national communities with the political life of the state.

We were placed between these accumulations during the development of modern times. We have so far failed to learn what our task is in this wedging between West and East. The terrible world catastrophe that arose from these two impulses, which I have characterized, should teach us where to steer, especially in Central Europe, which should learn from the West and the East. From the West it should learn that, as a neighbor of the West, it has the task of separating and achieving independence in economic life and political state life. From the East it has to learn the separation of spiritual life from - if we look superficially at it only in national life - state life. Huge errors – there is no use closing our eyes to this fact today – huge errors have piled up in the politics of the middle states, in the careless politics of these middle states, which finally led to nothingness, because the statesmen were not able to see how certain national instincts in the West have so far prevented economic life from merging with political life and gaining the upper hand in the latter, just as it provided one explosive charge after another in the East, how intellectual life has merged with state life in an unorganized way. Huge political errors, which one must recognize in their historical necessity, are what finally had to be discharged in that catastrophe that brought us the most terrible disaster. Has one in recent times, and I mean a long time, yes, has one actually until today the good will to look at these conditions in a penetrating way? Are there not, in spite of the present terrible situation, many people among us who look down on truly practical impulses as worthless idealism because these practical impulses are great ideals today, and who, out of complacency and timidity of spirit, long for small goals, which they alone call practical, while they turn against the great goals that are necessary today as against the impractical ones. These people, who today reject the truly practical, great goals as idealisms and only want to look at the very nearest, these people are the same or the descendants of the same who brought Central European humanity, European humanity in general, into its present situation and who will cause the damage to become even greater. If it is not possible for the so-called practice of life of the philistines to be replaced by the real practice of life — today the situation must be viewed impartially and honestly — then the result of a true foreign policy, which leads to the impulses of the threefold social organism, will never come.

But today we are not only dealing with a consequence of foreign policy. We are dealing with developmental forces that are surging from quite a different direction and making waves in humanity! What we are facing today can be compared to the migration of peoples and the encounter of this migration with Christianity at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Anyone who considers the great impulses of Christianity in their effectiveness through the Middle Ages and the modern era must actually notice the character of Christianity's impulses, especially among the peoples who are usually referred to when the migration of peoples is considered, and the character it has taken on among the more southern peoples. Originating in Asia, Christianity first took hold among the highly developed peoples of Greece and Italy, among the highly developed intellects of these southern regions of Europe. Only then did it penetrate into the lands of the “barbarians,” as the southern peoples called those storming in from the north. If we take a survey of these conditions, we find that what actually made Christianity effective in the world did not develop through its passage through the southern peoples, who were at the highest stage of development but already in a state of decline, but that it unfolded its mighty impulses in the hearts and minds of those peoples who still had unspent intelligence and unspent soul power. That was, I might say, the horizontal migration of peoples with its peculiarities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Today, when we look at the proletarian movement, we are faced with a vertical migration of peoples. That which can be called the proletariat flows out of the depths of cultural life to the leading currents of culture. But what we must seek as the new, saving element of culture, as the great impulses that lead us out of the confusion, that works, I would say, from the depths of the spirit, as Christianity once did for the Greek and Roman peoples. And we see how that which wants to seize the future in order to reshape the world in spiritual, state and economic terms needs the unspent intellects, the unspent minds of those masses of people who, in today's vertical migration of peoples, are streaming from bottom to top, while, as I already I have already stated here, in the worn-out brains of those who, like the Greeks and Romans of old, are at the height of culture, there is hardly any trace of that fire in the leading circles that have been in charge up to now, a fire that we urgently need today to find the way out of social distress and to achieve truly great, practical goals for humanity. That such paths must be found is indicated above all by the fact that the vertical migration of peoples has played itself out in the course of the more recent development of humanity.

Foreign policy points to the threefold nature of the social organism. What does domestic political life show us? It shows us that precisely those elements of the people who carry the unspent intellect, the unspent powers of the soul from below upwards – however little many people today may want to admit it, however little the proletariat itself can find suitable and appropriate words and ideas for certain phenomena today – that these people feel this in their souls, they feel it in the hardship of their bodies, and in everything that confronts them, one can say that for three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, they feel the triple hardship of the social order in three ways. They felt that they were facing, first of all, a spiritual life with which they felt no community other than the one that had been characterized for them in the last half-century by Karl Marx's words about “surplus value”. What underlies this has by no means been fully understood, neither on the one hand by the bourgeoisie nor on the other by the proletariat. In fact, things are taken rather superficially, especially in more recent education. What underlies it is that the entire, so much praised, so much vaunted intellectual culture of modern times in all its ramifications could only develop as the culture of a few on the subsoil of the deprivation of culture on the part of the great, broad masses. Not as if the hitherto leading classes had brought want and misery to the proletarian masses out of a malicious will, out of devilry. No, they brought it about, as I tried to show last Monday, through lack of understanding of the tasks that arose in world history from the fact that ever broader and broader masses were seized by the modern vertical migration of peoples, by the striving for a spiritual life that they lacked. But that was how it was, and the essential thing is that what we have achieved in art, indeed in science, what we have achieved in education with regard to intellectual life, could, on the one hand, only be for a few and that it had to be worked for under the deprivations of many. This special kind of intellectual life could not exist without creating an abyss between the privileged and the disadvantaged. The broad masses, striving upwards, felt this in relation to the main aspect of human life, in relation to the intellectual life.

In contrast to the life of the state, or of politics or law, the upwardly striving masses felt more and more that there is something for human nature that is the same for all people. This equality cannot be developed in any theory; it simply exists in the experiences of every healthy soul. Just as one cannot speak to a person with blind eyes about the color blue or red, so one cannot speak to an unhealthy soul about what lives in every healthy soul as a sense of right and wrong, that sense of right and wrong that makes man equal to all other men in the second sphere of social life, in the life of the state. But this feeling, which was still suppressed in the broad masses in the old patriarchal conditions, and even in the conditions of the Middle Ages, this feeling of equal rights, it came up more and more intensely in the last centuries and especially in the proletarian development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ruling and leading classes could not help but call on the broad masses for democracy. They needed it for their own interests. They needed a proletariat that was increasingly educated in schools. But you cannot educate one soul without educating the other at the same time. By making the proletarians into skilled workers for the complicated tasks in their factories and elsewhere, the ruling and leading classes had to, because one is not possible without the other, because the other develops by itself, at the same time allow the legal consciousness that is inherent in every self-aware human soul to arise in the proletariat. But this sense of justice developed quite differently in the proletarian than in the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity. In the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity, feelings of justice developed around the circles of interests into which these classes had long been born. The proletarian, by being placed at the machine, by being harnessed in the soul-destroying capitalism, was not equipped with such interests. Those relationships that existed everywhere between what the leading classes represented in social life and what they felt as their humanity, those contexts of interest did not exist for the proletarian. I do not mean it humorously when I say that for the members of the leading classes, something may have emerged from the social context in which they were placed, from an inner sense of humanity that gave them a certain sense of right and wrong when they could write, let us say, “factory owner” on their business card and the like, or even “reserve lieutenant”. But for the proletarian, there was no such connection of interests between the soul-destroying machine and his humanity, and between being harnessed into capitalism and his humanity. The proletarian was reduced to his bare human rights, and by looking at the others, he saw not universal human rights, but class privileges and class disadvantages. That was the second experience, the experience in the field of state life.

And the third experience arose for the proletarian in the economic sphere. There he saw how his labor power in the wage relationship was treated by the leading, leading circles in exactly the same way as a commodity. This had a deep, profound impact on the feelings of the modern proletariat. It created an awareness that perhaps did not express itself clearly in the mind, but that took root more and more deeply and intensely in the hearts of proletarians who were aware of their humanity: In ancient times there were slaves, the whole man could be sold and bought like a thing; later there was serfdom, less of the human being could be bought and sold, but still enough; today there is still buying and selling of human labor for those who own nothing but that labor. This labor power, one must go with it, by having to sell it, one cannot carry it to the market like an object and go back again after selling the object, one must deliver oneself to the one who buys the labor power. The enslavement of the laborer to the economic cycle was the third experience of the modern proletariat. Thus, in the social order that emerged as a welfare state, the proletarians found themselves united in the same way that we found them united in foreign policy; they found themselves united in the modern state, in intellectual life, in state and legal life, and in economic life. Just as the amalgamation of the great imperialisms led to the explosion of the world war, so, on the other hand, what moves from the bottom up, what is experienced threefold in intellectual life, in legal or state life and in economic life, leads to social explosion. The two belong together. The old order exploded into the world war catastrophe from the empires, into which modern capitalism saw itself transformed from large-scale enterprise without really knowing it. Large-scale enterprise has become imperialism, and the clash of imperialisms has given rise to the world war catastrophe. That which moved vertically, from bottom to top, contains the same impulses. It only leads in the opposite direction to that social distress that was a world social distress in the conditions of the newer empires, which either, as in the West, became empires of interests, or as in the East, amalgamations of state empires with national empires. The fusion of the three spheres of life led to the explosion of the world war and into a social distress of the greatest magnitude, because this so-called world war is nothing different than previous wars. It is the last gasp of the old order in a terrible form. Let us see how a new one is about to begin, from the bottom up. Let us not fail to see what impulses are striving to develop differently for the further development of humanity than those that developed from the old economic order into world imperialism and thus led to the most terrible horrors of recent times. This is how the signs of the times speak today. And so man must know how to face these signs of the times today. Have we not experienced how, especially in Central Europe, it has become apparent that people have gradually lost a truly healthy judgment about intellectual, economic, and political life because of the unnatural, the impossible gradual fusion of the three areas?

I ask you, without getting involved in a critique of the circumstances, I ask you whether events and facts of the last human development – let us look at them only with regard to Europe for now – have not emerged almost entirely under the influence of the fusion, for example, of politics and economic life? The whole world has screamed – I do not want to get involved in a critique of this screaming, of course, there are not only lambs on this side and only wolves on the other – but the whole world has screamed about the breakthrough through Belgium at the beginning of the war. How could this breakthrough have come about? It could only have come about because the strategic railways had been built there. They would not have been there if the economic forces had been separated from the political forces within the German territory. Look at the map of Europe, consider the many railway networks and then study from a healthy industrial science - which we do not yet have - whether these purely economic institutions, the railways, would be as they are - you can even do these studies in neutral countries - if they only served economic life and developed out of it. Or do we not notice, when we look at the relationship between economic and political life, how, precisely because the empire has become more and more merged with economic conditions, all of Central Europe has gradually become more and more of a large commercial building, following the Western model? Do we not notice that political education is increasingly fading away? Just think of the vast sums of intelligence, the vast sums of prudence that have been directed towards pure business life, towards economic life, while the peoples of Central Europe have become more and more apolitical, even compared to their apolitical nature of earlier centuries. We have become depoliticized by merging politics with economic life.

And finally, more and more we have come to depend completely on state life for all intellectual life. Here, too, it must be pointed out again and again how not only the filling of positions but also the administration of schools have come to depend on modern state life, but also the content of intellectual life itself, the content of art, the content of science. People are not yet aware of this today, which is why the most monstrous prejudice arises in this very area, when people attack what is important. And what is important today is that we rise up to work towards a healthy separation of economic life from state or political or legal life on the one hand, and again towards a separation of the entire intellectual life from state life on the other.

Today, the call for socialization runs through our economic life. It emerges, one might say, from the aforementioned vertical migration of peoples like a motto in world history. And even though there is still little sign of even a reasonably adequate understanding of true socialization, we must nevertheless say, when we look at social life without prejudice: However unclear the thinking on the matter may be, the call for socialization expresses something significant in world history. We see this perhaps most clearly from the fact that, precisely because of the terrible economic experiences of the war, even capitalistically oriented thinkers could not avoid speaking of the necessity of socializing the economy. This necessity for socialization of the economy is, for example, very energetically emphasized by an otherwise capitalist-minded man, Walther Rathenau. Indeed, in some of the points the Appeal makes, one can even find points of contact with what Walther Rathenau says, for example, in his little book 'The New Economy'. But as we shall see in a moment, for those who really understand the impulses of the threefold social organism, there is a radical, fundamental difference in the socialization of the economic between what must be demanded on the basis of this threefold social organism as such socialization and Rathenau's views. And this fundamental difference shows precisely what is most necessary in contemporary social striving.

But how did people actually arrive at the idea of socialization in the economic sphere, at the demands for socialization? For a long time, the human ideal was seen in what was called the free play of economic forces. Much of what can be called the modern private-capitalist economic system came into being as a result of the free play of economic forces, of the free competition of economic personalities and groups. But then, in the course of the development of the economic system that had emerged under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism and under the influence of the free play of economic forces, it became apparent that more and more was being separated from a human minority, namely the proletarian majority, which became the bearer of the three great demands that I have just characterized. And so the justified demand arose within the proletariat for socialization, that is, for the opposite of the pure play of forces in the economic sphere. According to the ideas of the leading figures of the proletariat, the development of economic life should henceforth be based on the thorough organization of the whole of economic life. And we see, of course, how in certain areas, albeit to the horror and disgust of many, such thorough organization is being implemented. For the old free play of forces, one still found the beautiful saying of the salutary of throne and altar as an echo of earlier state and economic orders. Now, out of the catastrophe of world war, the call and enthusiasm for throne and altar is abandoned, but we see something lurking that opens up in the face of the former throne and altar. Not only the former ruling classes, but also the broadest sections of the truly rational, thinking proletariat feel something frightening in the question: What will happen when office and machine take the place of throne and altar? Will it be better for us? Could it not be that the same dictators might develop from among those who work in the factory and office as have developed under the influence of throne and altar? This is a significant question, but also one that, if answered in a healthy way, must lead to a way out of social hardship to truly practical goals. I am still speaking in a very abstract way, but the idea I am about to express can be practically applied in all areas of economic life if all those involved in economic life are called upon to organize these matters. But it must be done in such a way that trust can prevail between all these links in the economic chain.

Let us speak openly and honestly on this matter. The days I have spent here in Stuttgart addressing numerous proletarian assemblies have been a great experience for me. I hardly spoke, only in form at most, to the proletarians differently than I speak here. I was, it turned out, understood in Switzerland and here in the broadest circles of the proletariat. And what did this teach me? It taught me that it is only possible to make progress, whether with socialization or with other social demands of the present, if we work with the trust of humanity. That we will only make progress if we work with people and align ourselves with their desires, if we stop seeking salvation only in issuing decrees from above out of a seemingly superior intellect. Today we can only avoid dictatorships if we find the right words that, when spoken by individuals, are spoken from the heart, from the feelings of the broad masses, especially the working population. I wanted to say that first. It points out that the social issues that are immediately urgent cannot be resolved in small circles, however they may call themselves, but that they must be resolved on the broad basis of the factories and workshops, from the people, not from socialist theories.

One of the first demands, if we take this human factor into account, is that the economic life should learn from the bitter and terrible events of the world war catastrophe, that is, from what the world war catastrophe has become, how socialization should be carried out. We must learn that everything that leads to such socialization must be disastrous, especially if it again confuses state or legal life with economic life.

Time and again I have to point out the unnatural amalgamation of economic life with state and legal life, as it developed in Austria in the last third of the nineteenth century. The fact that Austria fell into such a terrible decline, and was ripe for decline long before the world war catastrophe, is due to the fact that, on this hotbed of conflict, it was not understood how destructive it would be to form the state based on the rule of law from economic curiae at the dawn of the newer constitutional life. Only through coercion was a change made, much later, but it was much too late, to something other than what was attempted in the 1860s. The so-called Reichsrat was formed from four economic curiae: large landowners; chambers of commerce; cities, markets and industrial towns; rural communities. Purely economic interests were asserted on the territory of the state, where the law was to arise. Economic interests were transformed into rights! And anyone who has properly studied this political development of Austria, which under the Taaffe Ministry in the last third of the nineteenth century was called muddling through, knows what seeds of destruction lay in the fact that in these territories, which were based on the most diverse nationalities, the impulse was not found to develop the legal life separately for itself and the economic life separately for itself. I could say a great deal, and I could say a great deal in the parliaments of practically all the present States, if I wanted to show in detail how the impossibility of merging political or state or legal life with economic life has increased everywhere. From today onwards, the first requirement must be to separate this economic life from the state life. Then we can proceed with the claim of all human resources involved in economic life, trusting in them to carry out the appropriate socialization, which will consist - as I have explained in my book and also hinted at in other places - in the formation of associations, first by profession, then by context, coalitions, cooperatives, which arise from the pursuit of harmonization of conditions in consumption and production. Only on this basis can healthy socialization arise. It will arise when people see the damage caused by both the free play of forces and mechanical socialization – both of which have been prejudicial to humanity. It will only arise when we learn from the lessons of world's history, so that socialization will come about not through the extinction of the free play of forces, but precisely through the understanding work of the free play of human forces. You can only do that if you spread trust, but then you can do it! That, more or less, is what Walther Rathenau meant, and he was echoing a certain saying of Gretchen to Faust. But the threefold social organism means something quite different. You see, that is why Walther Rathenau's concept of socialization is quite different from the socialization that had to be proposed by the threefold order, because Walther Rathenau cannot imagine anything other than socialization taking place while state supervision continues and the state draws a steady profit from what is produced in the socialized enterprises.

This only proves that a person who might have learned from practical experience remains trapped in blind theory. This only proves how powerfully suggestive the thoughts that have formed in the course of the development of modern capitalism continue to be, even in those who strive for socialization, how necessary it is to struggle against prejudices in this area with all the strength of free practical insight into the circumstances. Everything that is to be raised in the way of order in economic life, of reasonableness and understanding permeating economic life, of morality, must come from the independent personalities and bodies that themselves direct economic life. Economic life will only develop healthily when the state has nothing to say in economic life other than what it has to say through the personalities involved in economic life, as personalities with rights. Of course, if someone cheats others in the field of economic life, then he is subject to the state law. He is subject to the state law as a personality. But the functions and activities of the personality in economic life must be based, in the economic partnership, on the mere contract, on mere trust. Even if this still meets with many prejudices on the socialist side today, anyone who judges not from concepts and ideas but from the experience that the last decades of European economic life have brought, up to the economic downfall in the war, will say this. And he must say: We will not achieve sound economic conditions until the separation of economic life from state life has been accomplished. We have arrived at the present situation through the intermingling of what should be based on trust and contract with the state, which should be based solely on laws. The laws of the state may only shine into economic life insofar as they shine through personalities. Only in this way can we bring out of economic life what must be brought out, that which, as labor power, is today, like a commodity, unlawfully harnessed into the economic cycle, according to the proletarian sense.

On the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. Imagine the following absurdity: some economic consortium would get together, determine its balance sheet, the probable balance sheet for 1919; and this consortium would take the 1918 balance sheet and then, based on assets and liabilities, determine how many days it should rain in the summer of 1919, for example, in order to achieve a desirable business situation for the next year. Of course this is pure nonsense, isn't it. But I only mention this nonsense because it should be seen from it that, on the one hand, economic life is based on natural conditions, which we cannot completely regulate from within this economic life. We can do some things through technical devices, but we cannot completely regulate them from within mere economic life. Just as economic life borders on natural life on the one hand, so in the future economic life must border on the legal life of the state, and in the legal life of the state everything must be regulated that is subject to the legal life, above all human labor. For the economic cycle, the regulation of the human labor of the worker must lie outside this economic process. Just as the natural forces of the soil ripen the corn and wheat outside the economic process, so the regulation of the measure, time and type of labor must be outside the economic process. Nothing must be determined by the economic situation, nothing must be determined by the economic conditions and forces with regard to the measure and type of human labor. With regard to labor, man stands quite differently to man than with regard to the satisfaction of human needs, which are met by the economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of commodities. From this cycle of production, labor must be taken out and regulated in the purely democratic life of the state, in the separate state emancipated from economic life. Thus the economic process is healthily constrained between nature on the one hand and the legal life of the state on the other. All this must be organized in the spirit of threefolding. This can only be achieved if the state does not develop what can only develop within the economic process from person to person, but only develops everything that relates to the relationship between individuals, where each individual is equal to every other individual. Therefore, no profit that comes from a consortium of people, from an economic group, from an economic community, may prevail on the basis of this state life. What is gained in the economic sphere must in turn flow back into the economic life of the people to raise their standard of living. Whatever flows into the state, let us call it a tax or whatever, must, if I am to express myself clearly, come only from the pocket of the individual human being. Only the individual human being can stand in relation to the state; then, on the basis of the state, only the individual human being stands in relation to the individual human being. Then human rights will truly flourish on the basis of the state. Then the social question, insofar as it is a labor question, will be solved by emancipating state life from economic life, in which the compulsion can no longer prevail by which labor itself becomes an object of the free play of forces in the free play of forces. The worker must have organized his labor power before he enters the workshop, before he enters the factory, before he enters the economic process. Then he appears as a free personality, whose freedom is guaranteed by the state labor law, to the head of labor; only then does a healthy relationship develop.

Here we are on truly practical socialization ground. Those who understand the conditions of this ground know that you can make socialization framework laws without end from other conditions. You can make them today, find them useless after two years, reform them, find them useless again after five years and reform them, and so on. We will not arrive at a healthy, beneficial state sooner than we rise up to attack the practice at such a point as I have just pointed out. It is precisely this characteristic of the development of recent times that this development, in many ways for human thinking, for human habits of thinking, clings to the surface of things. And now, when we are confronted with world-shaking facts, we see in so many cases, unfortunately, unfortunately, the inadequacy of the old party judgments, which were supposed to build up and which in the building up often behave not like judgments that intervene in reality, but like mummies of judgment that have died under the party stiffness, under the party philistrosity of more recent times. Therefore, it can be said that in the present day, when things should be seen urgently and squarely and honestly and truthfully, the most important things are seen so crookedly. It is understandable that many who have seen modern capitalism in its development now hold the view that private capitalism as a whole must go and common ownership of all means of production must prevail. It is understandable that this judgment, which has been formed over decades, I would say out of bleeding souls, out of need and misery, is difficult to discard. Nevertheless, a deeper question must arise – after all, we cannot do without capital accumulation in the modern economy – the question: What must be associated with capital accumulation? The individual ability of people to use capital in the appropriate way, not in an egoistic but precisely in a social sense, must be associated with capital accumulation. We cannot do this if we do not cultivate human individual abilities, if we do not make the respective capital administrations of the enterprises accessible to these human individual abilities. Therefore, on the ground on which this call for social threefolding, which you have mentioned again today, originated, an idea had to be grasped that represents something completely different from what is still often understood today as the socialization of capital.

It is remarkable how, when thinking practically, one is led to making the administration of capital dependent on the third sphere, which must become independent in a healthy social organism, the emancipated spiritual organism. We have increasingly severed the link between intellectual work and the work of capital in the economic process. As a result, instead of developing an economic upswing that can be linked to an increase in the standard of living of the masses, we have increasingly developed a kind of economic overexploitation despite all technical advances. Particularly with regard to the impulses that play a major role in modern economic life, for example the impulse of credit, modern economic life has run itself into a strange cul-de-sac. Credit in the context of economic life today is something that can almost only be supported by existing economic factors. In the future, we need the possibility that credit will not only be born on the basis of economic life, we need the possibility that credit can be born into economic life from outside. Not true, a paradoxical assertion, a strange assertion; but what underlies it is even stranger as it is. As spiritual life becomes independent in the direction of the future, developing out of its own conditions, we shall emerge from that abstract spiritual life, from that luxurious spiritual life that cannot find any relation to practical life. Those who know me will not suppose that I want to belittle spiritual life in any way. But the intellectual life that will develop out of its own conditions, isolated from the other two social organisms, will not be an abstract intellectual life that merely preaches or remains on abstract intellectual heights. It will be an intellectual life that does not merely lead to abstract knowledge about this or that, but that leads to making people capable as people. In a future social order, we will no longer be able to use our grammar schools, which are alien to life. Nor anything similar.

But that which will live will be something that has spiritual impact, that the human soul is able to carry in all its most spiritual needs for life. It is precisely by developing that which so many people today regard as an outlandish spiritual life that we come to find that path which cannot be found by our education system, which is forged to the state, that path which educates the human being as a whole human being, educating the human being in such a way that any kind of intellectual culture will no longer be possible without at the same time being a skill for practical things, a way of looking at practical things. The materialism of modern times has made people impractical. A true spiritual life, which will not be the life of a state servant in the field of the spirit, will make people practical again. It will not produce people in the field of the highest culture who think they have worldviews but do not know what a bank, credit, mortgages and so on are, and how these work in economic life. It will not produce people who know about the forces of physics but who have never chopped wood in their lives. I am, of course, speaking comparatively here. There is a practical bridge between a genuine spiritual life, left to its own devices, and the management of economic life. Capitalism, in its damaging form, can only be overcome if the management of capitalism is closely linked to the recovery of spiritual life. Then there will emerge what may be called a healthy socialization of capital. Then those people will emerge from the spiritual life who can also bring credit, new credit, into economic life, who can constantly fertilize economic life. Then the cycle of capital will be possible, of which I speak in my book. Today I can only touch on these points. In the next lectures that I am allowed to give here, I will have to discuss individual specific questions of this kind, in particular the relationship between capital and human labor.

Thus we see how the three great impulses of human social development, which, as I mentioned the other day, have been shining maxims of human endeavor since the French Revolution, will be able to materialize through the three-part social organism. Freedom in the field of independent intellectual life, equality in all fields of state life, fraternity through the associations and cooperatives of the self-built economic life.

Now, in conclusion, I would just like to say this: I know that if one hears only the generalities, and not yet the specific practicalities that have been mentioned again today, one can have many objections to them, because one does not know how everything is really connected in practice in the thinking about this threefold social organism, from the founding of the university to the sale of a toothbrush. The practical nature of the proposal lies precisely in the fact that one can object in many ways when one only hears the general. But the practical value will emerge when people of all professions, of all human activities, participate in the realization of this idea in their social work in the individual concrete case. In the face of the objection that it is idealism or even utopian, in the face of this objection, more and more people will speak out about the serious facts of the time.

In July and early August 1914, world events reduced to absurdity in a strange way the ideas that many still consider practical today. In my pamphlet, 'The Crux of the Social Question', I pointed out at the end, where international relations are discussed, that people at home and abroad still have no idea of what really happened in Berlin on the last day of July and the first days of August 1914. The world will demand to know what happened there. When the truth is told about these things, it will be seen that a terrible light falls on the events of modern times, a light that will show that we do not just need a transformation of one or the other, that we need new thoughts, new habits of thought, that we not only have to transform institutions, but that we have to relearn and rethink in the thoughts of our heads.

Those who honestly and sincerely come to terms with this situation will not despondently recoil at the objections of those who say: You idealist, stick to your trade, stick to your ideals, don't talk us into practice! These practitioners will see what a pest this practice of life will reveal itself to be. But those who are the true practitioners, who think from the great impulses of human development, do not ascribe any special cleverness to themselves. For what compels us today to speak as I have done today, are the facts of the present itself. Oh, sometimes one feels so that one would like to compare oneself with that boy who once sat at the machine and had to operate the two taps, where the steam was let in through one and the condensed water through the other. The boy was truly not a genius inventor because of his age, but he stood before the machine, which revealed something to him through its facts. He saw how opening one of the valves coincided with the descent of the balance arm on one side, and opening the other valve with the descent of the balance rod on the other side. So, in his naivety, he took some ropes and tied the cocks to the balancing rod – and lo and behold, there he was at his steam engine, watching the balancer go up and down and open and close the cocks. But with that something important had been found. It was not the man who had been right at the time who now approached the boy and said: You good-for-nothing, get rid of those cords, just open the valves by hand; but it was the man who had found the self-control of the steam engine through the naive machinations of that boy.

Today, the facts speak so powerfully that one truly feels naive when trying to find how the self-control of the healthy social organism should be achieved. I could only hint at this today. It will be found when the following are allowed to function in full independence: spiritual life, economic life, and political or state life.

And so, I would like to conclude today by saying that I hope that humanity, and in particular Central European humanity, will recognize the significance of these impulses in the necessities of life in modern times before it is too late. For it must be recognized that we can only effectively move towards practical goals out of social need if we come up with ideas that contain the germ of action. It is thoughts that contain germs, thoughts that contain the germs of deeds, that we should seek, and we, who represent the tripartite social organism in its three impulses of independent spiritual, economic and legal life, believe that these impulses must be carried into the development of humanity before it is too late.

Closing remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees,

I do not want to keep you any longer with my closing remarks, not so much because there is not still much to be said about the remarks of the esteemed speakers, but above all because we are already too far ahead in time. Therefore, some of what I would like to say, but only in a vague way, has been said by some of the esteemed speakers, will have to be taken into account in the next two lectures to be given here. However, I would like to address some of them today, albeit very briefly. So please forgive the brevity of the answers to the direct questions that have been put to me.

The question has been raised as to why I myself – possibly through those on whom my word could have made some impression – have not raised the voice of peace earlier. Well, even though there were speakers in this discussion who again raised the accusation of idealism, I would like to emphasize quite strongly that I am and want to be a practitioner of life through and through, and that therefore it never occurs to me to merely propagate things that do not show their potential for realization in the facts of life. I would therefore also like to answer these questions with a few facts. What do you think would have been a truly practical way of promoting peace propaganda in real terms, say here in Stuttgart, well, let's say in the middle of the year or in the spring of 1916? By calling you together here and speaking fine words to you about the necessity of peace? Do you think that in the spring of 1916 a real practitioner of life could have achieved that so easily? Well, there were other ways. These ways, which came from the realization, from the full realization of the matter, were tried in order to do what was right at the time. In the not too distant future, it will be necessary to talk seriously about the history of the last four to five years, not in the way that people still talk about the history of these years in many circles. To mention just one of the facts: I fully advocated what I considered necessary as early as the spring of 1916, when it would have been possible to take practical action. I tried everything possible. Partly because of lack of time, because I would have to talk a lot about it, I will not elaborate further. It came to the point that on a certain day my task in the face of the terrible events should have begun. But then came the strange decree, I will call it that, from the highest instance, although those who had examined the matter considered it to be very promising. The decree came from the instance in which many people believe because they were ordered to believe: “He is an Austrian German, after all. Before we use Austrians for such services, we have to hire our capable German people for them. — That is the truth! That is how a truth can be! If I told you the whole context of the matter, no one would ask me why I did not stand up earlier for what I stand up for today. And another thing. At the beginning of this century and at the end of the last century, I was a teacher at a workers' training school founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. At that workers' training school, I formed a very loyal following among the students. But perhaps the members of the Socialist Party present here know that there are also so-called bigwigs within this party. And so it came about that one fine day, because I did not want to teach a dogmatic, materialistic view of history, four people out of six hundred of my students – four people who had never heard me outnumbered six hundred of my students who had heard me for years – and managed to get me fired. This is also a small chapter as to why the things that are now being spoken of me have not been spoken of earlier. Those who know how and where I have spoken on these subjects do not ask. But it is one thing to speak and another to be listened to. I am firmly convinced that many of those who are listening to me today would not have listened at all before the great lessons of the terrible and dreadful events of recent years came. This is also something that must be taken into account.

If it has been said that a bone of contention should be thrown between the state and labor, then, please, I must also refer to one of the next lectures. It will show that the esteemed previous speaker has misunderstood me completely if he believes that I want to make the state an economic actor in just any old way. That will not be the case. Rather, the state will play no economic role at all, so it cannot be the payer of wages either. Instead, for the state it is a matter of the freedom of the labor force. In this sense, I have also been correctly understood by many.

Now I have only briefly responded to certain questions with individual facts. In the course of time, these very questions will be answered quite differently.

If one of the esteemed gentlemen who spoke before has pointed out that it has been said that I have not explained the things, then it must be said that it is precisely the case that these things can only be explained from the experience of life, that when they are expressed, they go out as an appeal to human thinking and human experience. One must really turn to life for a change, otherwise we will not make any progress. Here is something that approaches people in such a way that they are to give it their free understanding. Unfortunately, we have seen that much has been understood in recent times – well, what I have not understood are the things that certain gentlemen have had framed in quite beautiful frames in recent years, the proverbs from a certain quarter, I have not understood those. The difference between what is to be understood here and what has been so easily understood in the course of the last few years is that, of course, here, with understanding, an act of inner freedom should be present. There, understanding was commanded. Let us sit up straight for once, try to understand something without being ordered to understand it, and let us try to work out how much of what we think we understand we only think we understand because it has been instilled in us, drilled into us or ordered to be understood. Now, anyone who is a practitioner of life can finally understand when someone says: Don't be hard on the money bag carrier, have pity on this or that person. But such instructions are actually quite selfish instructions, really quite selfish instructions, because it does not matter whether someone realizes that money is dirt or continues to believe that money is a little god. That is not what matters to the socially minded, but rather what role money and a person who has it play in society.

We should not shut ourselves off from such feelings: we should feel sorry for the moneybag carrier – but we should open our minds to the circumstances, not just to what we would or would not want to feel sorry for based on our own tastes. It is a matter

about breaking the habit of idle preaching. This idle preaching is one of the things that has brought us to our present plight and misery. I have often said figuratively to my listeners: All the talk about love of one's neighbor, about brotherhood, is all very well, it does so much good for the inwardly egotistical soul when one talks about love of one's neighbor in a well-heated room, about loving all people without distinction of station and so on. But that is now compared to reality as if I stood in front of the stove, so I said, and said to the stove: You stove, it is your stove duty to heat the room. The way you look, you have a stove physiognomy, such an object has the categorical imperative to make the room warm. — But it does not get warm, I can preach as much as I want.

And so people preach in abstractions over and over again, it does not get warm, but outside it is now going haywire. The thing to do is to stop preaching, use my thoughts to consider how warmth can be created in a sensible way, and to get firewood and make a fire. In the matters that are now at hand, it is important that our thoughts contain the seeds of what can be done. I believe that anyone who really seeks will find this in the meaning of the call to action in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. There have been enough words that are just words, now we need action. But if these actions are to be reasonable, we must first come to an understanding about them. We need germinal thoughts for action, such germinal thoughts that lead to action as soon as possible, before it is too late.

Emil Molt: I have the honor of welcoming you this evening and thanking you for the large attendance, which shows us that our invitation has fallen on fertile ground. The “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has seen fit to invite a number of prominent figures here this evening to put all the questions that the individual members of the audience have on their minds - questions that have arisen, for example, from the lectures - so that these questions can be clarified by Dr. Steiner himself. We believe that the lectures that have been held here in Stuttgart for four to six weeks are not only given to bring something interesting to the listeners, but above all to allow something to mature in the listeners that can be turned into action. We also believe that in order to bring such a movement into being, it is not enough to have only a few people as the driving force; rather, we need collaborators from all walks of life.

Now I ask you to take the floor, and I ask Dr. Steiner to answer any questions that arise.

Dr. Schmucker: I would like to make it clear from the start that I am asking purely as a private person. The resolution that has been formulated from the various lectures calls upon the government to appoint Dr. Steiner to implement the threefold social order that he has been advocating as quickly as possible. Now I must honestly confess that I have not yet had enough time to delve into his book and follow all the lectures. So I apologize if my question reveals that I don't know whether Dr. Steiner has perhaps already commented on the matter that is close to my heart. My question is this: Let us assume that one day the government takes the position that we want to work together with Dr. Steiner. Let us assume that Dr. Steiner comes to some ministry, for example the Ministry of Labor. He is seated in a room that is full of government papers and commentaries. He finds all the codes of law that deal with the solution of the social question, for example the Workers' Protection Act, the Law on Employee Insurance and so on, but above all the many laws that were brought to light by the new government after the great upheaval, and which all point in the same direction, namely, to satisfy as much as possible the social aspirations of the workers and employees. How does Dr. Steiner envision this work – the transition from the current mode of governance to the future one? What should happen to the current popular representations, to the provincial assemblies, to the National Assembly?

Rudolf Steiner: You have approached the question from a certain perspective, from the government perspective. Therefore, I can only answer it from this perspective. And the answer is that, of course, at the first act of government, one would have to foresee a great deal that could happen as a result of this first act of government.

As a first act of government, I would have something to think about – isn't that right, we are of course talking quite openly here – which of course has little to do with the question of what I would do if, for my sake, I were placed in the Ministry of Labor, found law books and the like in there and now had to continue working there. I would just like to formally state in advance that I had absolutely nothing to do with the wording of the resolution you are talking about. I would not be able to accept this interpretation of the resolution, but only be able to characterize my position on this question.

For example, I would first have to state that I do not belong in a labor ministry at all, that I have nothing to do there, for the simple reason that there can be no labor ministry within the unified state community in the near future. That is why I recently said in a lecture that the first act of government should be to take the initiative on various matters, in order to create a basis for further action.

First of all, it must be understood that a present-day government is, to a certain extent, the continuation of what has emerged as a government from previous conditions. However, only part of this government lies in the straightforward continuation of previous conditions, namely that which would include the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior - for Internal Security - and the Ministry of Hygiene. These things would lie in the continuation of what has arisen from previous government maxims. In all other respects, such a government would have to take the initiative to become a liquidation ministry, that is, a ministry that takes the initiative to the right and to the left in order to create the conditions for a free spiritual life that would be based on its own administration and constitution and would have to organize itself once the transition from the present to the following conditions has been overcome. This administration would also have a corresponding representation, which of course could not be shaped like today's popular representations, but would have to grow out of the special conditions of intellectual life. This would have to be formed purely out of the self-administration of intellectual life; in this context, the system of education and culture is particularly important. On the one hand, it would have to be handed over to the self-administration of intellectual life.

On the other hand, a liquidation ministry would have to hand over to the autonomous economic life everything that is, for example, traffic and trade; the Ministry of Labor would also have to find its administration in organizations that would develop out of economic life. These would, of course, be very radical things, but from this point of view they can only be radical things. Only then would a basis be created for any kind of treatment of specific questions.

What I have dealt with now does not change anything with regard to what has been built from below. It only indicates the path by which something new can be created out of what already exists. Only when those organizations have been created out of economic life that would continue what is in the codes of law you mentioned, only then could [further] be tackled. That would only be a step that could come later. I am not thinking of a program, but of a sequence of steps, all of which are real actions, real processes. All I say in my books and lectures are not indications of how to do it, but how to create the conditions for people to enter into the possible interrelationships in order to do the things. Economic laws can only grow out of economic life itself, and only if all those corporations are expressed in their impulses in economic life that can contribute something to the shaping of this economic life from the individual concrete circumstances of economic life.

So, on the part of the government, I would consider that as the first step: to understand that it must be a liquidation government.

I am happy to go into further specific issues that arise from this.

Dr. Schmucker: Suppose you were to get some kind of self-government to regulate economic life. Could the works councils, which are now to be introduced for individual companies under the Reich bill, serve as a means of achieving this self-administration if – which is at least the intention – the works councils were expanded upwards, for example by combining the Württemberg works councils into a state workers' council or state works council and, at the highest level, into a Reich works council or Reich economic council? The bill uses the term “works council” for a representation that would become a pure workers' representation in which employers would not be included. Just as the works council works together with the employer, so too could employers and employees sit together at the higher state level, and then not only employees but also employers would be represented in a Reich Economic Council, so that here too there would be equal representation. Could Dr. Steiner see the possibility that such an organization would fulfill some of the wishes of economic life and that these economic self-governing corporations would be assigned all further tasks that Dr. Steiner believes should be performed by economic corporations as self-governing corporations?

Rudolf Steiner: I would ask you not to take the few introductory sentences I am about to say as abstractions, but as a summary of experiences. These can only be summarized in just such sentences.

The way in which the structure of economic life has developed means that this economic life suffers from the fact that harmonization of interests is not possible within the existing structure. I will only hint at some of it. For example, under the development of our economic life, the worker is not interested in production - I am ignoring the really foolish interest, for example, in profit sharing, which I consider impractical. The worker is interested in economic life, as things stand today, only as a consumer, while the capitalist, in turn, is basically only interested in economic life as a producer, and again only as a producer from the point of view of profit - that is his point of view, economically speaking, it cannot be otherwise. So today we have no way of organizing a real harmonization of consumer and producer interests; it is not part of our economic structure.

What we must achieve is that we actually make those people who are involved in shaping the economic structure equally interested in consumption and production, so that no one who intervenes in a formative way – not only through judgment but also through action – has a one-sided interest in production or consumption, but rather that through the organization itself there is an equal interest in both. This can only be achieved if we are able to gradually let people form small corporations out of economic life itself, and out of all forms of economic life, which then naturally continue to grow. They must be corporations because trust must be established. This is only possible if larger corporations are gradually built up uniformly from smaller ones, that is, only if we have personalities with their judgments and also with their influence based on the economic foundation, who work in all areas of social life through their aptitude for managing economic life as such. If we want to socialize, we cannot socialize economic life through institutions, but only by being able to interest people in the institutions in the way described and by having them participate in them continuously.

Therefore, I consider it most necessary today that we do not create laws by which works councils are established, but that we have the possibility to create works councils from all forms of economic life – so that they are initially there – and to let a works council emerge from these works councils, which only has a true meaning when it forms the mediation between the individual branches of production. A works council that only exists for individual branches is of little significance. It is only when the activities of the works councils unfold primarily between the branches of production that are in interaction that they have a meaning.

I therefore said: the individual works council actually only has a purpose in the company if it has an informational significance. What must be done with this idea of works councils in economic life can actually only be done by the works councils as a whole, because it can only result in a blessing for the individual companies in the future if the works councils emerge from the structure of the whole economic life. So I think that the real focus is on the works council as a whole, in other words, on what is negotiated between the works councils of the individual factories, and not on what happens only in the individual factories.

But then I can only expect this institution to be a blessing if these works councils – which, of course, have to be set up on the basis of existing conditions, which must not arise from blue-sky hopes but from what exists today – if they are elected, for example, from all those who are somehow involved in the company. I do not want to speak of “employers” and “employees”, but of people from the circle of all those who are really involved in the business, either intellectually or physically. So all those who participate in the business would form the basis for such councils to develop out of themselves. If the matter were approached from this economic angle, the reasonable employers to date would naturally be included in their capacity as spiritual leaders, and we would have a works council that would at least not initially have elected representatives from all [areas] – that would only be the case after some time – but which could represent the interests of the most diverse people involved in economic life. However, I could only imagine that such a workers' council would nevertheless focus its main attention on the conditions of production, so I actually cannot imagine that a mere workers' council would be anything meaningful. I can only imagine that in addition to the workers' council – not overlooking the objection that one might say: Where will work still be done if all this is to be done in practice? I can only imagine that the workers' councils will be supplemented by transport councils and economic councils, because the workers' council will primarily deal with production, but the economic council with consumption in the broadest sense. For example, consumption would also have to include everything that we consume from abroad, everything that is imported; everything that is imported would be subject to the economic council. I am not saying that everything is exemplary today, but these are the three most important [types of] workers' councils that must be established first: the workers' council, the transport council, and the economic council. To do this, only one wing of the government would have to take the initiative, but it would have no laws to create, but would only have to see to it that these workers' councils are set up. These councils would then have to begin to create their own constitution, that is, to create what flows from independent economic life, what they have experienced in it. The constitution of the three councils would arise entirely from the circumstances themselves. This is what I would consider the first step: the creation of workers' councils out of the circumstances. Only then would these have to give themselves their constitution. That, in practice, is what I would call breaking up the economy in a given area. As long as there is the idea that laws concerning workers' councils are issued by a central government, I consider that to be something that has nothing to do with what should happen. Taking the first step first – that is what the time demands of us.

Dr. Schmucker: In my opinion, this work, which the participants themselves should carry out in order to form and manage organizations, requires a highly developed workforce. However, the experiences we have had with the workforce during the war and with the labor force in recent months make me hesitant to assume that the majority of the workforce – or at least the vast majority – is up to this great task. When you have experiences like the ones we have had recently, where the workers of a company come and demand under threat of violence: You have made so much profit now. You may be doing badly now, but the state will take a large part of what you have earned if you do not share it. We are now demanding cost-of-living allowances! This whole process is well known to everyone, this continued increase in wages, food prices and so on, one thing becoming more expensive as a result of another. These experiences cast doubt on whether workers and employees are at this high level of development to fulfill the task that is required of them here.

Rudolf Steiner: If we start from the principle that we always want to do the best we can possibly imagine or that we can envision in any ideal way, then we will never carry out in practice what really needs to be done. I naturally admit that a great deal of what you have just said is absolutely right. But I would ask you to consider the following: in the last few weeks and months, I have had the opportunity to talk to a great many workers, and I have found that when you really speak to them in their language, they come up with things that really have a real basis. I have found that he then proves to be inwardly receptive and realizes that what is to be done can only be something that does not undermine economic life or cause it to die, but builds it up. It is extremely easy to make the worker understand what needs to be done if you address what he himself has experienced. And from there he will easily grasp certain interrelations in economic life. Of course, there is still a great deal that he cannot grasp, for the simple reason that the circumstances never allowed him to see into certain interrelations, into which one simply cannot see when one stands at the machine from morning till night. I already know that too.

But now, of course, there is the added factor that even our most experienced principals do not delve very deeply into the real conditions of economic life. I would like to quote Rathenau not as an economist [oriented towards the whole], but almost as a principal, because his writings actually reveal on every page that he really speaks from the standpoint of the principal, the industrial entrepreneur. Now, basically, from this point of view, there are no absolute objections to be made against these statements, because basically all the facts are correct. I would like to mention just one thing: Rathenau calculates the actual meaning of surplus value. Of course, today it is very easy to prove that the concept of surplus value as it existed some time ago is now obsolete. Rathenau also does this calculation very nicely in detail, and comes to the quite correct conclusion that basically none of the surplus value can be claimed. Because if the worker gets it, he would have to give it back, because the institutions make it necessary for it to be used as a reserve. This calculation is, of course, simply correct. The question is whether it is possible to escape the result of this calculation, whether it is economically possible to find a way to escape the result of this calculation. The point is that there is no way to escape Rathenau's calculation other than to realize what I have given as an answer in my book: that the moment any given sum of means of production is completed, it can no longer be sold, that is, it no longer has any purchase value. Then the whole calculation collapses, because the Rathenau calculation is only possible if the means of production can be sold again at any time for a very specific value. So the right prerequisite is missing for the actual conclusion, for which the principal is not yet available today. They would first have to understand that we will get nowhere because we are at an impasse if we do not make major changes. And it would be immediately apparent if we were to find common ground, but on ground where the only interest is in continuing economic life and not in serving the interests of the individual; we would see that the principals know something, but that they have one-sided knowledge that can be supplemented by the others.

I believe I can say, with reference to everything that an individual can produce intellectually in the way of beautiful ideals: “One is a human being, two are people, more than two are beasts.” As soon as we come to the kind of thinking that is supposed to be realized in the social order, the opposite principle applies: “One alone is nothing, several are a little something, and many are those who can then do it.” Because when twelve people from the most diverse party-political directions sit together with the goodwill to summarize their individual experiences as partial experiences, we not only have a sum of twelve different opinions, but by these opinions really taking action, a potentiation of these twelve impulses arises. Thus a quite tremendous sum of economic experience is formed simply by our socializing human opinion in this way. That is the important thing. Well, I must say, I believe that what you say is right, so long as you are dealing with a class of workers who demand simply from their standpoint as consumers. Because the fact that they have demands will of course not lead to anything that can lead to any kind of socialization. This is the only way to dismantle the economy. We must not imagine that we will achieve ideal conditions the day after tomorrow, but a condition that is possible to live in if we do things this way. At this point in particular, we should think: What is possible to live in? – and not: Are people smart enough? Let us take people as they are and do the best we can with them, and not speculate about whether people are highly developed, because ultimately something must always happen. We simply cannot do nothing; something must happen from some quarter. I do not see why, if we take people out of economic life, they should be less highly developed than, for example, the government people and the members of the former German Reichstag in all the years in which what happened then had terrible effects. There, too, only what was possible happened. The point is that we do what is possible with the majority of people who are there. I do not imagine that an ideal state could be created, but an organism that is possible to live in.

Dr. Riebensam: I would like to address the question of the works councils. What still gives us the opportunity to talk to the workers? The situation is now escalating to the point where we need to find a lightning rod. I want to get to the practical point and ask: Why do you want to put a car on the road without a steering wheel? In my opinion, such a machine is our workforce. I have spoken to many of them about this and expressed my view that I consider it impossible to come to any kind of cooperation with a large workforce in this way. For the moment a committee of workers makes itself the representative of a certain opinion, every member of the committee will be stoned by the workers. You assume goodwill on the part of the workers. I have tried everything, and not without success at first, because I have the trust of the workers, ever since I have been able to speak to them and they have been able to hear me. But the people who do not come are in the majority. I can perhaps talk to two thousand, the others do not have the good will. From experience, I know that the great multitude is capable of confusing those who are initially convinced. The wisest of the workers' committees, with whom I have spoken privately and who expressed positive views, are now back to the point where I ask myself: has all the work I have done for six months been in vain? I have made certain proposals to the government with the intention that they be implemented in such a way as to satisfy the workers. If these proposals are issued as decrees by the government, all this work will be in vain. But I think it is useless to establish works councils without any tax; the craziest things happen then. Since you yourself say that we have to start at some point, we would have to start in such a way that it could be implemented.

Rudolf Steiner: All that you have said actually amounts to the fact that it is basically not possible at present for the management of the companies to cope with the workforce. This has of course not come about without preconditions, it has of course only gradually become so. I believe that you misjudge the situation if you rely too much on the goodwill of the workforce. Because the workers will demand goodwill from you, for the reason that they have learned through agitation - to a certain extent justifiably - that nothing will come of it. The workers will say: We can have this goodwill, but the entrepreneur will not have it. This mistrust is already too great today. Therefore, there is no other way than to gain as much trust as possible. The moment someone is found who really knows something about social objectives that the workers can understand, and not just based on good will but on insight, even for two thousand workers – or for eight thousand, for that matter – the situation changes. Of course, if you talk to two thousand workers, they in turn may be confused by the other side, but the situation will still turn out like this: If you really talk to the workers about what they understand, you are not just talking to two thousand people who are confused by the people they last talked to, but these will in turn have an effect on the others.

But if we ask ourselves whether this path has even been taken yet, we have to say that basically it has not been taken at all. And everything is done to make this path unattractive over and over again. Naturally, when the worker sees that works councils are decreed from above by law, this is a complete denial of trust. So let something come from the central authorities today in a truly audible way, something that makes sense, so that the worker can see that it makes sense. But nothing like that is happening. And that is why the movement for the threefold social order actually exists, because something is to be created that really constitutes a conceivable goal. You will not reach the worker by just talking about concrete institutions, because he has been pushed out into a mere consumer position. This is not explained to the worker by anyone. Everything that is being done is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Let the institutions arise on their own initiative today. If this works council is really to be constituted, just let it come, perhaps only in the form of proposals - after all, many proposals can be put forward here -; not just one single type of bill. That is, of course, the best way to have the entire working class against the works councils. Today there is no way to make any headway in this way. Today we can only succeed if we want something other than to use force against force, namely to confront personalities with personalities, to gain personal trust. That is what the worker can do. The one who understands how to talk to the worker in his language in such a way that the worker realizes that nothing will come of it if he only ever pushes up the wage scale, and he also sees that there is a will to finally move in this [new] direction, then he will go along with it and work as well. He will not work with you if you just make legislative proposals, but he wants to see that the personalities in the government actually have the will to move in a certain direction.

This is what the current government is also being criticized for; people have the idea that they want to do something, but what is happening is all moving along the same tracks as before. There is nothing new in it anywhere. On the other hand, when people are involved, it is not a matter of somehow setting a car in motion and not giving it a steering wheel. It really must have a steering wheel if it is to be able to move. We cannot help but say: either we try to move forward and go as far as we can, or we are heading for chaos. There is no other way to do it.

Dr. Riebensam: I agree with all that. I go along with the idea that the worker should be shown this goal to begin with, but not be led down the same old paths. I think it's possible that today you will see that the workers in a factory are throwing a great deal together. But perhaps it would be possible to find a way for the workers to play a fruitful role. We are willing to take the workers into account, but they must also take our point of view into consideration if they do not want all faith in a possibility of understanding to disappear. Somehow we have to find a way. [But it's not that easy.] When the workers come to set up works councils and we tell them we want to sit down together and do the right thing, then that is basically an abstract template; they don't meet our advice at all. I was at a workers' meeting the other day when the workers demanded too much. They said that we should not approach the matter with narrow-minded thinking; it would no longer be useful to make any arrangements; they wanted to decide everything themselves in the future. This realization must be the basis for my future actions. However, I could imagine a works council that meets every eight days and with which I discuss everything before tensions arise. But we should also tell the workers: we cannot simply create a works council on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in these matters it is important to take systematic experiences, not unsystematic ones. We have had a whole series of workers' meetings, almost every day, because we had no other option. One thing emerged again and again in these workers' meetings. It was very noticeable that, as an extreme, the workers themselves said: Yes, if we are alone, how are we supposed to cope in the future? Of course we need those who can lead; we need the spiritual worker. This matter does not arise from dictating, but only from really working with people. That is why I considered the fact (Molt will be able to confirm this) that from the very beginning, when he came with other friends to put this matter into effect, I told him: the first requirement is that honest trust be acquired, but not in the usual way of: I am the principal and you are the worker, but rather from person to person, so that the worker is really initiated step by step into the management of the whole business and also gets an idea of when the business ceases to be economically viable. That is something that is indispensable, and I openly ask the question: where has it happened? Where is it being done? — Nowadays, a lot of things are done in government by individual commissions getting together and thinking about the best way of doing this or that. In this case, forgive the harsh word, the horse is being put before the cart. It is impossible to make progress with that. Today it is necessary to create a living link between those who work with their hands and those who can understand it. It is much more necessary than holding ministerial meetings for individual men to go among the people and talk from person to person. That is the ground on which one must begin first. One must not be put out if success does not come at the first attempt; it is bound to come by the fourth or fifth time. So, wouldn't it be true that if only some kind of beginning had been made in what is actually practical today, one would be able to see [that something is emerging]; but there is no beginning, people are opposed to it.

Emil Molt: A start has been made. May I point out to those gentlemen who are interested that we have been introducing this kind of works council for weeks. Even though I am well aware that the matter is still in its infancy, it has been shown that we have already gained the trust while we are negotiating here on how to gain that trust. This is essential because we set out to make fewer cigarettes and more people. We have used the factory to make people. Making cigarettes is only a means to an end. We set out to really get in touch with people and to do this during working hours. You just have to take that time. It's about realizing things from the bottom up. If things are like this elsewhere now - a lot has been missed in the last six to eight weeks. If we had started earlier, a lot could have been avoided.

The situation now is as follows: the people who are in the factory not only want to work, they also want to know. We must be clear about this: the more we give in to this urge and are not afraid to steer this power current into the right channels, the more this power can be utilized again. Therefore, we should not be afraid to tell every factory owner to lay out his business like an open book, because that is where trust begins to be put into practice. As long as we only talk about what we should do, we will not win the trust of the people. We must provide insight and show them: Today we have nothing more to hide. In the past, the factory owner had more to hide. Now the worker can see at most that nothing is being earned. Only if he comes to it himself will he believe it – he will not believe it from the factory owner. When people demand higher wages, they are driven only by a desire for knowledge; they want to gain insight. But if you yourself are the helmsman and provide insight into the production process, you will see that people will concern themselves with issues other than wages. I would ask you to bear in mind that we [from Waldorf-Astoria] are not speaking as theorists; we have experience, we have proof of this. Even if not all our ideals have been realized so far, we are on the way to doing so. And the difficulties that other companies are now facing – we will never have them.

Yesterday I spoke to a large workforce from another company. I saw the enthusiasm with which people received my report as soon as things were viewed from a comprehensive point of view. I heard from my workforce today that the news of this meeting is spreading like wildfire among the workforce. People see for themselves that if it were like this everywhere, the conditions would be quite different. For days we have had continuous visits from the workers' committees of all the major plants, and they say: Yes, if only we had that! There is a great failure on the part of the bourgeoisie; if you really talk to our colleagues, you will encounter blinkers and narrow-mindedness everywhere.

Dr. Schmucker: I had imagined the government's bill to be dreadful, but not so dreadful; it is a real monstrosity. If you study the matter, you can see that the law-makers in Berlin do not know the situation; they do not even know what it is about. Now they want to abolish the employee and worker committees and set up works councils of 40 to 80 people who are incapable of working.

Mr. Geyer: There is no one present who is not touched by Dr. Steiner's proposals. But I must openly admit that I deal with the question every day of why we always face new problems when I think we have overcome them. We are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. People are becoming more and more concerned with the spiritual side of the social structure than has been the case so far, when the interest of the individual in general was only directed towards an economic revolution. But I must say that this spiritual revolution, in my opinion, is not moving in the right direction. The worker and many employees are by no means aware of what is at stake today. Their consumer interests keep them so firmly in their grip that they do not allow other people who do not work with their hands to be considered alongside them. It is true when Dr. Steiner says that social policy cannot be driven from above. But we must come to a point where the human being enters into a closer relationship with other human beings. Unfortunately, however, we are already so one-sided in the culture and in the state organism and in the world organism that a return to the original culture, to the original state, is necessary – not in the spiritual sense, but in relation to the relationship between human beings. There is no longer any control that stands above the human being. All people should enter into relationship with each other, forming small circles, a kind of crystal, which combine to form larger units. This forming of crystals should then continue until we have reached the summit, where the liquidation of the state organism has come to its end. I believe that this is how Dr. Steiner imagines the process of developing threefolding until it is complete. But a considerable time will pass before that [and a problem will arise]: councils will be formed, but these councils will change very often, just as people now often change their jobs, so that chaos will ensue. There will not only be friction between the small organizations, but also collisions within the liquidation ministry. This can lead to the whole tower, which is to be built from below, collapsing. I believe that our general education of the people as a prerequisite [for this reform work] does not yet make it possible to hope for the development of genuine trust between people. I believe that a general education of the people should start first, although I readily admit that this general education of the people will also face obstacles from above and below. The one who is supposed to be educated, the worker, regards not only the employer as an enemy, but everyone who is intellectually superior, because he fears that he will have to persuade him to do something that is contrary to his interests. This is an experience that is made many times. I do not believe that even if Molt has had good experiences with the works councils in his company, it will always remain so. Man is man, and since I have known man in his ten-thousand-year development, I must say: Man is not a mere earthly creature, but a being that once reaches the point of culture where one can truly say that now man is culturally so educated that his earthly existence will be a happy one. To bring this about, however, a person would have to come along who has superhuman spiritual powers to capture the souls of people.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say that all of this could actually be used to present a view of the value of the human being. But for those who are thinking practically about what can be done in these chaotic times, it is not at all a matter of whether a person is sufficiently culturally educated or can be educated, but only of making what can be made out of people. And above all, when we speak of the social organism, we should abandon the notion from the outset that we want to somehow establish happiness in the social organism or bring happiness to people through social institutions. The aim of social transformation is therefore not to create happy people, but to get to know the living conditions of the social organism, that is, to create a viable social organism. The fact that we cannot make progress with popular education as it is today has led to the demand for total emancipation from the other limbs for popular education, for the impulses of the threefold order.

Now, if you really want to know people, you cannot speak of tens or thousands of years, but of what is really manageable. If you consider the development of public education in the last few centuries – three to four centuries is all you need to take if you want to get to the bottom of today's problems – you can see that the ever-increasing nationalization of the entire education system has led to the public ignorance that we have today. We have gradually created an education in our leading circles that leads to nothing but false concepts. Consider that the leading circles have driven the worker into mere economic life. Because what you throw at him in the way of popular education, he does not understand. I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School and I know what the worker can understand and what is done incorrectly. I know that he can only understand something that is not taken from bourgeois education, but from the general human existence. You said that the worker regards everyone as an enemy who is spiritually superior. Of course, he regards everyone as an enemy who merely represents a spiritual life that is conditioned by the social structure of a small number of castes and classes. He senses this very well in his instinct. As soon as he is confronted with the spiritual life that is drawn from the whole human being, there is no question of him being an enemy of the spiritually superior; there can be no question of that; on the contrary, he realizes very well that this is his best friend. We must find a way to achieve a truly social education for the people through the emancipation of spiritual life. We must not be afraid of a certain radicalism. We must have an inkling of how concepts, ideas, the whole essence of what our education is today has rubbed off on people, to put it trivially. There has been much discussion about the grammar school system. What is this grammar school system? We have established it by staging a kind of paradox. The spiritual life is, after all, a whole. The Greeks absorbed the spiritual life from everything, because it was the spiritual life that adapted to the circumstances. We do not teach anything in school that is in the world, but rather what was in the world for the Greeks, that is imagined by our culture. From this paradox we now demand: We want to offer people enlightenment. We can only offer it to them if we go back to ourselves in this area, if we approach man as a human being. There should be no return to a speculative original state; only what the times demand can be considered. Today it is necessary that we really learn from such things. When I taught my students - and I can say that there were a great many of them - what I could not get from any branch of grammar school knowledge or education, but what had to be built up from scratch, they learned eagerly. Of course, because they also absorb the judgment of the educated, which [actually comes from high school knowledge], so they knew exactly that this is a cultural lie; of course they don't want to learn anything about that.

We will never have the opportunity to actually move forward if we are unable to make the radical initial decision to implement this threefold order, that is, to really wrest spiritual life and economic life from state life. I am convinced that today a great many people say that they do not understand this threefold order. They say this because it is too radical for them, because they have no courage to really study the matter in detail and carry it out. That is not the case, it is really a matter of the fact that we are not dealing with supermen, but with human beings as they really are, and doing what can be done with them. Then you can do a great deal if you do not want to start from this or that prejudice. You really ought to put the education system on its own basis and let those who are in it manage it. But people can hardly imagine what that is, while it is actually a thing that, if you want to imagine it, already exists.

So, the school system must first be thought of as completely separate from the state system. It is out of the question for us to make any progress if we do not embrace this radical thinking of bringing the school, indeed the whole education system, out of the state.

Dr. Riebensam: I want to get back to the real issue, to what we are trying to achieve. I would like to speak very personally and reply to Mr. Molt that I consider his view – although he experienced it in his factory – to be somewhat unrealistic. It is based on experiences in a small circle. Twenty years ago, I implemented principles in a small factory that no one else was thinking of at the time. I openly showed what I did in the factory. We had the Taylor system, which seems good. I then tried the same in a much larger factory – the people went with me. I then tried the same here – there was a lack of trust. Because of these circumstances, I have expressed my concerns, and I must stick to them. Let us return to what we want. The question was asked: How should we begin? I will assume that we call together the workers with the aim of founding works councils. How do we do that? It is possible that you, Dr. Steiner, will tell me that we could even give the workers self-management. I am not yet convinced that this is possible. I would like to see a concrete example of a works council being formed in a large factory.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say in advance that everything that can be done in detail within a company today can really only be a preparation for what the works council means. I would just like to say, because Dr. Riebensam started from this point, that experiences such as those in the small group described by Mr. Molt should not be celebrated too soon as a victory. But let us not be deceived: what these experiences can prove in the first instance is that trust can be established within a certain group. And that is what Mr. Molt primarily meant. It cannot be a victory because, when a systematic socialization is considered, a victory cannot be achieved in a single company. The victory of a single company, even if it were to increase the standard of living of its workforce, could only be achieved at the expense of the general public if a single company were to achieve it unilaterally.

Dr. Riebensam: I did not want to speak in detail about the Taylor system.

Rudolf Steiner: I only meant that this Taylor system could lead to something positive under certain circumstances, if it were applied under different conditions; but under our present system it would only increase all the system's damage.

Regarding the specific question of how we deal with works councils, let us not forget that we only want to make demands. We must observe the demands and distinguish the essential from the inessential. The system of councils is actually a given reality today, that is, perhaps it only exists in embryo, but anyone who properly observes the social forces at work in our social organism will understand this. So it is with the idea of councils in this particular case: works councils, transport councils and economic councils will assert themselves of their own accord. Now, to begin with, we only have a presentiment of the working class. The real issue is that the social constitution of the works council is to emerge, that general principles cannot be established for it. In fact, the issue is that we finally get used to making initiatives possible, and such initiatives will arise the moment they are unleashed. They need do nothing at all except popularize the idea of works councils – and that is very important today. Then the question will surely have to be answered in the most diverse concrete enterprises in the most diverse ways: How do we do it? – It can be done in one enterprise in one way and in another way, depending on the goals and people. We must come to the possibility that a workers' council is constituted from within the enterprises, that a workers' council separates itself from the enterprises and acts between the enterprises. That is where the work of the council actually begins. The question of how to do it would have to be resolved by you in each individual case. We just have to understand the idea in general and implement it in each individual case.

The general tenor that we have heard here today, our experience, we are not gaining any trust -: I believe that if one were to examine each individual case, one would come to see that the matter would have to be approached differently after all. First of all, we would have to really embrace the full necessity of putting economic life on its own feet. Just think, if you do that, then it is only goods and the production of goods; you no longer have anything to do with wages. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. But the worker understands that when you tell him: you cannot abolish the wage system overnight. But if the tendency exists to abolish the wage system, to transfer the worker's labor power to the constitutional state, so that it is decided there - because it does not belong in economic life - then there is only a contract between management and workers regarding distribution. That is a concrete thing, that must first of all become real, it must be carried into every single company; then one can make progress with the people. Unfortunately, however, there is no will to do this. For example, there is no understanding [among employers] that the wage system can be replaced. This is regarded as a conditio sine qua non of economic life.

Dr. Riebensam: I say that the workers do have works councils in mind, but they do not take them into account in their [fundamental] goal. [This would have to be shown to them]. You do this here by giving lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Not with the leaders [of the workers], who think in the old ways, who think in bourgeois terms.

Dr. Riebensam: Of course we have to tell the workers all these things, but first I have to be clear about them myself, I have to think about these thoughts. Then I can also try to talk to the workers and influence them. But I would like to ask you if you also know the works councils in the other factories?

Rudolf Steiner: I only know the Molt system, which was introduced on the basis of this idea [about the works council].

Emil Molt: One fine day, we saw that there was a need, we convened the people, discussed the aim and purpose and then said: the most capable can join the works council, but they must know that they still have to learn. Those who come in must learn from day one, but under supervision. They must learn what is necessary to run a business. Confidence comes, people then see that it is not as easy to run a business as people now realize that it is not so easy to govern. People then understand that the director is the first works councilor in his business because he is the only one who knows the business from the bottom up. Then you work through fundamental questions with the people so that they feel the imponderables.

Dr. Riebensam: How many people do you have in your company?

Emil Molt: Seven hundred.

Dr. Riebensam: Who should I sit down with?

Emil Molt: They will come to me.

Dr. Carl Unger: I could contribute some experiences, even if they are only specific ones, because my company has metalworkers who have a slightly different mentality than the other workers. My experiences go in the direction that we have set up a program that is not a program in and of itself, but it is only about working out the basic features for a works council before the government comes, because otherwise nothing will come of it. You said that you consider it essential for the works council to seek contact with the outside world and to get in touch with other works councils. The prerequisite was the call that appeared at the time and was circulated in our company. In all the possible questions that have now been discussed here, the point of view of threefolding was always sought. [In our company, however, we were forced] to do it the old way — but that doesn't really belong here. The whole matter of the workers' councils must be approached from the legal point of view. It is actually a good thing when people ask about the threefold order, because in this way they are instructed and pass on their knowledge in their circle, because the threefold order idea is something that must work from man to man.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: Dr. Schmucker first asked Dr. Steiner what he would do if he were now appointed to the government in accordance with the workers' resolution. I would like to speak purely personally, not politically, because from a political point of view, I do not consider this demand to be a good one, and that is because it would mean nothing less than asking the government to dismiss itself. Because such a government will not, without disavowing itself, appoint the representative of modern ideas without resigning. Since that would be irresponsible and since such a significant movement should not arise with something that has no chance of success, I have never hidden these concerns and regret that such a resolution was passed at all. However, that should not prevent us from extracting what is useful from this unreasonable demand. As far as I know, Dr. Schmucker is in the Ministry of Labor. We have had ministers during the war and afterwards who were not there before; these are signs that the old state of civil servants, the old state of lackeys, has not mastered this tremendous economy that has been emerging for 60 years and which must seek other forms, whether we like it or not, because these forms have now actually suffered a fiasco. The states themselves have shown that it is impossible for them to build themselves up into economic states in this way. That is the meaning of this catastrophe.

Now all the gentlemen, especially Dr. Riebensam, have rightly assumed that we are in an extremely difficult situation in which the whole building can collapse. We are in a transitional stage and must first remain in the area that is of current interest and that must be tackled immediately. These are not spiritual questions, but economic ones. Mr. Molt has earned the trust of his workers; but they are not from the metalworkers' structure. They have in fact, as we hear, already arrived at the point of nihilism, which will bring about the sharpest dangers for Württemberg. One of these dangers, Dr. Riebensam, lies in the fact that you view the matter too sharply from a purely industrial point of view, because you forget that the state of Württemberg does not only have 8,000 [Daimler] and 5,000 Bosch workers, but also farmers. And if they come, we will have a civil war. What will happen then, I do not know.

The question arises: if the workers demand the impossible without reason, not only the workers but also the bureaucracy, if they take the mere consumer point of view, [what happens then]? We would have to try and say to the workers in the sense of threefolding: You metalworkers – and that means all companies – get together, form a production cooperative – this is something completely new – you bring all the assets of your company, your labor, and a new organization will be created. I do not want to say that this is necessary, but I can imagine that the worker can be persuaded to advocate the abolition of wages as the equivalent of labor without having to make a final decision, because a single state can hardly abolish wages. If these enterprises, which are important in Württemberg, were to set up such a production cooperative and thereby reassure the workers, we would have gained time for the implementation of Dr. Steiner's ideas. This merger would be an organized merger that manifests itself in some legal form. This could be organized differently for you, Dr. Riebensam, than for small businesses.

And now the other question: Can a small or medium-sized state like Württemberg, which belongs to a closed economic area [with its own money], even form such a structure for itself? Will foreign countries supply raw materials to such cooperatives? The danger is that foreign countries, which are much larger and stronger “capital countries” than Germany at the moment, will decide not to enter into economic relations with such a structure. But we cannot feed ourselves. So the question must be considered: where do we start with these organizations?

Rudolf Steiner: It would perhaps be going too far if I were to go into the details of the previous summaries; I would rather go into the questions.

It would not yet be possible to regard it as a particular realization of what is meant by threefolding if, for my sake, all metalworkers in Württemberg were treated in the way you have described, although it could be formally implemented. But when I speak of the threefold social order, I must expressly emphasize that I regard a one-sided separation of economic life from state life, with the spiritual life remaining with the state life, as the opposite of what is sought, because I consider a two-way division to be just as harmful as a three-way division is necessary. If a single branch of the economy were to be separated out in this way, I would not regard it as being in line with the threefold order. However, it could formally take place in a social organism that is working towards threefold order. Well, it would also be a fundamental test of the principle if such things were to be considered.

As a detail, I would just like to note that the abolition of wages, consistently thought through, does not at all lead to the view that a single state cannot abolish wages because the relationship of the economy in such a state, which abolishes wages, to the entire economic outside world, does not need to change at all. Whether the worker receives his income internally in the sense of economic liberalism or whether he receives it in some other form, for example from the proceeds of what he produces, for which he is already a partner with the manager, does not change the other economic relations with the outside world. It is therefore not true that a single state cannot abolish wages. But it is equally untenable to claim that a small or large state cannot implement this on its own. On the contrary, in a small or large state you certainly cannot socialize in the sense that the old socialists had in mind. I believe, in fact, that socialization in the sense of the old socialists can lead to nothing more than the absolute strangulation and constriction of a single economic area. If you draw the ultimate consequences from the old socialization, then basically a single economic area is nothing more than what is dominated by a single ledger. You can never come to a positive trade balance with that, but only to a gradual, complete devaluation of the money. Then you can abolish the money. Then the possibility of an external connection ceases altogether.

So all these things have been the basis for thinking of this threefold order, because it is the only way that each individual area, the economic, the legal and the spiritual, can carry it out. The external relationships will not change in any other way than that it will no longer be possible, for example, for political measures to disrupt the economy. The economic sphere will have an external impact, and it will no longer be possible for things to happen, as in the case of the Baghdad Railway problem, where all three interests became entangled, with the result that the Baghdad Railway problem became one of the most important causes of the war. There you see these three things tied together.

I would like to point out once again that the tripartite division is intended for foreign policy, that is, it has been conceived to offer the possibility of conducting economic life according to purely economic aspects, beyond political boundaries, so that political life can never interfere with it. This means that in the areas where the threefold order is not implemented, the damage would be there, but there would be no real reason for the [separate] economic life not to get involved abroad if the economic situation is profitable for the foreign country. It will depend on this alone, even if an economic area is not independent, if it is entirely impulsed by the political; for all these things that affect other countries are not affected by the threefold social order.

Today there is great concern: let us take a specific case. Let us assume that Bavaria would now carry out its socialization, then with such a bureaucratically and centrally conceived socialization, a whole range of free connections between domestic companies and foreign industry would be made impossible and undermined. On the other hand, through the threefold social order, the labor force is removed from the economic sphere, which thus gives the worker the opportunity to face the work manager as a free partner. But this is how the worker comes to be able to really have the share that arises within the economic sphere when everything is no longer mixed up. Today, we no longer have objective prices, but rather the wage relationship in economic life. If you take this out, you have, on the one hand, eliminated the disquiet caused by the workers. And if you now take out the capital relationship, you have, on the other hand, the intellectual organism that always has to take care of the abilities of those who are supposed to be there to run the businesses. So you have removed the two main stumbling blocks from the economic body, and yet you have not touched on something that takes place in economic relations with foreign countries. Therefore, there is no reason for foreign countries to be hostile, because they lose nothing and can conduct economic life exactly as before.

This reorganization [through the works council] is intended precisely with economic life in mind. If we think of Germany, a whole host of fine threads that exist with foreign countries will organize themselves in one fell swoop, from all companies. There is really nothing else to be done but to reorganize social life in such a way that in the future, goods will actually regulate themselves through goods, so that there will be a precise index around which goods group in terms of their value. This will create the possibility that what the individual produces has the value that all products must have in order to meet his needs. In our organism, which is based on the division of labor, all socialization must ultimately result in what the individual person produces in the course of a year equaling what he needs to sustain his life. If we throw out the wage and capital relationship, then we get the pure commodity relationship. However, this is something that one must decide to think through completely. At that moment, one will find that it is quite easy.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: I am not opposed to the spiritual organism administering itself; I am just saying that it will take longer and is not urgent.

Rudolf Steiner: It is urgent because we have the necessity to create a basis for the education of spiritual workers, which we do not produce with our current state spiritual life. That is the terrible thing today, that our state-stamped spiritual life is very far removed from real practical life. Even at the universities, people are trained in such a way – they are not trained practically, but only theoretically – that they are not rooted in life. Isn't it true that I imagine, for example, this school system in the future in such a way that the practitioner, who works in the factory, will be particularly suited as a teacher, and possibly, I think, these [teachers] will continually change [between school and factory]?

Dr. Stadler: I came here today by chance, and I would like to take the liberty of expressing my opinion as a guest. What you are doing here is currently being done in a similar way in many parts of Germany. What I am currently experiencing in Berlin is an unprecedented intellectual struggle of the German people with the problems of the revolution. In Berlin, there are masses of circles, organizations, associations, loose groups, all of which meet in a similar way to you this evening and discuss these matters. For we are not only experiencing the political and economic collapse in Germany, but also the intellectual disintegration of the entire old system. And in this collapse, the German people are once again so far along that they are trying to go their own way. The practitioners are causing difficulties for the theorists and thwarting their goals with their practical questions. They are also right, because they live in practice. The difficulty lies in the fact that in the whole of Germany long-term goals are being set that would take one or two generations to achieve, while we are in the midst of an actual collapse. If, in contrast to Rudolf Steiner and others, I state that Dr. Steiner has actually thought up an idea that a large proportion of those present can emotionally agree with, but that pure practitioners cannot be satisfied with - I say practitioners because one of them is a government councilor [Dr. Schmucker] and the other a top entrepreneur [Dr. Riebensam] —, because they have to ask themselves: What is the way forward tomorrow, because we are not getting anywhere with this? The solution will not be found [so easily]; it is so extraordinarily complicated that with a system of thought one remains in the unreal and it is no longer suitable for solving real questions. All these action programs repeatedly encounter resistance from industrialists, politicians and lawyers. In Germany, we are fortunate that thought and research are being done at all, unlike in Russia, where there has been no real thought during the entire revolutionary period. Thus, Russia is indeed doomed - both as a state and economically. I suspect that the same thing will happen to us in Germany, despite all our intellectual efforts, because the way things are going it is impossible for us to arrive at a political synthesis in time. There are theorists who cling to some system or other, while there are practical people who put the brakes on; so it can only happen by force, because between the two extremes German politics is now only drifting and letting everything happen. Our party politicians have no idea about the spiritual. I have the honor of knowing leading statesmen personally. I leave with the sad belief that they have nothing of the spirit of the times in them, that they have no faith in the future and only think about how to hold on to the rudder from today to tomorrow.

But you should consider whether there are possibilities for quickly linking what you are trying to achieve here with similar efforts being made throughout Germany, so that you do not feel isolated. It would be right for you to be aware that Germany is not the small circle that is currently gathered here. If you do not succeed in forming a phalanx, this attempt is doomed to failure because it can only be a local one. You cannot shape something in Württemberg, carry out the threefold order, when the whole of Germany is going to the devil. You cannot introduce works councils if the entire political system does not go along with it. Either you join together in a spiritual renewal movement and refrain from engaging in the realpolitik of the day – in which case you have to accept ruin and chaos – or you not only want to strive for renewal, but also to work practically and realpolitically for today and tomorrow, then you have to form a phalanx with all the similarly minded forces of the German people and make concessions to the realities of life. That means, for example, you must begin to work out a very concrete system of workers' councils and make specific foreign policy proposals. Please excuse me for criticizing as an outsider, but I mean well by you and the German people, whose preservation is important to me.

Mr. Jaeger: I would like to be brief. I have gained the impression in the discussion that the question tends to be asked quite generally: How do we initially tread the path that leads to the goal that Dr. Steiner presents to us? This question concerns us all. If the creation of the works councils, as Dr. Steiner demands, is proving so difficult, we must not forget that this is only a very small beginning. To shape economic life, we need not only works councils for the factories, but a whole system of councils in general. But when we talk about it today, we must be clear about the fact that no council system exists at all yet, because what has been practiced by the councils in our country so far is not yet a system at all; it is a lack of system. We would first have to discuss individual questions and make an effort to get started and begin with these councils.

And now a specific question: the representative of Daimler-Werke spoke at length about the works council there and about the relationship with the workers. Dr. Riebensam asked how he should proceed in order to properly get in touch with the workers at Daimler and gain the trust of the workforce. I believe that if you want to achieve a big goal, you first have to look at the small things by taking a practical step like Mr. Molt. [So I would like to ask]: Is it not possible for Dr. Steiner, together with the gentlemen who want this suggestion, to work with the workers at the Daimler factory themselves, in order to inspire others by achieving this goal? We need not only the trust of the workers, but also the cooperation of the industrialists, the factory managers, who are opposed to [such things at first.

Rudolf Steiner: This question can only be answered if this practical experiment could actually be carried out – it could certainly be carried out – but I would like to think that one would first have to be inside the Daimler works.

A speaker: Once you are inside, the problem is a lack of trust. Leading personalities find it difficult to gain trust. Those who are elected by the workers are opposed when they come to an understanding with the management. The point is to explain to the workers: Through this threefold structure we can achieve practical goals; we only want to be the link to bring you together and show you the way.

Rudolf Steiner: The only way to do this is to win over the workers, for example, to an understanding of a common goal that can be achieved outside the walls of the company concerned. If one wanted to go further — and that is what would give it a purpose in the first place; it would have to be possible to lead the workers to this goal — one would have to try to achieve something oneself, somehow. That would only lead to the management of the Daimler-Werke throwing me out. I was told that it was highly peculiar that I had gained the trust of the workers, and that I would actually do things quite differently from the way they were usually done. This different way of doing things is based on the fact that I basically do not promise the workers anything, but only explain the processes to them and such like. That is the big difference: in fact, I don't promise anything – I can really do the same with the workers at the Daimler factory as I am doing now – I can't promise anything because I know for sure that if I make promises to the management I will be thrown out. We must not forget that today it is not about some nebulous abstractions such as “all of Germany” or “what is collapsing,” but rather that it is about actually bringing understanding to the individual point and working from that individual point. If a true understanding of the demands inherent in the really real conditions and their satisfaction were to be awakened in a single point, then the prejudice would not always arise again: This is some kind of general idealism that has nothing to do with practice. If people would take the trouble to study the actually practical impetus of this not thought- but life-principle, then we would make progress. What harms us today is that this so-called system, which is not a system at all, but really something else that is rooted in real life, is taken everywhere merely as a system of thoughts. I can only do what is based on real circumstances. But the right impetus to win over the entire workforce of the Daimler factory would be based on that today. The next step, however, would have to be to come to an agreement with the management. But that would get them fired. And that makes it impossible for someone on the outside to implement anything. It is important that we work on bringing these things to real understanding. Then it will move forward. But I don't think we will make progress with mere abstractions. It is also an abstraction to say that a practical attempt should be made when there is no basis for it.

Mr. Jaeger: I must insist that once the workers' understanding is won, the management would not throw the personality out, but once the personality has gained the trust, then these proposals would be taken up by both sides. It is not a matter of promises here, but only of the works council first reaching an agreement among the management and an understanding between the management and the workers.

Rudolf Steiner: The whole matter is hopeless if there is no understanding of the real threefold social order. This understanding is generally found today among the working class, because these people do not cling to anything that comes from old conditions, but own nothing but themselves and their labor. This understanding is still lacking, however, among the other [people] today; perhaps only when they come to grief will they be forced to let go of what consists only in clinging to the old conditions. Today, they actually find widespread support for the threefold order among the working class, even though the leaders of the working class are not at all able to think in terms of progressive thinking, but basically think much more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.

When people say that these things cannot be understood because they are too outlandish, it is because they have forgotten how to understand things based on life. When it comes to things that arise in life, people must respond with experiences of life. Today, they only respond with what they have based on party judgments and concepts. But if someone has nothing of that, but only what comes from the whole breadth of life, then one says: that is impractical, that does not answer individual questions, one would have liked to have answered individual concrete questions. My “key points” were not written to steer [the social question] into the theoretical or philosophical, but to start somewhere. When you start, you will see that it continues.

Dr. Riebensam: I do not think that Dr. Steiner would be thrown out by me – I am the one who decides, but the commercial management also has something to say – but the current workers' committee would probably throw Dr. Steiner out. It appears as if I wanted to thwart Dr. Steiner's ideas with my real concerns. That was not the aim or the intention of my explanation. I just wanted to discuss the whole matter here. My view is that today we need some way to avoid a struggle with the workers if possible. Now it is a fact that Dr. Steiner has won the trust of a large number of workers today. And that should be enough in Stuttgart to take further steps. This could also pave the way for a way forward that might not require a fight for a while. The workforce is willing to go along with this, even with the plant managers. It would be a great mistake not to pursue such a path. That is my personal opinion.

Mr. Reitz: How can this be done?

Emil Molt: To answer that, we have come together. After Dr. Riebensam has said an important word, after the way is clearly laid out, how two classes come together to form one human race, after these clear ways are laid out here, it is now up to each individual to actually follow the way. The death in all these things is always that there is much more talk than action. Dr. Stadler is right when he says that if we only come together and talk without taking action, then time will rush by so quickly that events will sweep over us. We all agree that the great collapse will come in three to four weeks, when we must be ready to take action to realize the New. For this we need every single person, so that thoughts can be put into action hourly and every minute in daily life. Therefore, in the interest of the people, of humanity, we ask you not only to ask, what does Dr. Steiner think about it, but that each individual is very clear about the fact that the path lies within himself and he must tread it. The old Germany perished because of this non-treading and the present Germany will perish. I believe that when we go home today, we should do so with the firm resolution to move from mere deliberation to action, even if it cannot be perfect – imperfect action is still better than clever thinking, with which we only remain on the surface again and do not reshape things in reality, because reshaping things is what it is all about today.

Perhaps there is still a need to comment on the cultural side of the problems. We would like to create an opportunity for this soon; perhaps individual areas could be worked on separately or together. I would like to hear your opinion on this so that we can go home with a result.

Dr. Weiss: I am very much in favor of continuing the discussion along these lines. However, I think it would be better not to work on the individual areas separately; it is important for us, who are neither entrepreneurs nor tradesmen, to look at all the issues. The opportunity should be created to work on all the issues together, even at the risk of thinning out the ranks. We should not only speak, but also try to work through the press. We should have a very loosely organized press committee that comments in the various party organs, not to fuel polemics. There should also be a special organ of the federation for threefolding to check the manuscripts before sending them to the relevant editorial office, so that the subsequent procedure is not complicated. The Federation for Threefolding should not, of course, restrict freedom of expression, but we must organize ourselves in such a way that everyone uses their contacts with the press to comment on the issues in question, but the articles should be sent in beforehand so that we can proceed in a concentrated manner.

Emil Molt: That is precisely what we are aiming for; we should actually be commenting every day.

A speaker: We came here today for a discussion. It would be desirable if a number of industrialists, as representatives of the owners, and plant managers, and employees, as representatives of the employee committees, came together to talk.

Emil Molt: In my opinion, this should really be attempted; it would be the first step in preparing a functioning works council.

Dr. Riebensam: I think the approach should be somewhat different; your works councils should invite our workers' committees.

Emil Molt: You can do both; the workers would have to see that the initiative comes from the factory owners.

Dr. Riebensam: It should come from the workers' committees, not from the factory owners.

Emil Molt: But otherwise the factory owners would not come; but it would be best to discuss this afterwards.

A speaker: Couldn't we, so to speak, issue certain guidelines to give the factory owners something to work on? That way, the management of the large companies could process the matter and discuss it with the workers' committees. Perhaps this would be a way to shorten the whole thing.

In response to the question of whether they would like to meet again next Thursday, it was decided to meet again at 7 p.m. that day.

With reference to my presentations I would like to ask you to take these four lectures as a unit. This means the content of one lecture is not to be taken as independent and judged this way. The relative theme is so comprehensive that it can only be manageable by doing a number of lectures.

In today's lecture I would like to make a provisional outline for possible solving techniques distilled from actual knowledge of the being of the social organism, of such solution possibilities for the social question which do not come out of some one-sided remark about some or other class, some or other state, but coming from appropriate reality, coming from the properly observed evolutionary forces of humanity and in particular those evolutionary forces which are the most pronounced at present and valid for the near future of humanity. If one tries to find a solution for the social question through the aspirations or the demands of a state, of a class, out of some part of the social organism, then one does nothing other than undermine the other elements of the social organism by calling on yet another class which in some way or other restrict development or healthy living conditions.

For our time here, it is relevant to reveal and substantiate my indications of truths in the following lectures. In modern life, or it could be called the modern social organism, quite a particular form is experienced through expressions characteristic of modern life, through technology, through the technical operation of economic life and its relationships and through the capitalistic process which organises this economic enterprise. Not necessarily only those with a conscious focus observe this modern technology and modern capitalism as they were introduced into life, but their focus was on the more or less conscious or the more or less instinctive, actively organised forces within the social structure of the human community.

The characteristic, particular form of the social question coming to the fore in modern times can be expressed as follows: economic life supported by technology and modern capitalism have worked in a natural self-evident way and brought order into the modern community. Besides this claim for human awareness towards technology and capitalism, the awareness was deflected by other branches, other spheres of the social organism, where awareness should have become as necessary as the health of the social organism as it was with the economic field.

Perhaps I may use a comparison to clearly communicate what I could call the nerve of a comprehensive, many-sided observation of the social question. Please consider that with a comparison I don't mean anything other than a support of human understanding in order to orientate it towards the healing of the social question. Whoever wants to consider what we know as the most complicated organism—that of the human being—needs to pay attention to the existence of three operative systems working side by side in the human form. These three cooperative systems can be characterised in the following way. One could say in the human, natural organism a system works incorporating the nerves and senses. One could call the most important member of this system where the nerves and senses are centralized, the head organisation.

As to the second member of the human organism, in order to develop a real understanding of this organism it is necessary to consider what I would like to call the rhythmic system, in relationship with breathing, blood circulation and everything expressed as rhythmic processes. As a third system, one can recognise all the organs whose actions relate to metabolism. In these three systems are the combined effects, when they interact in a healthy way, of all that is contained in the human organism. I have tried, in full agreement with all the research science has claimed, to characterise this threefold aspect of the human being as an outline in my book Riddles of the Soul I am clear about all the aspects to be introduced in the future by biology, physiology and science regarding the human organism which will see how this threefold head-, circulation-, (or chest system) and digestive systems are maintained—that these members each work in a particular independent way which indicates it is not an complete centralisation of the organism. These three systems each have a particular relationship to the outer world; the head system through the senses, the circulation or rhythmic system through breathing and the digestive system through the nutritional organs. In relation to scientific methods we have not progressed as far as these ideas I'm indicating here, out of spiritual scientific foundations for natural science as I've tried to use, in order to present it in scientific circles as a general statement and in a way, make it desirable for the evolution of knowledge. This means however that our thinking habits, the entire way we imagine the world to be has not completely been adjusted to the example of the human organism as it is presented in its natural processes. In a way one could say yes, science can wait, they may gradually rush to their ideals, they will soon come to the view that such observations are their own. However, regarding the examination and especially the processes of the social organism, one can't wait. Not with some or other expert but for every human soul—because every human soul shares in the work of the social organism—at least must take part in the work of the social organism—at least by an instinctive knowledge of the necessities of this social organism. Healthy thought and experience, a healthy will and desire in relation to the expression of the social order can only develop when people—whether more or less instinctive—can understand that this social organism, if it is to be healthy, must be a natural threefold organism.

Now I am at the point where I need to be very careful not to be misunderstood. Since Schäffle wrote a book about the social organism, there have been repeated attempts at establishing an analogy between a natural organization, let's say an organisation of people, and on the other side, a human community as such. So many efforts have been made to determine the cell of the social organism, where the cell structure exists, what the tissues could be and so on! Recently a book appeared by Aleray, Weltmutation (mutation of the world), in which certain scientific facts and scientific laws are simply transferred on to, what they call, the social organization. With all these analogy games, nothing relates to what we are considering here. Those who at the end of this lecture could say: ‘Oh, here we have yet again such a game of analogy between the natural organism and the social organism’—would prove that the real spirit within the meaning has not been penetrated by the listener. This I don't want—some or other scientific facts adjusted as truth and transplanted on to the social organisation. What I want is for human thinking, human feeling to learn through observation of the natural organism that this method, this way of sensing can in turn be applied to the social organization. When you simply take the belief you learnt about natural organisms and apply that to social organism, like Schäffle has done, like others have done too, likewise with Weltmutation then it shows you are unwilling to develop a capability to consider the social organism as independent, to examine it as such, to research it according to its own laws, just as you do with natural organisms. In order for you to understand me I have made this comparison with a natural organism. The very moment you continue, like the researcher in nature, objectively meeting the natural organism, as you would place yourself before the independence of the social organism in order to learn about its laws, in that moment the game of analogy regarding the earnestness of your observation, will stop.

I want to call your attention now to how this play of analogies must come to an end. The examination of the social organism—here it involves something becoming, something which must come into existence first—in as far as it must be healthy, leads to the three members of this social organism, but they both can only be recognised as independent as such, when considered objectively. On the one side, you can distinguish three members of the human organism, on the other side the objective, independent members of the social organism. If you look for analogies, then you most likely will experience the following. You would say that this human head- or nerve-system relates to human spiritual life with its spiritual abilities; the circulatory system rules the relation with this spiritual system with the crudest system, and the materialistic system with the digestive system. The digestive system could be considered through certain fundamental experiences as the crudest of systems in the human organism. What then, if you continued the game of analogy, would be the next thing? The next thing would be to say the social organism divides into three branches.

Spiritual life develops within a person. That is one member. Within a person his actual political life develops too—we will speak about this division of branches afterwards—and also his economic or business life develops within. You could, if you wanted to play the analogy game, believe that spiritual life as in spiritual culture in the social organism is subject to the same kind of laws which allow a comparison with the laws in the nervous and sense systems. The system considered as unrefined, the most materialistic, the digestive system, can in the game of analogy probably be compared with what one calls the crude system of material business life. Whoever can consider things for themselves and stay far away from the mere game of analogy will know that in reality, things are actually reversed in comparison with what comes out of mere analogy. See, the social organism lies opposite the economic production and consumption, opposite the economic circulation of goods at the basis of life's rules, just like the natural human organism's laws are at the foundation of the nerves- and sense-life, which is its spiritual system. Certainly the life of public law, the actual political life, life which is often too all-encompassing, which can be described as the actual civil life, allows itself to be between the two systems of the digestive and the nerve-sense systems where the rhythmic system lies, the regulating system of the breathing and heart. Only by comparing how the human organism has, between its digestive and nerve-systems the central circulation or rhythmic systems, so between the public rights and the economic system stand the actual life of spiritual culture. This life of spiritual culture, this spiritual life of the social organism has no laws which can be thought of as analogous to laws of human talents, laws of human sense and nerve existence but the spiritual life in the social organism has laws which can only be compared with laws in the crudest system, the metabolic system.

This leads to an objective observation of the social organism. Regarding this particular point the assumption must be clear in order for no misunderstanding to arise in a belief that the physiological or biological elements are simply transferred on to the social organism. The social organism must be considered as an independent organism throughout for its success towards recovery to take place. In various areas in central and eastern Europe the word “socializing” is heard. This socializing will not become a healing process but a fake process in the social organism, perhaps even a disturbing process if the human heart, the soul does not have insight with instinctive knowledge of the necessity for a threefoldness in the social organism. This social organism has in every case, if it is to work in a healthy way, three members. The first member, to begin with from the one side—one could understandably also start on the side of the spiritual life but for now we will start on the economic side as this obviously controls the rest of life through modern technology in modern capitalism—therefore, the first member of the social organism as business life, or economic life, will be looked at. This economic life, we will partly today and partly in the course of these lectures see it has to be an independent member within the social organism just as in comparison, the nerve- sense system is relatively independent in the human organism. Our economic life is connected to all that takes place in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. With everything connected to these three things, economy is linked. We will soon consider its characteristics in order to understand it more closely.

As a second member of the social organism we observe the life of public law, the actual political life, for the purposes of the old constitutional state it could be called the actual life of the state. Meanwhile economic life involves the business of everything which the human being brings out of nature as his own production, because the economic life involves the circulation and consumption of goods, so this second member of the social organism is involved with everything with a human foundation with its relationships of people with people. This I ask you to consider comprehensively, because it is important for knowledge of the members of the social organism to know the difference between public laws which relate to the foundation of one human being to another, while in the economic system it involves the production, circulation and consumption of goods. One must be able to distinguish between the natural human system in relation to the lungs and outer air, the processing of this outer air, how this differs from the manner and way nourishment is transformed in the third natural system within the human being.

As a third member which must be placed independently from the others, there has to be a distinction from everything in the social order which involved spiritual life. More precisely the name ‘spiritual culture’ does not cover everything connected to spiritual life; it should be everything flowing into the social organism which depends on the natural gift of individuals, the natural spiritual and physical talents coming from single individuals. Similar to the first system, the economic system which needs to exist for humanity to relates and regulates the outer world, the second system which must exist in the social organism, relates to everything happening between one person and another; there we have the third system. In order for this third system to have a name it will be called the spiritual system, involved with everything which is created out of the single human individuality and needing to be incorporated into the social organism.

Even as true as it is that modern technology and modern capitalism have given a stamp to our modern community life, it actually is so necessary for the wounds of humanity beaten from this side to be healed and thus enable people and communities to develop the right relationship to the threefold social order I am characterizing here.

Economic life has in our modern time taken on particular forms. It has so to speak penetrated human life with its own rules. Both the other members of the social organism are in the position to bring their own independent laws in the right way into this social organism. For them it is necessary that people out of independence and from a point of awareness carry out the social membership, each in its place, where it is positioned. For the purpose of finding solutions to the social question which we are considering, every single person has a social task in the present and near future. The first member of the social organism, the economic life, rests primarily on a natural background. Just as each individual depends for his learning and his education on the talents of his spiritual and physical organs, on those gifts and talents given to him, likewise economic life depends on certain natural foundations. This natural basis gives economic life—and through this the totality of the social organism—its character. However, these natural foundations are there without having to be discovered through some social organisation, some or other socializing of its original form. This needs consideration. Just as with the education of humanity the various gifts they have need consideration, in natural bodily and spiritual abilities, so every attempt at socializing community living by giving it an economic form as well, need consideration out of its natural foundations. All circulation of goods and also all human labour and any spiritual cultural life lie at the foundation of the first elementary origins chained by human beings to a particular part of nature. Here one needs to really think about the social organism's relationship with the natural foundation, for instance as in individuals in regard to learning and education, in relation to their gifts in thinking. This can be made clear by taking extreme examples.

For instance, you can imagine how in various parts on earth, locally produced bananas present a source of nourishment, how bananas qualify in the community to be displaced from their point of origin and be made into a consumable product at a specific destination. Compare the human labour involved in making bananas into consumables for the community with the work of making wheat into a consumable product in the vicinity of Central Europe, it is clear the work needed for the bananas, modestly calculated, is three hundred times less. The work necessary to make the wheat consumable is, lightly calculated, three hundred times bigger.

This is indeed an extreme example. Such differences regarding the measure of work necessary in relation to its natural origin exist in our production line also, under the production line which is represented in some or other social organism in Europe. Not as radical a difference as between bananas and wheat, but the differences are there. Just as the economic organism is founded on the relationship between human beings and their consumption of nature, the measure of the work talents in reality dependent on the natural origin, so the being of a person is dependent on his natural physical or spiritual gifts. One can make a comparison. In Germany, in the region of middle profit abilities, the sowing of wheat has a crop return of seven to eight times at the harvest. In Chile this becomes twelve times, in north Mexico seventeen times and in Peru twenty times, south Mexico twenty-five times up to thirty-five times. For different regions of the earth the return in wheat productivity is in relation to the earth, to the yield of the earth. This actually affects the measure of labour needed to bring the wheat in an appropriate manner into the economic life.

Just as one can make such data for the measure of labour needed to process the wheat into a consumable item in different regions, so comparisons can be made for the labour needed in the most varied production lines, raw materials with different production lines made consumable within the economic sphere of a social organism.

This whole interconnected being found in the preliminary processes at the beginning of the relation of people to nature, which continue in every human action by transforming products of nature into consumables for the community, all these processes which are involved as a whole from the natural foundations up to consumables, all these processes, and only these, are included in a healthy social organism as a pure economic member of the social organization. This economic member of the social organisation must be—I will in the course of the lectures give more details with proof—with just such an independence be positioned in the whole social organism as the human head organisation stands in relation to the entire human organism.

Independently standing beside the economic system another system must exist and that is the relationship between one person and another. Living within the purely economic system is the relationship which needs to be established between people and objective goods. A healthy social life needs to develop as a second member of the social organism which regulates everything in relationships between one person and another.

People have neglected achieving the correct difference between the two members of the social organism through the hypnotic belief that modern technology and ancient thinking habits in modern times are the economic forces and processes necessary, either for single regions or in the radical social sense, which can be transformed into the totality of economic life, applied to what I have here as the second member, as the actual state region in a narrower sense, as the region of public law, as the area of relationships between one person to the other.

This region of the state can only then develop in a healthy way when the conflicting streams of development cut in, which are considered by some as correct. Many people believe that healing the social organism is only achievable through nationalization as much as possible; with the greatest degree of association with nationalism—but it involves far more the necessity for complete autonomy, acknowledged and applied to all the separate branches of life, which must step in between economic life—with all its laws on the one side—and the narrower life of the state on the other side—again with its own laws.

I can well imagine how many people there are who say: ‘For Heavens' sake, these things are becoming so complicated! Things which are brought together out of necessities for new developments are now to be separated from one another by various systems!’ Whoever speaks in this way, unable to consider origins developing in a natural way, would even refuse to understand that the human organism can only be alive as a result of the relative autonomy of the rhythmic life, the vital breathing and hart in the breast, concentrated, centralized in the breathing and in the heart system. The entire human organism is dependent on such systems being closed in and yet working together. The health of the social organism depends on the economic life having its own laws, that the legal life, the life of public law and public security, everything fitting the narrower description of political, has its own laws and its own proficiencies. Only then will both these spheres work in the right way, in the social organism. May it come about with some, who believe certain requirements have finally been accomplished, while others may well raise a shoulder, that it can eventually be said: no healing in the central management of the social organism, as within a party, can happen without cooperation between economic life and political life. If this does happen we will see it is valid for the third member as well. It is necessary nonetheless, that just as the circulatory system has its own lungs, just as the nerve-sense system has its own brain system, so in a single management system its own management, an autonomous replacement system or party or other representation is there for the economic and political or public legal systems, and then again for the third domain, an autonomous area for spiritual life.

These three spheres have a valid autonomy in a healthy organism and relate to one another through their independent representative, enabling this mutual relationship between the three members of the social organism. This corresponds to them in the same way as the independent relationship is produced by the three members of the natural human organism. It turns out that essentially those representations and administrations produced out of the economic members of the organism, that these essentially work towards the economic organism building an associated foundation for itself, a cooperative, trade unionism, but in a higher form. This cooperative trade unionism will only work with the laws of production, work with the circulation and consumption of goods. This is what creates the foundation, builds the content for the economic member of the social organism. It will depend on the vitality of association. It will depend on those who have given the necessary inequality produced from natural foundations, to balance it out. I have pointed out how many variations exist in the amount of human labour needed according to different relationship of the natural source of a member's production. All this enters into an unnatural social organization, when such cooperation is achieved as it has been up to now, of nature, human labour and capital. In a most chaotic way nature, human labour and capital are infused into a unified state or remain outside lawlessly, outside this unitary state. Even though the life of spiritual culture which is dependent on people's physical and spiritual talents for their expression, so also the chosen public and political laws of life must be acknowledged for their need to develop an independent life for themselves, such as the economic system.

I could, to make myself better understood as far as it is needed today, include the following. Besides other foundations out of which we live today, there is also a surfacing out of mankind's deep, natural foundations for a renewal of the social organism, in which can be heard the three words: brotherhood, equality, freedom. Whoever is unprejudiced towards a healthy human experience for all that is really human, will not feel anything but the deepest sympathy and deepest understanding for the meaning in the words, brotherhood, equality, and freedom. Nevertheless, I know of extraordinary thinkers, deep astute thinkers who repeatedly in the course of the 19th Century took the trouble to show how impossible it is to make a united social organism comprising brotherhood, equality and freedom, a reality. An astute Hungarian searched for proof that these three things, but when they are realized, when they penetrate human social structure, they will contradict themselves. Shrewdly he referred to the example of how impossible it is to instil equality into social life because every human being also wants the necessity for freedom to be valid. He found these three ideals to be contradictory. Interestingly, one can't but agree that there is a contradiction and one can't but sympathise out of a general human experience regarding these three ideals. Why these?

Because as soon as the true sense of these three ideals become clear, it will be recognised as necessarily a threefold social organism. The three members should not be an abstract, theoretical parliament or some unit assembled and centralized, they should be living reality and through their lively activity side by side be brought together in a unit. When these three members are independent they contradict one another in a certain way, just like the metabolic system is at variance with the head and rhythmic systems. However, in life, contradictions are just what work together in a unit. Through an understanding of life one is able to figure out the real gesture of the social organism. A realization will arise that brotherliness must be active in order for cooperation within economic life, where rules are needed among one another regarding particulars, are to be created in this first social member. In the second member of public law where it deals with the relationship of one person to another, only in as far as a human being is a person, it works with the activation of the idea of equality. In the spiritual sphere, where again it has to exist independently in the social organism, it deals with the idea of freedom. Now suddenly the three golden ideals gain their real value when it is known that they may not reach success through an inter-scrambled mixture but that they are orientated according to laws within the threefold organism in which each single one of the three members can achieve its applicable ideal of freedom, equality and brotherhood.

Today I can only propose the structure of the social organism in the form of a sketch. In the following lectures, I will substantiate and prove each one individually. Adding to what has been said is a third member of a healthy social organism with everything arising out of the human individuality, on the foundation of freedom and based on the physical and spiritual gifts of individuals. Here again an area is touched which causes quiet shudders when things are truthfully defined. To continue with this healthy organism, a third area is added which encompasses everything which relates to the religious life of humanity, everything related to schools and education in the widest sense which includes spiritual life, the practice of art and so on. While I only want to mention this today, in the next lectures I will create an extensive foundation regarding everything which belongs to this third sphere—which is not related to public law which belongs in the second sphere—but which is related to private law and criminal law. I found with those to whom I've explained this threefold social organism and who have understood some of it, that they could not grasp the idea that public law, the law which relates to the security and equality of people, should be separated from the right towards law breaking, or towards the private relationships between people; that this could be regarded as separate, and private law and criminal law must be included in the third, in the spiritual member of the social organism.

Modern life has unfortunately turned away from considering these three members of the social organism. Just like the body of economics with its concerns have penetrated into the government, into actual political life, penetrated its concerns into the representative body of political life, the result has clouded the possibility for the second member of the organism to be formed in which human equality can be realized, so too the economic and public life have absorbed the possibility which can only develop itself in a freer form. Out of a certain instinct, out of an erroneous instinct however, modern social democracy has tried to separate religious life from the life of the public state: “Religion is a private affair”; unfortunately, not out of particular care for religion, not out of a special evaluation accessible through the religious life, but out of disregard, out of complacency towards religious life linked to the content I presented in my previous lecture, the day before yesterday. This progression is right for the separation of religious life from the other spheres, from the formation of the economic life and from the formation of political life. Just as necessary as the separation of the lower and higher educational systems are, so too is the spiritual life actually from the two other members. A really healthy social organism can only develop when within these entities they ensure equality of all people before the law, when only out of these entities it is ensured that free human individualities develop schools, religious and spiritual life, when it is ensured that life is developed in freedom and no claim is made according to economic or state rules placed on school, educational and spiritual life.

That sounds radical today. Such radicalism must be expressed as soon as it is detected. Spiritual life, inclusive of education, inclusive of jurisdiction in public and criminal matters, actually underlies the complete freedom flowing out of single individuals which both the other members of the social organism can have no influence upon in its configuration, upon its forms.

Yesterday I only offered a sketch towards the direction thinking can move in the search for solutions of the social question, attempts at solutions based on necessities of life, not based on abstract demands of a single party, of a single class, but based on the powers actually developing in modern people.

I wish to say I can understand every objection raised but ask you to wait with objections until my sketch has been carried to completion in my coming lectures. Particularly today I can understand objections being raised as I'm just trying to characterise; the evidence of the World Trade Organization is not yet clear. I must say I can understand every objection coming out of various experiences which I want to represent here with ideas which I believe I can recognise in frequently misjudged spiritual science as the actual foundations of life which I have related to these things.

Behind us lie a time containing the most terrible human catastrophe. Within the life we had to lead within this catastrophic time, we have not had the human heart in the right place if our vision did not contain the power and ability to say: ‘Where can we find help out of this terrible chaos into which we have been driven?’—I told you the day before yesterday I would speak about the particular relationships of these wars to their causes and their unfolding in relation to the social question in both my following lectures. Today I would like to say it is clear to me, as we are going to be within these events for a long time to come, events now having entered a crisis which some short-sighted thinkers believe are soon at an end, that out of these things, out of chaos, out of the terrible catastrophe in some or other area of the civilized world it is possible to find the correct thoughts, the correct picture of more truthful, more realistic impulses for the human social organism. Towards various personalities who have been active and advisory during the last years within these terrible events, I have proposed what is also the vein of my various presentations here: I have tried to make it clear to these personalities who are involved, how different events would have been if from an authoritative place in the world it was said: ‘We want to head towards a healthy social goal.’—The entire interrelationship of states would have been different if, instead of mere laws and state programs being introduced, a comprehensive program for people in the way indicated here, had been introduced.

One can say that these things have been understood in a certain theoretical way. The content of my lectures has appeared to some in a really sympathetic way. The bridge which needs to be established between understanding such content and the will to actually do something to make it a reality in actual life, each in its own place, this bridge is quite another matter. This would mostly have an uncomfortable effect. For this reason, they compose themselves and say: ‘It all sounds a bit like a dream to me, quite impractical.’—They remain calm only because they don't have the will forces to really involve themselves with the course of events. Not a revolutionary course of events is meant here, not something which should happen from one day to the next, but a direction in which all single measures of public and private life should be brought for healing, to form a healthy social organism. The content of my lecture the day before yesterday, I have brought in another form to some people on whom one wanted to depend during these difficult times, addressed in the following way: Today, I would say for example, we are in the most terrible time of the war. Expressing the social necessity in this, the most terrible time of The War, it would be to say: People who are committed to this or that state into giving humanity a worthy self-realization which will become a reality for humanity, will enable this terrible course of events to take on quite a different, healing direction than merely the sword, the cannons and such like, or offer nothing through existing regional politics. I say they have the choice to either acknowledge what is offered here out of the developmental conditions and developmental forces within humanity, or to stand alone.

Today we stand, because during the last decade humanity has somehow missed acknowledging the essence of these things, today we stand in front of the most terrible catastrophe which has broken out like a plague, an illness attacking an organism which has failed to live according to its natural laws. This war catastrophe should now clearly reveal what is necessary for the healing of the social organism of humanity. This indication could have been perceived before the war but then it was not so clear, not even recognised. To some I have said: You have been given these indications regarding human evolution in the social sphere which will be brought into a reality in the next twenty to thirty years in the civilized world. I'm not talking about a program or ideal but it is the result of observation of those who want to make a reality of the seed towards an inclination already in humanity today, towards the next ten, twenty or thirty years. You have only to choose, I say, either to work through to its realization with reason, or to face revolutions of social cataclysms, terrible social upheavals. No third choice is possible. The war will probably be the time—so I say to some—where reason is acceptable. After that it could be too late. It is not a program which can be implemented or left undone, but involves recognising something which needs implementation through people, because in it lie their necessary historical growth forces for the future.

Another particular obstacle towards understanding is some or other belief that these things only relate to an inner structure of some state or some human territory. No, such social thoughts are at the same time the basis for the real necessary transformation of outer politics of states under one another. Just like the human organism turns each of its particular organs to the outside world, so also can a state only accomplish it when—if I might use this whole expression—such a social organism can shift its three members into outer activity. Relationships between one individual state and another appear quite different when a centralized government and administrations no longer remain in connection with one another but when one socially educated representative with a spiritual life relate to another representative with a spiritual life in another social state; whether it be an economic or a political representative, corresponding to the representative in the other state. When there is an intermixing, a confused mess due to the three members working outwardly in such a way to create an ensuing conflict at its boundary through the chaos of this intermixing of the three members, then, when across the boundary an independent state with threefold representatives working independently, the process of one member in the international relationship will not only be disrupted by the other, but by contrast, will balance out and be corrected.

This is what I wanted to sketch for you today to support the idea that it doesn't merely involve an assertion of inner social structure of one state but involves the international and social life of humanity. I have already tried to make all these things clear while we are in the middle of these horrific catastrophic events. At the moment, terrible misfortune has broken out over many people in central and eastern Europe, terrible misfortune for every individual, for every perceptive person the rest of the world indicates threatening misfortune. This must take place in relation to the real understanding of humanity for their tasks in the present and future: whoever wants to bring about a healing of life out of the actual evolutionary elements in humanity must take this up, not as an impractical ideal but as an actual practical application in life.

The obvious form modern life has taken on through technology and capitalism has to stand in opposition to the most inner human initiative forms of the spiritual, independent spiritual culture and independent state culture, which bring about in actual fact an equality between one person to another and which also, as we will soon see, could regulate labour and wage relations in a desirable way for the Proletariat.

The question about the form or human labour, about the liberation of labour from goods will only become detachable when threefoldness enters the social organism. The desire of the modern socialist is certainly legitimate as a desire; what they consider a remedy would work the least effectively as a remedy when it transforms outer reality in the way they want it to be.

This I need to stress yet again: I am not trying to come from some one-sided class or party position but from the side of the observation of human developmental forces in order to speak about what some call social integration and others call the healing of social life and others the reawakening of a healthy political sense, and so on.

What we are dealing with here is not some random program but the deepest true impulses coming to the fore in the next decades in humanity's evolution, it is actually the very foundation of the entire meaning and intention which I want to make into a reality with these lectures; it doesn't relate to the opinion of a person from this standpoint, but it relates to the expression of the deepest wishes in mankind for the next decades. This I would like to found and implement and prove in my lectures during the week ahead.

[ 1 ] The characteristic element which has given the social question its particular form in modern times may be described as follows: The economy, along with technology and modern capitalism, has, as a matter of course, brought a certain inner order to modern society. While the attention of humanity has focused on what technology and capitalism have brought, it has been diverted from other branches, other areas of the social organism. It is equally necessary to attain efficacy through human consciousness in these areas if the social organism is to become healthy.

[ 2 ] In order to clearly characterize certain driving forces by means of a comprehensive, universal observation of the social organism, I would like to start with a comparison. It should be borne in mind, however, that nothing more than a comparison is intended. Human understanding can be assisted by such a comparison to form mental pictures about the social organism's restoration to health. To consider the most complicated of all natural organisms, the human organism, from the point of view presented here, it is necessary to direct one's attention to the fact that the total essence of this human organism exhibits three complementary systems, each of which functions with a certain autonomy. These three complementary systems can be characterized as follows. The system consisting of the nerve and sense faculties functions as one area in the natural human organism. It could also be designated, after the most important member of the organism in which the nerve and sense faculties are to a certain extent centralized, the head organism.

[ 3 ] A clear understanding of the human organization will result in recognizing as the second member, what [ I ] would like to call the rhythmic system. It consists of respiration, blood circulation and everything which expresses itself in the rhythmic processes of the human organism.

[ 4 ] The third system is to be recognized in everything which, in the form of organs and functions, is connected with metabolism as such. [ 5 ] These three systems contain everything which, when properly co-ordinated, maintains the entire functioning of the human organism in a healthy manner.²

[ 6 ] In my book “Von Seelenrätseln”^* I have attempted to characterize, at least in outline, this triformation of the human natural organism. It is clear to me that biology, physiology, natural science as a whole will, in the very near future, tend toward a consideration of the human organism which perceives how these three members—the head-system, the circulatory system or breast-system and the metabolic system maintain the total processes in the human organism, how they function with a certain autonomy, how no absolute centralization of the human organism exists and how each of these systems has its own particular relation to the outer world. The head-system through the senses, the circulatory or rhythmic system through respiration and the metabolic system through the organs of nourishment and movement.

[ 7 ] Natural scientific methods are not yet sufficiently advanced for scientific circles to be able to grant recognition, sufficient for an advance in knowledge, to what I have indicated here—which is an attempt to utilize knowledge based on spiritual science for natural scientific purposes.

This means, however, that our habit of thought, the whole way in which we conceive of the world, is not yet completely in accordance with how, for example, the inner essence of nature's functions manifests itself in the human organism. One could very well say: Yes, but natural science can wait, its ideals will develop gradually and it will come to a point where viewpoints such as yours will be recognized. It is not possible, however, to wait where these things are concerned. In every human mind—for every human mind takes part in the functioning of the social organism—and not only in the minds of a few specialists, must be present at least an instinctive knowledge of what this social organism needs. Healthy thinking and feeling, healthy will and aspirations with regard to the formation of the social organism, can only develop when it is clear, albeit more or less instinctively, that in order for the social organism to be healthy it must, like the natural organism, have a threefold organization.

[ 8 ] Ever since Schäffle wrote his book about the structure of the social organism, attempts have been made to encounter analogies between the organization of a natural being—the human being, for example—and human society as such. The cell of the social organism has been sought, the cell structure, tissues and so forth! A short while ago a book by Meray appeared, Weltmutation (World Mutation), in which certain scientific facts and laws were simply transferred to a supposed human society-organism. What is meant here has absolutely nothing to do with all these things, with all these analogy games. To assume that in these considerations such an analogy game between the natural and the social organism is being played is to reveal a failure to enter into the spirit of what is here meant. No attempt is being made to transplant some scientific fact to the social organism; quite the contrary, it is intended that human thinking and feeling learn to sense the vital potentialities in contemplating the natural organism and then to be capable of applying this sensibility to the social organism. When what has supposedly been learned about the natural organism is simply transferred to the social organism, this only indicates an unwillingness to acquire the capacity to contemplate and investigate the social organism just as independently as is necessary for an understanding of the natural organism. If, in order to perceive its laws, one considers the social organism as an independent entity in the same manner as a scientific investigator considers the natural organism, in that instant the seriousness of the contemplation excludes playing with analogies.

[ 9 ] It may also be imagined that what is presented here is based on the belief that the social organism should be ‘constructed’ as an imitation of some bleak scientific theory. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is my intention to point out something quite different. The present historical human crisis requires that certain sensibilities arise in every individual, that these sensibilities be stimulated by education, i.e., the school system, as is the learning of arithmetical functions. What has hitherto resulted from the old forms of the social organism, without being consciously absorbed by the inner life of the mind, will cease to have effect in the future. A characteristic of the evolutionary impulses which are attempting to manifest themselves in human life at the present time is that such sensibilities are necessary, just as schooling has long been a necessity. From now on mankind should acquire a healthy sense of how the social organism should function in order for it to be viable. A feeling must be acquired that it is unhealthy and anti-social to want to participate in this organism without such sensibilities.

[ 10 ] It is often said that ‘socialization’ is needed for these times. This socialization will not be a curative process for the social organism, but a quack remedy, perhaps even a destructive process, as long as at least an instinctive knowledge of the necessity for the triformation of the social organism has not been absorbed by human hearts, by human souls. If this social organism is to function in a healthy way it must methodically cultivate three constituent members.

[ 11 ] One of these members is the economy. It will be considered first because it has so evidently been able to dominate human society through modern technology and capitalism. This economic life must constitute an autonomous member within the social organism, as relatively autonomous as is the nervous-sensory system in the human organism. The economy is concerned with all aspects of the production, circulation and consumption of commodities.

[ 12 ] The second member of the social organism is that of civil rights, of political life as such. What can be designated as the state, in the sense of the old rights-state, pertains to this member. Whereas the economy is concerned with all aspects of man's natural needs and the production, circulation and consumption of commodities, this second member of the social organism can only concern itself with all aspects of the relations between human beings which derive from purely human sources. It is essential for knowledge about the members of the social organism to be able to differentiate between the legal rights system, which can only concern itself with relations between human beings that derive from human sources, and the economic system, which can only be concerned with the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. It is necessary to sense this difference in life in order that, as a consequence of this sensibility, the economy be separate from the rights member, as in the human natural organism the activity of the lungs in processing the outside air is separate from the processes of the nervous-sensory system.

[ 13 ] The third member, standing autonomous alongside the other two, is to be apprehended in the social organism as that which pertains to spiritual life. To be more precise, because the designations ‘spiritual culture’ or ‘everything which pertains to spiritual life’, are perhaps not sufficiently precise, one could say: everything which is based on the natural aptitudes of each human individual; what must enter into the social organism based on the natural aptitudes, spiritual as well as physical, of each individual. The first system, the economic, is concerned with what must be present in order for man to determine his relation to the outer world. The second system is concerned with what must be present in the social organism in respect to human inter-relationships. The third system is concerned with everything which must blossom forth from each human individuality and be integrated into the social organism.

[ 14 ] Just as it is true that modern technology and capitalism have moulded our society in recent times, it is also imperative that the wounds necessarily inflicted on human society by them be thoroughly healed by correctly relating man and the human community to the three members of the social organism. The economy has, of itself, taken on quite definite forms in recent times. Through one-sided efficiency it has exerted an especially powerful influence on human life. Until now the other two members of society have not been in a position to properly integrate themselves in the social organism with the same certitude and according to their own laws. It is therefore necessary that each individual, in the place where he happens to be, undertakes to work for social formation based on the sensibilities described above. It is inherent in these attempts at solving the social questions that in the present and in the immediate future each individual has his social task.

[ 15 ] The first member of the social organism, the economy, depends primarily on nature, just as the individual, in respect to what he can make of himself through education and experience, depends on the aptitudes of his spiritual and physical organisms. This natural base simply impresses itself on the economy, and thereby on the entire social organism. It is there and cannot be affected essentially by any social organization, by any socialization. It must constitute the foundation of the social organism, as the human being's aptitudes in various areas, his natural physical and spiritual abilities, must constitute the foundation of his education. Every attempt at socialization, at giving human society an economic structure, must take the natural base into account. This elementary, primitive element which binds the human being to a certain piece of nature constitutes the foundation for the circulation of goods, all human labour and every form of cultural-spiritual life. It is necessary to take the relationship of the social organism to its natural base into consideration, just as it is necessary to take the relationship of the individual to his aptitudes into consideration where the learning process is concerned. This can be made clear by citing extreme cases. In certain regions of the earth, where the banana is an easily accessible food, what is taken into consideration is the labour which must be expended in order to transfer the bananas from their place of origin to a certain destination and convert them into items of consumption. If the human labour which must be expended in order to make the bananas consumer items for society is compared with the labour which must be expended in Central Europe to do the same with wheat, it will be seen that the labour necessary for the bananas is at least three hundred times less than for the wheat. [ 16 ] Of course that is an extreme case. Nevertheless, such differences in the required amount of labour in relation to the natural base are also present in the branches of production which are represented in any European society,- not as radically as with the bananas and wheat, but the differences do exist. It is thereby substantiated that the amount of labour power which men must bring to the economic process is conditioned by the natural base of their economy. In Germany, for example, in regions of average fertility, the wheat yield is approximately seven to eight times the amount sown; in Chile the yield is twelvefold, in northern Mexico seventeenfold, and in Peru twentyfold.^*

[ 17 ] The entire homogeneous entity consisting of processes which begin with man's relation to nature and continue through his activities in transforming the products of nature into consumable goods, all these processes, and only these, comprise the economic member of a healthy social organism. This member is comparable to the head system of the human organism which conditions individual aptitudes and, just as this head-system is dependent on the lung-heart system, the economic system is dependent on human labour. But the head cannot independently regulate breathing; nor should the human labour system be regulated by the same forces which activate the economy.

[ 18 ] The human being is engaged in economic activity in his own interests. These are based on his spiritual needs and on the needs of his soul. How these interests can be most suitably approached within a social organism so that the individual can best satisfy his interests through the social organism and also be economically active to the best advantage, is a question which must be resolved in practice within the various economic facilities. This can only happen if the interests are able to freely assert themselves, and if the will and possibility arise to do what is necessary to satisfy them. The origin of the interests lies beyond the circle which circumscribes economic affairs. They develop together with the development of the human soul and body. The task of economic life is to establish facilities in order to satisfy them. These facilities should be exclusively concerned with the production and interchange of commodities, that is, of goods which acquire value through human need. The commodity has value through the person who consumes it. Due to the fact that the commodity acquires its value through the consumer, its position in the social organism is completely different from the other things which the human being, as a member of this organism, values. The economy, within the circumference of which the production, inter-change and consumption of commodities belong, should be considered without preconceptions. The essential difference between the person-to-person relationship in which one produces commodities for the other, and the rights relationship as such will be evident. Careful consideration will lead to the conviction and the practical requirement that in the social organism legal rights must be completely separated from the economic sector. The activities which are to be carried out in the facilities which serve the production and interchange of commodities are not conducive to the best possible influence on the area of human rights. In the economy one individual turns to another individual because one serves the interests of the other, but the relation of one person to another is fundamentally different in the area of human rights.

[ 19 ] It might seem that the required distinction would be sufficiently realized if the legal element, which must also exist in the relations between the persons engaged in the economy, be provided for in it. Such a belief has no foundation in reality. The individual can only correctly experience the legal relation which must exist between himself and others when he does not experience this relation in the economic area, but in an area which is completely separate from it. Therefore, an area must develop in the social organism alongside the economy and independent of it, in which the rights element is cultivated and administered. The rights element is, moreover, that of the political domain, of the state. If men carry over their economic interests into the legislation and administration of the rights-state, then the resulting rights will only be the expression of these economic interests. When the rights-state manages the economy it loses the ability to regulate human rights. Its acts and facilities must serve the human need for commodities; they are therefore diverted from the impulses which correspond to human rights.

[ 20 ] The healthy social organism requires an autonomous political state as the second member alongside the economic sector. In the autonomous economic sector, through the forces of economic life, people will develop facilities which will best serve the production and interchange of commodities. In the political state facilities will develop which will orient the mutual relations between persons and groups in a way which corresponds to human rights-awareness.

[ 21 ] This viewpoint, which advocates the complete separation of rights-state and economy, is one which corresponds to the realities of life. The same cannot be said for the viewpoint which would merge the economic and rights functions. Those who are active in the economic sector do, of course, possess a rights-awareness; but their participation in legislative and administrative processes will derive exclusively from this rights-awareness only if their judgement in this area occurs within the framework of a rights-state which does not occupy itself with economic matters. Such a rights-state has its own legislative and administrative bodies, both structured according to the principles which derive from the modern rights awareness. It will be structured according to the impulses in human consciousness nowadays referred to as democratic. The economic area will form its legislative and administrative bodies in accordance with economic impulses. The necessary contact between the responsible persons of the legal and economic bodies will ensue in a manner similar to that at present practised by the governments of sovereign states. Through this formation the developments in one body will be able to have the necessary effect on developments in the other. As things are now this effect is hindered by one area trying to develop in itself what should flow toward it from the other.

[ 22 ] The economy is subject, on the one hand, to the conditions of the natural base (climate, regional geography, mineral wealth and so forth) and, on the other hand, it is dependent upon the legal conditions which the state imposes between the persons or groups engaged in economic activity. The boundaries of what economic activity can and should encompass are therefore laid out. Just as nature imposes prerequisites from the outside on the economic process which those engaged in economic activity take for granted as something upon which they must build this economy, so should everything which underlies the legal relationship between persons be regulated, in a healthy social organism, by a rights-state which, like the natural base, is autonomous in its relation to the economy.

[ 23 ] In the social organism that has evolved through the history of mankind and which, by means of the machine age and the modern capitalistic economic form, has given the social movement its characteristic stamp, economic activity encompasses more than is good for a healthy social organism. In today's economic system, in which only commodities should circulate, human labour-power and rights circulate as well. In the economic process of today, which is based on the division of labour, not only are commodities exchanged for commodities, but commodities are exchanged for both labour and for rights. (I call commodity everything which has been prepared by human activity for consumption and brought to a certain locality for this purpose. Although this description may be objectionable or seem insufficient to some economists, it can nevertheless be useful for an understanding of just what should belong to economic activity.^t3 ) When someone acquires a piece of land through purchase, the process must be considered an exchange of the land for commodities, represented by the purchase money. The land itself, however, does not act as a commodity in economic life. Its position is based on the right of a person to use it. This right is essentially different from the relationship in which the producer of a commodity finds himself. This relationship, by its very nature, does not overlap with the completely different type of person-to-person relationship which results from the fact that someone has the exclusive use of a piece of land. The owner puts those persons who earn their living on the land as his employees, or those who must live on it, in a position of dependence on him. The exchange of real commodities which are produced or consumed does not cause a dependence which has the same effect as this personal kind of relationship.

[ 24 ] Looking at this fact of life impartially, one sees clearly that it must find expression in the institutions of the entire social organism. As long as commodities are exchanged for other commodities in the economic sphere, the value of these commodities is determined independently of the legal relations between persons or groups. As soon as commodities are exchanged for rights, however, the legal relations themselves are affected. It is not a question of the exchange itself. This is a necessary, vital element of the contemporary social organism based on its division of labour; the problem is that through the exchange of rights for commodities the rights become commodities when they originate within the economic sphere. This can only be avoided by the existence of facilities in the social organism which, on the one hand, have the exclusive function of activating the circulation of commodities in the most expedient manner, and, on the other hand, facilities which regulate the rights, inherent in the commodity exchange process, of those individuals who produce, trade and consume. These rights are essentially no different from other rights of a personal nature which exist independently of the commodity exchange process. If I injure or benefit my fellow-man through the sale of a commodity, this belongs in the same social category as an injury or benefit through an act or omission not directly related to commodity exchange.

[ 25 ] The individual's way of life is influenced by rights institutions acting together with economic interests. In a healthy social organism these influences must come from two different directions. In the economic organization formal training, together with experience, is to provide management with the necessary insights. Through law and administration in the rights organization the necessary rights-awareness, in respect to the relations of individuals, or groups of individuals, to each other will be realized. The economic organization will allow persons with similar professional or consumer interests, or with similar needs of other kinds, to unite in cooperative associations which, through reciprocal activities, will underlie the entire economy. This organization will structure itself on an associative foundation and on the interrelations between associations. The associations will engage in purely economic activities. The legal basis for their work is provided by the rights organization. When such economic associations are able to make their economic interests felt in the representative and administrative bodies of the economic organization, they will not feel the need to pressure the legislative or administrative leadership of the rights-state (for example, farmers' and industrialists' lobbies, economically orientated social democrats) in order to attain there what is not attainable within the economic sector. If the rights state is not active in any economic field, then it will only establish facilities which derive from the rights awareness of the persons involved. Even if the same individuals who are active in the economic area also participate in the representation of the rights-state, which would of course be the case, no economic influence can be exerted on the rights sector, due to the formation of separate economic and legal systems. Such influence undermines the health of the social organism, as it can also be undermined when the state organization itself manages branches of the economic sector and when representatives of economic interests determine laws in accordance with those interests.

[ 26 ] Austria offered a typical example of the fusion of the economic and rights sectors with the constitution it adopted in the eighteen-sixties. The representatives of the imperial assembly of this territorial union were elected from the ranks of the four economic branches: The land owners, the chamber of commerce, the cities, markets and industrial areas, and the rural communities. It is clear from this composition of the representative assembly that they thought a rights system would ensue by allowing economic interests to exert themselves. Certainly the divergent forces of its many nationalities contributed a great deal to Austria's disintegration. It is equally certain, however, that a rights organization functioning alongside the economy would have enabled the development of a form of society in which the co-existence of the various nationalities would have been possible.

[ 27 ] Nowadays people interested in public life usually direct their attention to matters of secondary importance. They do this because their thinking habits induce them to consider the social organism as a uniform entity. A suitable elective process for such an entity is not to be found. Regardless of the elective process employed, economic interests and the impulses emanating from the rights sector will conflict with each other in the representative bodies. This conflict must result in extreme social agitation. Priority must be given today to the all-important objective of working toward a drastic separation of the economy from the rights-organization. As this separation becomes a reality, the separating organizations will, each according to their own principles, find the best means of choosing their legislators and administrators. This question of how to choose such representatives, although as such of fundamental significance, is secondary compared to the other pressing decisions which must be made today. Where old conditions still exist, these new forms could be developed from them. Where the old has already disintegrated, or is in the process of doing so, individuals or groups of individuals should take the initiative in attempting to reorganize society in the indicated direction. To expect an overnight transformation is seen even by reasonable socialists as unrealistic. They expect the healing process which they desire to be gradual and relevant. However, that the historical human evolutionary forces of today make a rational desire for a new social structure necessary is perfectly obvious to every objective person who observes current events.

[ 28 ] He who considers ‘practical’ only what he has become accustomed to within the limits of his own horizons, will consider what is presented here as ‘impractical’. If he is not able to change his attitude however, and has influence in some area, his actions will not contribute to the healing, but to the continued degeneration of the social organism, just as the deeds of people of like mind have contributed to present conditions.

[ 29 ] The endeavours which have already begun to be realized by those in authority to turn certain economic functions (post office, railroads, etc.) over to the state must be reversed; the state must be relieved of all economic functions. Thinkers who like to believe that they are on the road to a healthy social organism carry these efforts at nationalization to their logically extreme conclusions. They desire the socialization of all economic means, insofar as they are means of production. Healthy development, however, requires that the economy be autonomous and the political state be able, through the process of law, to affect economic organizations in such a way that the individual does not feel that his integration in the social organism is in conflict with his rights-awareness.

[ 30 ] It is possible to see how the ideas presented here are based on the realities of the human situation by directing one's attention to the physical labour which the human being performs for the social organism. Within the capitalistic economic form, this labour has been incorporated into the social organism in such a way that it is bought like a commodity from the worker by his employer. An exchange takes place between money (representing commodities) and labour. But such an exchange cannot, in reality, take place. It only appears to do so.^t4 In reality, the employer receives commodities from the worker, which can only come into existence by the worker devoting his labour-power to their creation. The worker receives one part of the equivalent value of these commodities and the employer the other. The production of commodities results from the cooperation of the employer and the employed. Only the product of their joint action passes into economic circulation. A legal relationship between worker and entrepreneur is necessary for the production of the commodity. Capitalism, however, is capable of converting this relationship into one which is determined by the economic supremacy of the employer over the worker. In the healthy social organism it will be apparent that labour cannot be paid for. It cannot attain an economic value through equivalence with a commodity. These, produced by labour, acquire value through equivalence with other commodities. The kind and amount of work as well as the way in which the individual performs it for the maintenance of the social organism, must be determined by his own abilities as well as the requisites for a decent human existence. This is only possible if the determination is carried out by the political state independently of economic management.

[ 31 ] Through this determination the commodity will acquire a value basis which is comparable to that which exists in the conditions imposed by nature. As the value of a commodity increases in relation to another commodity due to the acquisition of the raw materials necessary for its production becoming more difficult, so must its value also be dependent upon the kind and amount of labour which may be expended for its production in accordance with rights legislation.^t5 [ 32 ] In this way the economy becomes subject to two essential conditions: that of the natural base, which humanity must take as it is given, and that of the rights base, which should be created through a rights-awareness with roots in a political state independent of economic interests.

[ 33 ] It is evident that by managing the social organism in this way, economic prosperity will increase and decrease according to the amount of labour rights-awareness decides to expend. In a healthy social organism it is necessary that economic prosperity be dependent in this way, for only such dependence can prevent man from being so consumed by economic life that he can no longer consider his existence worthy of human dignity. And, in truth, all the turmoil in the social organism results from the feeling that existence is unworthy of human dignity.

[ 34 ] A comparison with the means employed to improve the natural base can be used to find possible means of avoiding steep declines in prosperity as an effect of the rights sector's measures.

A low yield soil can be made more productive through the use of technical means; similarly, if prosperity declines excessively the type and amount of labour can be modified. This modification should not emanate directly from economic circles, but from the insight which can develop in a rights organisation which is independent of economic life.

[ 35 ] Everything which occurs in the social organization due to economic activity and rights-awareness is influenced by what emanates from a third source: the individual abilities of each human being. This includes the greatest spiritual accomplishments as well as superior or inferior physical aptitudes. What derives from this source must be introduced into the healthy social organism in quite a different manner than the exchange of commodities or what emanates from the state. This introduction can only be effected in a sound manner if it is left to man's free receptivity and the impulses which come from individual abilities. The human efforts and achievements which result from such abilities are, to a great extent, deprived of the true essence of their being if they are influenced by economic interests or the state organization. This essence can only exist in the forces which human effort and achievement must develop of and by themselves. Free receptivity, the only suitable means, is paralysed when the social integration of these efforts and achievements is directly conditioned by economic life or organized by the state. There is only one possible healthy form of development for spiritual life: what it produces shall be the result of its own impulses and a relationship of mutual understanding shall exist between itself and the recipients of its achievements. (The development of the individual abilities present in society is connected to the development of spiritual life by countless fine threads.)

[ 36 ] The conditions described here for the healthy development of spiritual-cultural life are not recognized today because powers of observation have been clouded by the fusion of a large part of this life with the political state. This fusion has come about in the course of the past centuries and we have grown accustomed to it. There is talk, of course, of ‘scientific and educational freedom’. It is taken for granted however, that the political state should administer the ‘free science’ and the ‘free education’.

It is not understood that in this way the state makes spiritual life dependent on state requirements. People think that the state can provide the educational facilities and that the teachers who occupy them can develop culture and spiritual life ‘freely’ in them. This opinion ignores how closely related the content of spiritual life is to the innermost essence of the human being in which it is developing, and how this development can only be free when it is introduced into the social organism through the impulses which originate in spiritual life itself, and through no others. Through fusion with the state, not only the administration of science and the part of spiritual life connected with it has been determined, but the content as well. Of course what mathematics or physics produce cannot be directly influenced by the state. But the history of the cultural sciences shows that they have become reflections of their representatives' relations to the state and of state requirements. Due to this phenomenon, the contemporary scientifically oriented concepts which dominate spiritual life affect the proletarian as ideology. He has noticed how certain aspects of human thought are determined by state requirements which correspond to the interests of the ruling classes. The thinking proletarian saw therein a reflection of material interests as well as a battle of conflicting interests. This created the feeling that all spiritual life is ideology, a reflection of economic organization.

[ 37 ] This desolating view of human spiritual life ceases when the feeling can arise that in the spiritual sphere a self-containing reality, transcending the material, is at work. It is impossible for such a feeling to arise when spiritual life is not freely self-developing and administering within the social organism. Only those persons who are active in the development and administration of spiritual life have the strength to secure its appropriate place in the social organism. Art, science, philosophical world-views, and all that goes with them, need just such an independent position in human society, for in spiritual life everything is interrelated. The freedom of one cannot flourish without the freedom of the other. Although the content of mathematics and physics cannot be directly influenced by state requirements, what develops from them, what people think of their value, what effects their cultivation can have on the rest of spiritual life, and much more, is conditioned by these requirements when the state administers branches of spiritual life. It is very different if a teacher of the lowest school grades follows the impulses of the state or if he receives these impulses from a spiritual life which is self-contained. The Social Democrats have merely inherited the habits of thought and the customs of the ruling classes in this respect. Their ideal is to include spiritual life in social institutions which are built upon economic principles. If they succeed in reaching their goal, they will only have continued along the path of spiritual depreciation. They were correct, although one-sided, in their demand that religion be a private affair. In a healthy social organism all spiritual life must be, in respect to the state and the economy, a ‘private affair’. But the social democrats' motive in wanting to transfer religion to the private sector is not a desire to create a position within the social organism where a spiritual institution would develop in a more desirable, worthier manner than it can under state influence. They are of the opinion that the social organism should only cultivate with its own means its own necessities of life. And religious values do not belong to this category. A branch of spiritual life cannot flourish when it is unilaterally removed from the public sector in this way, if the other spiritual branches remain fettered. Modern humanity's religious life will only develop its soul-sustaining strength together with all the other liberated branches of spiritual life.

[ 38 ] Not only the creation but also the reception by humanity of this spiritual life must be freely determined in accordance with the soul's necessities. Teachers, artists and such whose only direct connection with a legislature or an administration is with those which have their origin in spiritual life itself, will be able, through their actions, to inspire the development of a receptivity for their efforts and achievements amongst individuals who are protected by a self-reliant, independent political state from being forced to exist only for work, and which guarantees their right to a leisure that can awaken in them an appreciation of spiritual values. Those persons who imagine themselves to be ‘practical’ may object that people would pass their leisure time drinking and that illiteracy would result if the state occupied itself with the right to leisure and if school attendance were left to free human common sense. Let these ‘pessimists’ wait and see what will happen when the world is no longer under their influence all too often determined by a certain feeling which, whispering in their ear, softly reminds them of how they use their leisure time, what they needed to acquire a little ‘learning’. They cannot imagine the power of enthusiasm which a really self-contained spiritual life can have in the social organism, because the fettered one they know cannot exert such an enthusiastic influence over them.

[ 39 ] Both the political state and the economy will receive the spiritual performance they require from a self-administered spiritual organism. Furthermore, practical economic training will reach full effectiveness through free cooperation with this organism. People who have received the appropriate training will be able to vitalize their economic experience through the strength which will come to them from liberated spiritual values. Those with economic experience will also work for the spiritual organization, where their abilities are most needed.

[ 40 ] In the political area, the necessary insights will be formed through the activation of spiritual values. The worker will acquire, through the influence of such spiritual values, a feeling of satisfaction in respect to the function his labour performs in the social organism. He will realize that without management organizing labour in a meaningful way the social organism could not support him. He will sense the need for cooperation between his work and the organizing abilities which derive from the development of individual human abilities. Within the framework of the political state he will acquire the rights which insure him his share of the commodities he produces; and he will freely grant an appropriate share of the proceeds for the formation of the spiritual values which flow toward him. In the field of spiritual-cultural life, it will become possible for those engaged in creative activities to live from the proceeds of their efforts. What someone practices in the field of spiritual life is his own affair. What he is able to contribute to the social organism however, will be recompensed by those who have need of his spiritual contribution. Whoever is not able to support himself within the spiritual organization from such compensation will have to transfer his activities to the political or economic sphere of activity.

[ 41 ] The technical ideas that derive from spiritual life flow into the economic sector. They derive from spiritual life even when they come directly from members of the state or economic sectors. All organizational ideas and forces which fecundate the economic and state sectors originate in spiritual life. Compensation for this input to both social sectors will come either through the free appreciation of the beneficiaries, or through laws determined by the political state. Tax laws will provide this political state with what it needs to maintain itself. These will be devised through a harmonization of ‘rights awareness’ and economic requirements.

[ 42 ] In a healthy social organism the autonomous spiritual sector must function alongside the political and economic sectors. The evolutionary forces in modern mankind point toward a triformation of this organism. As long as society was essentially governed by instinctive forces, the urge for this formation did not arise. What actually derived from three sources functioned somewhat torpidly together in society. Modern times demand the individual's conscious participation in this organism. This consciousness can only give the individual's behaviour and whole life a healthy form if it is oriented from three sides. Modern man, in the unconscious depths of his soul, strives toward this orientation; and what manifests itself in the social movement is only the dim reflection of this striving.

[ 43 ] Toward the end of the eighteenth century, under different circumstances than those under which we at present live, a call for a new formation of the human social organism arose from the depths of human nature. The motto of this reorganization consisted of three words: fraternity, equality, liberty. Anyone with an objective mind, who considers the realities of human social development with healthy sensibilities, cannot help but be sympathetic to the meaning behind these words. However, during the course of the nineteenth century, some very clever thinkers took pains to point out the impossibility of realizing these ideals of fraternity, equality and liberty in a uniform social organism. They felt certain that these three impulses would be contradictory if practised in society. It was clearly demonstrated, for example, that individual freedom would not be possible if the equality principle were practised. One is obliged to agree with those who observed these contradictions; nevertheless, one must at the same time feel sympathy for each of these ideals.

[ 44 ] These contradictions exist because the true social meaning of these three ideals only becomes evident through an understanding of the necessary triformation of the social organism. The three members are not to be united and centralized in some abstract, theoretical parliamentary body. Each of the three members is to be centralized within itself, and then, through their mutual cooperation, the unity of the overall social organism can come about. In real life, the apparent contradictions act as a unifying element. An apprehension of the living social organism can be attained when one is able to observe the true formation of this organism with respect to fraternity, equality and liberty. It will then be evident that human cooperation in economic life must be based on the fraternity which is inherent in associations. In the second member, the civil rights system, which is concerned with purely human, person-to-person relations, it is necessary to strive for the realization of the idea of equality. And in the relatively independent spiritual sector of the social organism it is necessary to strive for the realization of the idea of freedom. Seen in this light, the real worth of these three ideals becomes clear. They cannot be realized in a chaotic society, but only in a healthy, threefold social organism. No abstract, centralized social structure is able to realize the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity in such disarrangement; but each of the three sectors of the social organism can draw strength from one of these impulses and cooperate in a positive manner with the other sectors.

[ 45 ] Those individuals who demanded and worked for the realization of the three ideas—liberty, equality and fraternity—as well as those who later followed in their footsteps, were able to dimly discern in which direction modern humanity's forces of evolution are pointing. But they have not been able to overcome their belief in the uniform state, so their ideas contain a contradictory element. Nevertheless, they remained faithful to the contradictory, for in the subconscious depths of their souls the impulse toward the triformation of the social organism, in which the triplicity of their ideas can attain to a higher unity, continued to exert itself. The clearly discernible social facts of contemporary life demand that the forces of evolution, which in modern mankind strive toward this triformation, be turned into conscious will.

• 2. The arrangement meant here is not a spatial delimitation of the bodily members, but is according to the activities (functions) of the organism. The term ‘head-organism’ is only to be used in that one is aware that the nerve-sense faculty is principally centralized in the head. Of course the rhythmic and metabolic functions are also present in the head, as is the nerve-sense faculty in the other bodily members. Nevertheless, the three functional types are, according to their natures, sharply separated.
• *. Page 54 Von Seelenrätseln. Extracts from this book have been published by the Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970, under the title The Case for Anthroposophy, selected, translated, arranged and with an introduction by Owen Barfield.
• *. Page 61 Carl Jentsch Volkswirtschaftslehre (Economics) published 1895.
• t3. It is not the task of a work which intends to serve life to give definitions which originate in a theory, but to contribute ideas which illustrate the processes taking place in reality. ‘Commodity’ in this sense indicates something which the human being experiences; any other concept of ‘commodity’ omits or adds something, so that the concept does not correspond to the living process of reality.
• t4. It is not only possible for processes in life to be explained falsely, they can also occur falsely. Money and labour are not inter-changeable values as are money and the products of labour. Therefore, if I give money for labour I do something false. I create a deception. In reality, I can only give money for the products of labour.
• t5. Such a relationship of labour to rights legislation will compel the economic associations to accept what is ‘just’ as a precondition. Thereby a condition will be attained in which the economic organization is dependent on people, and not vice-versa.

Wilhelm von Blume: Dear attendees, on behalf of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, I would like to welcome you again today. We have planned an evening on which questions are to be answered that have been or may be asked from the floor, and I would first like to ask Dr. Steiner to make a few introductory remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, this evening is primarily intended to answer questions that have arisen from the esteemed audience in connection with the impulse given by the idea of social threefolding. Tomorrow I will deal with one of the main objections in a lecture to be held here, the objection that the impulse of the threefold social organism is only some kind of sophisticated idea, some kind of ideology or utopia, and tomorrow I will try to prove that it is really the most practical matter in our present time. Today, allow me just to say a few words to introduce the answering of questions that makes up the content of today's agenda.

It has, in fact, been little noticed, my dear attendees, that the impulse for the threefold social organism is intended to point out the most significant task that has been set for humanity in modern times as a result of developmental conditions. It is truly not out of exaggerated pessimism when one expresses the view today that all too little – truly all too little – of the great seriousness of the time, of the great seriousness of the demands of the time, is recognized in the broadest circles. We are indeed faced with a task that is almost gigantic. For the whole development of modern humanity has come to a head in such a way that this task has arisen at last, and it has arisen out of the momentous events of this world war catastrophe. But the extraordinary significance of this task is by no means understood in the broadest circles today, and one would like to believe that it is itself a task to make the people of the present age fully aware of the seriousness of this task. The task first emerges in the phenomena, in the facts of the time. People from the most diverse classes, from the most diverse social circles and also from the most diverse parties take their stand on these phenomena, on these facts of the time. From all that has emerged from such statements to date, two things stand out. I would like to characterize these two things in these few introductory words; I will go into more detail tomorrow. I would like to characterize this in the introduction because, however desirable it may be to discuss more individual, concrete, practical questions in today's question, But today it is necessary for people to look again and again at the big, comprehensive picture of the task, if only to awaken in people their sense of responsibility towards the great issues of the times.

There are two things that can be observed when considering the opinions of the most diverse circles on this great task today. One can say: One group of people is primarily interested in restoring in some way, in some form - in a form that is acceptable - what has been destroyed by the significant world war catastrophe. And the other type of person, coming from a completely different background, is primarily interested in doing everything differently than it was before the world war catastrophe - partly with the aim of ensuring that such terrible things never happen to humanity again, partly also out of the feeling and conviction that we cannot move forward on the basis of the old economic, state and spiritual order, that a new construction must be tackled very seriously. If we want to call one type of people – in the face of the completely new demands – more the conservative people, then our gaze is directed to all those circles that more or less belong to the old social worldviews, which are somehow intertwined with what the old worldviews have brought to humanity, especially in terms of economic orders. On the other hand, we see the forward-rushing parties, which are made up mainly of the proletariat, and there we see that which takes a completely different approach to the great task and which takes such a different approach that one type of people no longer understands the other. If we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding – I will only sketch them out today – if we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding, we will find that on the one hand the representatives of the old, who in some way want to continue to be associated with this old, have lost an actual cultural goal in the course of recent history and have retained an old cultural practice in which they have continued to work. These people, dear assembled presenters, have a practice, but this practice is no longer imbued with purposeful impulses. This practice always expresses itself in such a way that when you ask these people: How do you actually want to move forward now that the big tasks are coming? they somehow answer with what only means a continuation of the old; but they do not answer with any great goal either; basically, they only answer with what has emerged from the routine of their previous practice. They have a practice without a goal. On the other side stands the proletariat. It has a goal, a goal that can be expressed in the most diverse ways, but it is a goal. But this proletariat has no practice; this proletariat lacks any practical possibility of realizing what it somehow defines as its goals. So on the one hand there is traditional practice without a goal, on the other hand there is a new goal without practice. The proletariat has been kept away from practice, only summoned to the machine, only harnessed to the factory and to capitalism. From this, its goal has emerged, in that it, I would like to say, is rushing against what it has experienced, but it is never connected with the management, with the leadership of the economic forms themselves. Today it demands new forms of life; but it knows nothing of practice. Where does this gap come from?

This gap arises from the fact that we are faced with the greatest problem of modern times, and this greatest problem of modern times has arisen precisely in the age that has brought industrialism to its highest flowering. This problem is hidden at first in the economic sphere, but it extends its various branches to the other forms of life. This problem is so momentous that even a keen mind such as Walter Rathenau's has at most touched on it, but has not come to any clear understanding of this far-reaching problem of the present, this problem from which we all suffer, this problem that imperiously demands its solution. At least the impulse for the threefolding of the social organism would like to consider this problem without prejudice and full of life. And if I am to hint at it in a few words, so to speak as an introduction to tomorrow's lecture, which is to deal with it in its specific forms, then I must say: this problem, it had to slowly arise in humanity, had to, so to speak, rise to its highest development in the time of ever-expanding industrialism and modern technology, and now stands before us, questioning and threatening. It consists in the fact that all industrialism works with a deficit in the national economy – that is the case, there is no other way. The national economy must be attuned to this, knowing that all industrialism, insofar as it develops further and further through its means of production, works with a deficit in relation to what the national economy is for humanity. Insofar as industrialism works with a deficit, what is missing in the human national economy must be replaced from another source. That is the great problem of the present time, that all industrialism works with a deficit and that the question cannot be asked by me or others as to whether this deficit will be covered, but life is constantly being asked to cover the deficit of industrialism. Where does it come from? It is covered only by the soil, my dear audience, only by what the soil produces. In the modern economy, we are constantly involved in this exchange process [between industry and land production], which is covered up by secondary processes – in that the deficit of industry has to be covered by the surplus of land production in the broadest sense. Everything that is involved in the question of wages, the question of capital, and the question of prices in modern life is due solely to the fact that the surplus in the production of land must migrate into the deficit in industry.

But this, dear ladies and gentlemen, is linked to something else. It is linked to the fact that, on the one hand, everything in man that is connected with the soil tends towards a certain conservatism. This can be strictly proven, but today I will only hint at it in my introduction. If only the land and its products were available, we would have to remain more or less in a primitive state in terms of culture. The progress of humanity stems from the fact that industry, with its extensive division of labor, favors this progress. But at the same time, industry becomes the basis for progress in the most diverse fields, first of liberalism, then of socialism. Thus, what is expressed in the significant, I would even say bookish, contrast between land and industrial means of production is transferred to human sentiment. And as human sentiments clash with one another in life, this conflict is intimately connected with what underlies it: the opposing economic interests of land and industrial means of production. But in modern times this whole problem has intensified in yet another way. Not only that in parliaments liberal and socialist sit opposite the conservative, stemming simply from the assets and liabilities of the entire world economy; not only that in modern times the conservative and progressive element has crept into the people's assemblies of humanity , but economic interests have also crept in, with everything connected with the land, on the one hand, working for what remains stationary, and everything connected with industry, on the other hand, working for what is progressing. And so it has come about that, on the one hand, man's spiritual progress and, on the other, man's economic interests have been chaotically thrown together in our modern unitary state system.

This is the great problem that confronts people today, I would even say it is a gigantic one. People on the left and the right are fiddling around with this problem. Because it is so huge, that is why it is so difficult to reach an understanding. People on the one hand only want to consider the most immediate issues and only call that practical, while the times demand that we find some solution to the great accounting disparity between the land products and industrial products, from which humanity feeds, clothes and satisfies other needs, in the more recent development of humanity. I would say that everything that has occurred can ultimately be traced back, almost in terms of numbers, to the accounting result mentioned. But it takes real goodwill to engage with the fundamental forces of real practical life, even if you just want to see the task. We are at the point today where we have to see this task, that what is chaotically mixed up must be properly separated again. The impulse for a threefold social organism wants to face up to this task, which wants to place a healthy social organism on its healthy three legs in the right way: on the spiritual, the legal and the economic. This problem has arisen simply from what is inherent in this development of modern times. And even if, for my sake, people still find the next results, to which the impulse for the threefold social organism has come, disputable, one comes, without asking about these three areas of life in such a way that for their proper organization in the future, one does not come any closer to the greatest problem that has been set for us; one does not come any closer to what alone can lead out of the threatening chaos and confusion.

I wished to say this by way of introduction for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it should be seen how the impulse for the threefold social organism is really connected with the highest that is set before humanity as a great historical and because, on the other hand, the answer to the question will show how much can already be said today, based on a real observation of life, about what can arise in detail from the questions posed today.

I will now begin by answering the questions that have been put to me.

Wilhelm von Blume: So we will now begin to answer the questions that have been put to us in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I will try to answer the questions that were handed to me in writing in a not too long form, for the simple reason that I believe that perhaps afterwards numerous questions from the esteemed audience may still be asked orally or in writing.

The first bundle of questions that I have before me is headed “On Threefolding”. The first question:

In what way are individuals, associations and enterprises placed under the three different organizations? Individual borderline cases are, for example, the newspaper publisher, public health institutions, theaters and cinema enterprises.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to focus on the newspaper industry in particular from this first question. Because it is precisely something like the newspaper industry that will make it possible to see how, on the one hand, the threefold social organism can actually lead to a complete transformation of the current situation, but in an organic way, and how, on the other hand, it can result in the unity of life not being disturbed at all. Basically, it will also be possible to show that what people say about the incomprehensibility of the three-part social organism is actually based on the fact that, out of old habits of thinking, they do not want to engage in the present with what is necessary. But they will have to decide to come to terms with this necessity.

As you can see, dear attendees, in the newspaper business, all three aspects of human life basically come together. In the newspaper business, on the one hand, we have the publisher, the person who has to ensure that the newspaper is printed, that it is distributed in the appropriate manner, and so on – this is a purely economic task. On the other hand, we have those who write the newspaper. I believe that today, many people are already comfortable enough in our strange circumstances to come to the conclusion that newspapers should be written differently than they are often written. You see, something beneficial for humanity can only come out of writing a newspaper if what is written arises solely from the interests and needs of the spiritual life of humanity and from the needs that arise from the fact that the spiritual life also looks at the various other branches of life. The newspaper writer and everything that belongs to the editorial staff belongs to the spiritual life. And since we are dealing on both sides, both in the economic part of the newspaper business and in the spiritual part of the newspaper business, with people who, in turn, as human beings, are in relationships not only with their subscribers, but also with the whole of the general public, we are dealing with relationships that take place from person to person, that is, with legal relationships. The issue at hand, esteemed attendees, is that in the future, especially in a business such as the newspaper industry, the economic, the legal and the intellectual, cultural aspects will not mesh for the detriment of humanity, otherwise, in the culmination of the disaster, we will end up with things as we are experiencing them in the present, for example. Recently, a strange advertisement appeared in the so-called press. It called for the world of big industry and the world of capitalists in particular to join forces to create a new newspaper. So it is advertising for a new newspaper, especially among capitalists and big industry. The purpose of this newspaper is to fight with all spiritual means against the socialization of the means of production. So, dear attendees, the interest of capitalists and big industrialists is supposed to enslave everything that should actually educate humanity from the judgment that comes from impulses of the spiritual world. Those who have some experience in life will know how, especially in the newspaper industry, these things have increasingly merged in recent times and have developed in a particularly grotesque way under the present circumstances.

In the future, the aim must be for the newspaper publisher and printer to be a mere economist, subordinate to the administration of the economic part of the social organism. He will be part of the economic organism with all the interests he can develop within his newspaper business. The editorial staff will not be part of the economic organism, but will be entirely subject to the self-administration of intellectual life, along with the other branches of intellectual life. The editorial staff will form a unit with all that is teaching, art or the like, which are other branches of intellectual life. How a particular newspaper publisher can come to be a particular editor depends on the contract that can be concluded between the newspaper publisher and the editor, whereby the editor, because he belongs to the self-government of the spiritual organism, is independent of the newspaper publisher with regard to his entire material life. The editor will merely have an interest in being able to pursue his profession at all. If he did not pursue this interest in practicing his profession, he would be without a livelihood. But the moment he succeeds in concluding a contract with some administration, he will not receive compensation for this profession from the interests of that administration, but from the interests of the self-governing intellectual life. If any matters arise through which one or other part of the newspaper violates the law, this violation of rights will be subject to the laws of the constitutional state. In the future, therefore, it will be desirable for such a branch of production to be influenced by the three great administrative branches of intellectual, legal and economic life. In the most diverse branches of production, those interests that are administered from the most diverse directions will converge. And it will come about in the cooperation of people that these interests - which otherwise, when they are confounded, when they are mixed together into a tangle, only interfere with each other - that these interests will precisely moralize, ethicalize, and support each other. The one who really has a practical mind will say to himself: There is no doubt that such a division of a single trade can really be carried out in practice. And by this structuring of the entire social organism, which reaches into the individual circumstances, we then have the recovery of the whole of social life. It is just that people today are not accustomed to thinking about what leads to such a recovery. They are also unaccustomed to it because they have to let go of many things that they consider almost indispensable from certain old ways of life. Today it is considered essential that the person who takes the economic risk for a newspaper also makes the person employed by the newspaper on the editorial staff his writer. He will not be able to do that in the future. From this will arise a great independence of the writer from the economic interests of the newspaper publisher in the newspaper industry, and precisely in this branch will come a recovery that we truly need and must admit that we need if we want to address the living conditions of a healthy social organism.

The second question put to me is:

Will the municipal administration, with its enterprises that break through the tripartite division, be maintained in the areas of the three organizations – for example, schools, gasworks, and jurisdiction?

Now, dear attendees, it is not the intention, in this transitional period – in which we are not even in it yet, but are only striving for it – to talk about the size of the individual spiritual, legal and economic areas, which I talked about in the last lecture here. In regard to the external structure of social life, not much needs to change at all if there is to be a genuine socialization of all human life. But what I have just explained for a single trade can just as easily be carried out by any state, an empire or a single local authority. Schools, gasworks, courts of law, they will have their various aspects, partly on the legal side, partly on the economic side – and in the case of schools, also on the spiritual side – and what emanates from the three organizations and their administrations will play a role in the individual enterprise, be it spiritual or more or less merely material, economic. The third question:

Who decides on the respective affiliation to one of the three organisms?

This question, dear attendees, actually arises – forgive the harsh word – from a certain prejudice that everything must come from an authority. In what is striven for as a healthy social organism for the future, the affiliation arises from the matter itself. We have just seen in our discussion of the newspaper industry how this affiliation arises from the matter at hand. From this affiliation, a much more comprehensive answer will be given than is currently thought. And a question like this one - it will be recognized as one that actually flows from the present-day mood of obedience to authority, and not from a truly factual basis. The fourth question:

Is there, in addition to or above the special representatives of the three members, any thought of a parliament consisting of their top leadership or an elected parliament (for the individual states? for the empire?)?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it must first be stated that, of course, as I have explained in my book on the social question, the question of what is the administration or representation in the individual of the three parts of the social organism is that it must belong to the others in some way and that a mutual exchange must take place through people. But in this respect, too, people often think far too stereotypically. For example, it is stated — and this is not in this question — in a long document that was sent to me a few days ago that threefolding actually makes three different parliaments necessary: a cultural parliament, a state parliament and an economic parliament. Now, I am of the opinion that if three parliaments with three ministries were to sit side by side in such a stereotyped way, then the only consequence that could arise would be that all three would sabotage each other. And this is precisely what follows from a true understanding of the actual situation: that parliamentarism – and only a democratic parliamentarism is a true parliamentarism – can only be based on that which can be established between human beings by virtue of the fact that the human being is simply an adult, a mature human being. Everyone must be able to participate in democratic parliamentary life who is an adult, a mature human being. For everything that comes to a head in the legal sphere can be based on what a normal, healthy, adult, mature human being is, on what he can know, think, feel and want. But economic life has become mixed up with this legal life, which is therefore not only based on the feelings and thoughts of the adult, mature person, but which is based, firstly, on economic experience, which one can only acquire in a specific area can only be acquired in a specific, concrete area, secondly on the actual foundations, I would like to say on credit in the broadest sense. I do not mean monetary credit, but credit in the broadest sense, which is generated in a group of people by the fact that this group of people is involved in a particular branch of production. Because everything in economic life must develop from actual experience and the actual administrative basis of the specific individual branch, the organizational structure that exists in economic life can only arise on such a basis. That is to say, only an appropriate administration can develop in economic life from economic experience and economic facts. There will be no parliamentary representation at the top, but rather a structure of associations, coalitions, cooperatives from the professional classes, from the grouping of production and consumption and so on, which organize themselves and can manage themselves. And this structure will also develop a certain leadership, I would say a central council. But this cannot be the same structure that is expressed in what must be independently separated as the legal basis. On the contrary, it is precisely that which is to have an effect on economic life as law that will have the right effect as law, because it can now arise purely, without being contaminated by economic interests, on the legal basis of the community of all people who have come of age. And just as little as economic life can be administered in a stereotyped, parliamentary way, just as little can spiritual life be administered in this way. Spiritual life, in turn, must develop an organization based on its own laws, which will be quite different from that of economic life, because of its special circumstances. That which arises at the very apex of intellectual life, together with all that which stands in the middle, on the legal ground, what is administered by parliament and by ministers, and with that which arises as a kind of central council in economic life, will be able to order the common affairs. I know that there are many people who cannot imagine such a thing; but in practice it will be simpler, above all more fruitful, than all that stands in its place today.

The second set of questions is entitled “On Economic Life”. First:

What will happen to the existing property of the wealthy, in particular agricultural and urban property?

The question is clearly explained in my book on the Social Question. That which has led us into the individual crises of economic life and now into the great crisis - for such is the present world catastrophe - is that form of modern economic life which I have tried to highlight in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. In this book, the question is answered as to how, in the future, on the one hand, the means of production, which consists of land, and, on the other hand, the industrial means of production, must be viewed differently. The industrial means of production may only suck capital out of the economic body until they are finished; when they are finished, their sucking of capital out of the economic body is also finished. In other words, industrial means of production can only cost something while they are being worked on until they are completed; then they have to be transferred to the circulation process for means of production; then they have to be what is generally owned. But the land, which is not manufactured but is already there, can never cost anything.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you think in a healthy way, it already arises in a certain way today, but only in the individual cases where you think economically in a healthy way. We have built a structure in Dornach as a School of Spiritual Science that is not yet finished, which has been affected in its completion by the catastrophe of the world wars. We have, of course, built it out of the present economic conditions, but the question can be raised about this building: when we are all dead, when we are no longer there when the building is finished, who will own this building, who will be able to sell it to someone else? This question answers itself for our building. It will not belong to anyone; it naturally belongs to the general public. For it is built on the sound foundation that it will one day [in the future] be able to pass as the common property of all humanity to whoever can manage it in turn. One only has to have come up with such a thing in practice. In the present economic system, one can only come close to this, but one will see that what is written in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” about the fact that every purchase relationship ceases with a means of production when it is completed, and that this means of production, which can no longer be bought in other forms, then passes into the administration of society. And one will see that there is something eminently practical in this.

The second question:

How should small-scale crafts and trades be organized?

It is to be organized in no different way than large-scale industry and trade, for the simple reason that it will follow from the laws of economic life itself - from the laws that I explained in the lecture the other day - that a trade or business that is too large harms and starves those who are outside of it, and that a trade or business that is too small harms those who are within it. Size will be determined by the future economic situation.

The third question:

Should trade, in particular wholesale trade in import and export, be stopped?

That would, of course, be completely absurd if it were to stop. Anyone who really thinks through with a practical mind what is explained in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that the actual conditions at the boundaries of the economic, legal and intellectual spheres will by no means change. Not even the initiative of the individual will change as a result, which is of course necessary, especially in the external world. What is changed are only the social conditions within. In fact, only things that have nothing to do with what is happening on the borders will be changed, except that on these borders, what has previously had such a disturbing effect and has come to a head in the terrible explosions of war, will harmonize with each other. The fact that economic conditions at the borders have a harmonizing effect on international legal and spiritual conditions – for example, also at language borders – is precisely why the threefold social organism in its international relationship, as I explained in my book, will have its greatest significance. It will no longer be possible for what develops on the one hand from the economic and on the other from the legal or from the spiritual, to which the national also belongs, to mix in a colorful way with imports and exports. The absurdity of a “national economy” will, however, come to an end, for the simple reason that only economic conditions will be decisive for export and import across borders and because there will no longer be the possibility of such world conflicts being caused by the intertwining of economic and political interests. A great deal of what led to the present world war catastrophe lies in such a tangle of political, cultural and economic issues, as has emerged, for example, in the Sandschak question or the Dardanelles question in the southeast of the European continent or in the Baghdad railway problem.

The fourth question:

Will the economy of exchange by 'wages' be replaced by a natural economy?

In my book and in many lectures I have explained that the concept of wages will no longer have any real meaning in the future, because a kind of socialization will occur between manual laborers and intellectual workers. So there can be no question of a return to a purely natural economy. But money will — even if the leading commercial state of England adheres to the gold standard — at least initially in domestic trade — take on a different significance. What adheres to money today — that it is a commodity — will fall away. What will be present in the monetary system will be only a kind of changing accounting of the exchange of goods between the people belonging to the economic area. A kind of written credit will be kept in what is used as a monetary record. And a deduction of these credits will take place when one acquires anything one needs. A kind of bookkeeping, walking bookkeeping, will be the monetary system. Money, which is a commodity today and its equivalent, gold, which is only a sham commodity, will no longer be a commodity in the future.

The fifth question:

Is compulsory labor envisaged?

Now, dear readers, anyone who delves into the spirit of my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that what must seem to every humanely thinking person - I say quite bluntly here - must appear as the most abominable, a bureaucratically ordered compulsion to work, that in the future [in a threefold social organism] can be eliminated. Of course, everyone is forced to work by their social circumstances, and one has only the choice of either starving or working. There cannot be any compulsion to work other than that which arises from the circumstances in this way [in a social order] in which the freedom of the human being is a basic condition.

The sixth question:

Is the abolition of inheritance law planned?

Inheritance law, to the extent that parts of it remain, will at most be based on the fact that in a transitional period some kind of reckoning must be made with feelings of piety and the like. But inheritance law [in the sense of the previous inheritance law] will no longer be talked about in the future for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it can no longer be the case that something that cannot actually be sold, that is not for sale, still has value for someone. On the other hand, inheritance will no longer be needed, because under the institutions of a healthy social organism, people will be able to provide for the future of those who belong to them in a completely different way than is the case today under the purely materialistic law of inheritance. I have stated this in my book.

The third set of questions is headed: “On practical feasibility”. The first question:

Does not the accidental nature of personal talent (often not factual content, but individual ability such as skill, oratory and the like) create an upper class with the danger of abuse of the power entrusted to it, as well as corruption, and towards which envy and resentment of the lower class persists?

Now, dear attendees, anyone who does not want this formation will never be able to contribute anything to any fruitful shaping of the social organism if it does not correspond to the absolutely ideal state. The greatest enemy of all social impulses is when, through these social impulses, one wants to establish, so to speak, the happiness of humanity. I would like to use a comparison here. You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, let us take the human organism, let us assume that it is a so-called healthy organism. You don't feel it at all, and precisely because you don't feel anything in your organism, it is a healthy organism. Joy, harmony, and inner soul culture must first arise on the basis of such a healthy organism. You cannot expect the doctor to give you soul joy or inner soul culture in addition to health, but you can only expect him to make your organism healthy. It is only on the basis of a healthy organism that inner soul culture can arise. But if the organism is sick, then the soul shares in the sickness, then its inner life is dependent on this sickness. It is the same in the social organism. The sick social organism makes people unhappy; but the healthy social organism cannot yet make people happy, but only creates the conditions for human happiness, which can arise when the social organism is healthy. Therefore, the impulse for the tripartite social organism is to seek the living conditions of a healthy social organism. Of course, corruption or the like can also arise there – that cannot be denied – but such corruptions can be improved by countermeasures, and the greatest prospect of improving them when they occur lies precisely in the health of the social organism itself. I am firmly convinced that if the social organism is healthy, then the professional windbags with their gift of the gab will simply drive people away; they will not have much support. At present, due to our social circumstances, this is not yet the case. Particularly in those spheres where intellectual life is supposed to flourish, it sometimes happens that the audience of some professional babbler in a professorial chair takes to its heels, but they have to pay their college fees and may also take their exams. And professional babbling with its corruption has no particular effect on real life, on the living conditions of the social organism. Such things will naturally fall away in the future when man is instructed in the spiritual life to rely on the fact that he must gain the trust of his fellow human beings and that, for example, only on this trust of his fellow human beings can his achievements be based.

The second question, and this is the last question that has been put to me in this bundle of questions:

What evidence is there that communism, which does not strive for the equality of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie but for the rule of the proletariat, and which believes that the bourgeoisie will not voluntarily renounce its present position, will renounce its program of power in favor of threefolding and see an accommodation on the part of the propertied classes not only as an advance payment?

This question cannot be answered simply on the basis of the structure of the threefold organism. Rather, it must be said that the gulf that has arisen between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the non-proletariat, on the other, is essentially the fault of the leading circles , that is, the non-proletariat, and that the next task of these leading circles would be to really understand the demands of the proletariat and to be able to respond to them; for the proletariat will need, above all, the strength of intellectual workers. It is not in some impossible demands from one side or the other that one should see a danger, but only in the lack of goodwill to build any kind of bridge across the abyss.

There are now a few other written questions, for example the question:

In the three-part social organism, human labor will lose the character of a commodity. There will no longer be a wage in the traditional sense. The workers of a company will receive a contractually agreed portion of the total revenue of the company in question, while another portion will belong to the employees and the manager. How will it be ensured that the worker is guaranteed a kind of subsistence minimum, for example if a single company has a low earning capacity?

This question is dealt with in my book, and I will only note here that the question in the most eminent sense, when the three members of the healthy social organism really exist, is an economic question, and that the socialization of economic life will give rise to a major practical question for those administrations that will be active within the economic body. In essence, I would say that this question boils down to the following: what is today called the minimum subsistence level is still conceived in terms of the wage relationship. This kind of thinking will not be able to take place in the same way in the case of independent economic activity. There, the question will have to be posed purely and simply from the point of view of economic life. This question will then arise in such a way that a person, by performing some kind of service, by producing something, will receive in exchange as many other human services as he needs to satisfy his needs and those of those who belong to him, until he has produced a new, similar product. In doing so, only what the person has to do for his family in terms of work and the like must be taken into account. Then one will find a certain, I would say original cell of economic life. And that which will make this original cell of economic life what will make people satisfy their needs until they produce a similar new product, that applies to all branches of spiritual and material life. It will have to be organized in such a way that the associations, the coalitions, the cooperatives of the kind I have described earlier will have to ensure that this primal cell of economic life can exist. That is to say, that each product, in comparison with other products, has a value equal to the other products needed to satisfy needs until a new, similar product is produced. The fact that this original cell of economic life does not yet exist today is precisely because labor, goods and rights converge in the supply and demand of today's market and that these three areas must be separated in the future in the tripartite, healthy social organism.

Then the following question was asked:

How does Dr. Steiner envision an improved future for the status of private teachers and teachers of similar professions whose necessary income depends on the number of hours they personally work? How will it be possible in the future to strip their labor of its character as a commodity?

Well, that takes care of itself, because anyone who works as a teacher in the spiritual life will, when they are no longer tied into the state machine, actually be more or less free, but then in a healthy way, like any spiritual cultural activity in the threefold organism. That is about all that can be said on the matter. Simply, such persons as are meant here will be equated with those who today have monopolies, in that they are, in the field of the spiritual, combined in their position with purely state affairs.

I think I will now take a break in answering the questions submitted in writing so that any questions that may arise from the honored audience are not affected. The questions that I answered first have been on my mind for quite some time, and I wanted to answer them first today because I believe that they could be really significant for a larger circle. If we are unable to answer all the questions today, we can do so at a later date. I think it would be a good idea to let the questions that may arise from the audience approach us now.

Wilhelm von Blume: So I ask the esteemed attendees, if you have any questions on your mind, to speak up now and submit them in writing as far as possible. But you are also welcome to ask questions orally. We would just ask you to come here and ask the question from here so that we can hear you all.

Perhaps I may in the meantime answer the one question that was raised earlier with a word that I would like to add to what Dr. Steiner said, because this question has occasionally arisen for me myself and I therefore well understood that it was asked. It is the question of the position of the municipalities in the future threefold social organism. Perhaps the questioner would like to know more about what the situation of the municipalities will actually be in the future threefold social organism. The question has been asked: What will happen to the municipal schools, what will happen to the gasworks and so on? Behind this is the question: what will become of the community in the future, if, as there is no doubt, the gasworks, as an event in economic life, must be integrated into the overall organization of economic life, and can no longer be considered a special municipal institution? The questioner did not mention anything else, but the question of housing is at least as important. Who will be responsible for the construction of housing in the future? The construction of housing is, to put it bluntly, an economic process, since it involves 'production'. And there can be no doubt that the allocation of housing for use can also be regarded as an economic process. In the future, this matter will have to be dealt with by the special economic organization. One might think that the community will lose all or at least almost all of the tasks it has had until today – so what will actually become of the community? And yet: the community remains, and the community will continue to play an extremely important role in the future, just as the state remains and will continue to have tasks to perform in the future. I think everyone will immediately feel that the transfer of the gasworks from pure municipal administration to a special economic administration also has its very, very good sides, when they consider that the price of gas, which is charged by the community today, is not set with the aim of enabling as many people as possible to have this gas at a price that reflects the cost of production, but rather because the gasworks is a municipal institution that generates income and [through the surplus] municipal finances are maintained. The same applies to the power stations, the trams and so on. This means that these institutions, which are actually supposed to pursue very specific economic purposes, must also serve the financial purposes of the community, and often enough in such a way that the actual purpose of providing the community's residents with these extremely important goods is severely compromised. So it is certainly an advantage if, in the future, the community can no longer use such institutions for its financial purposes, but if they are only used for purely economic purposes. But the community remains the organization subordinate to the state in all matters of law and administration, that is, in particular, the police and the so-called welfare work - the welfare work insofar as it relates to the maintenance of the strength of the individual. That will be the task of the community, and that is where it has its most important task, as it does today. The community has only taken on economic activity because no one else has properly addressed this task, and it is fortunate, I believe, for a proper community life if in the future the purely economic is no longer the concern of the community. It is fortunate that in the future the municipal administration will no longer be organized in such a way that selfish interests prevail, but will be organized in such a way that every individual can effectively come to his or her rights.

As for spiritual life, what applies in general to the separation of this spiritual life from the influence of the state must also apply to the community. It is clear that today the communities have achieved a great deal of good in this area, but the disadvantages of economic interests interfering in cultural matters, which keep cropping up, can be felt clearly enough in the area of community life. But nevertheless, the community still has the very large area that it had before it took over such community institutions. So the fear that the community would become completely superfluous is just as unjustified as the other fear that the state would actually be finished off by this threefold order. It is not.

No further questions have been asked from the audience so far. Dr. Steiner will now answer the questions submitted in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: There is still the question:

The Steinerian economic order will have to submit to a certain government policy in broad outline, such as the nationality principle, the militaristic or pacifistic world order. Will the burden on the economy (apart from the current war debts and war reparations) be any different according to these guiding principles? Will not, for example, a nationalist policy, conceived in the old way, again burden the economy above all else and undermine the general welfare?

Now, dear attendees, the question arises from a not yet complete penetration of what the essence of the threefold social organism actually is. You see, the damage caused by the unitary state arises from the fact that, let us say, in the legal sphere, and thus to the greatest extent in politics, economic interests interfere, for example, when farmers form an alliance and assert themselves in the state parliament as the “Alliance of Farmers” and there, based on their interests, influence the legal system. On the other hand, harm can come about when a corporation that pursues purely spiritual interests – let us say, for example, the Catholic-organized “center” – in turn sits in the state parliament and there makes the legal interests, I would say, into reshaped spiritual interests. Now you will say: Well, in the future the three elements will exist separately: the spiritual organism, which is completely self-governing from the spiritual principles; the legal organism, which will form the continuation of the present state organism, but which will not have the spiritual and economic life within itself, but only the legal and political life; the economic organism, the cycle of economic life. But, you will say, the three areas do have certain things, certain interests in common, and they are connected through the individual himself; the individual is involved in some kind of business in which the three independent administrative areas play a role. You will ask: Yes, could not some club or the like assert itself in the future for the parliament of the legal ground, which carries the economic interests into the legal ground and asserts its interests in the state parliament , as for example, in the unified state, the farmers' union wants to make rights out of economic interests, or as the center wants to make rights out of religious, confessional interests, that is, out of spiritual life, through coalitions with other parties?

Now, dear attendees, the essence of the threefold social organism, which is still so little understood today, is that in the realm of the economic plane, only economic measures can be taken, not legal measures and not measures that have anything to do with the development of human abilities, which are to be administered in the realm of spiritual life; in the realm of the legal life, only legal issues will have to be developed at all. Let us assume, then, that a club with economic interests were to be found in the parliament of the legal sphere, in the state parliament. It would never be able to take measures that somehow influence economic life, since only legal issues relating to the equality of all people are ever discussed in this parliament. They cannot be conceived in terms of economic life. Economic life is out of the question in the Parliament of Right. It is impossible for anyone, no matter how much economic interest he may have, to assert his economic interests in the Parliament of Right, because nothing of an economic character can take place on the basis of the life of right; that can only take place on the basis of economic life. The point is that it is not a question of dividing men into classes, but of dividing the social organism itself. Thus the present unified state breaks down into three areas, and the interests of each area cannot be asserted in any way in the other two, because such assertion would have no effect in these areas. It is precisely this consistency that will bring about the future healing of the social organism; it is also the reason why this tripartite social organism is a social necessity.

I believe that most of those who have already familiarized themselves with the impulse of the tripartite organism consider what is meant by it to be much too sophisticated, something beyond practical application, something that someone has thought about and come up with: The unified organism did not work out well, so let's make three of them. That is not the point. What is important is the recognition of real life and real necessities, which lead to the tripartite social organism as a consequence. Today, we often hear people say: “We don't understand what is actually wanted.” They don't understand what is actually being sought. Today, so many people say to such an impulse: “We don't understand that.” Why is that? You see, that comes from something that is supposed to be different and better through the threefold social organism. Today, when people are called upon to judge something, what is missing above all is the connection with life. When someone speaks today from a theory, from something that can be explained with a few general principles, which are ultimately comprehensible to every normal person when they come of age, then people understand it. But when we speak today of something that cannot be grasped in this way, but for which a true connection with life is necessary, where one must appeal to life experience, then people come and say they do not understand it. Where does this come from? It comes from the unitary state that we have had for four centuries; through this unitary state, people have been thrown into a life in which they are involved in a particular area of life and have acquired a certain routine in it. They call this routine their practice. They know what they have through this routine. Otherwise, they are educated by the state from the lowest school level. What will play a role in the future is not part of their education, real life is not part of their education, but decrees, laws and so on are part of their education. The abstract nature of the decree and the law flows into human thinking [from the lowest school level], so that today people only have the routine of some individual branch, which they handle quite mechanically. Anyone who disagrees with them on this point, based on a broader experience of life, is called a fool or an impractical person. And on top of that, they have a head full of abstractions because they have only been educated from decrees, laws, teaching objectives and so on, which are not taken from life, but merely from some abstract way of thinking, which has sole authority on the legal ground, but on no other ground of life. In the legal sphere, it has legitimacy because, in the legal sphere, anything that any normal person of legal age can spin out of themselves simply by being of age can be claimed as a human right over against all other people. But what cannot be spun out of the ground is what must flow into the administration of economic life and into the development of intellectual life. Therefore, because we have lacked the freedom of intellectual life, the self-reliance of intellectual life, we have today this strange phenomenon that people can only grasp what they have been thinking for a long time.

Recently, I spoke in a neighboring town about the same issues that I am talking about here now. Afterwards, someone came forward to join the discussion who put forward something from which one could see that he had only taken up and even heard from my remarks what he had been used to for decades, even down to the sentence structure. But what had not been in his brain box for decades, that man did not even hear, it passed him by so strangely that he did not even hear it, that he denied it altogether in the discussion. This is because something like the impulse for a tripartite social organism must appeal not to what we have been educated to through abstract decrees, laws, teaching objectives, courses and so on, but must appeal to what people understand from life itself. That is why such a gulf has opened up today, when one speaks not out of utopian and ideological thinking, but precisely out of life. The more practical one's words are today, the more impractical people call one, because people do not have a real life practice, but only life routine and abstractions in their heads. That is also what leads to the fear that in the future, in the tripartite social organism, there could somehow be a tyranny from one side or the other. This cannot happen because, as I have explained, such a tyranny cannot even assert itself. No matter how many laws are passed in the right-wing parliament, they would not affect economic life, because even what would be dangerous for the interests of economic life could not affect economic life, since it is independently administered.

Another question:

On the other hand, how are the requirements of social policy, for example support for war invalids, orphans, the weak, and so on, regulated? In particular, on what scale? How are the results of the economy used? Couldn't a suitable government configuration render Dr. Steiner's social policy illusory? Even if the main excesses of capitalism, the rent economy, were eliminated, can't the distribution of the burdens still be one-sided?

The last part of the question has already been answered with what I have just said. But the fact that a truly self-reliant economic life can take even better care of widows and orphans, etc., is explained in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. I have already indicated that the economic unit must take into account what each person has to contribute as a quota to what widows and orphans, and other people who are unable to work, receive, as explained in my book, and also for children for whom I claim the right to educate. The standard for this will be derived simply from the living expenses of the other persons. Since the economic unit provides a standard for the living expenses of a person according to the existing overall economic prosperity, this also makes it possible to create a standard for the living expenses of those who really cannot work.

The next question:

Could the dangers of the so-called bourgeois government not continue to exist? Are these not further strengthened by the fact that, depending on the composition of the leading political direction, the distribution of offices can take place in such a way that, despite all the good words, the leadership and the occupation of the factories, cooperatives and so on happens through cronyism? In a backward ruling society, that is, in parliament, who guarantees the removal of the incompetent and the lazy from a leading or independent position? Can't a clique economy quickly destroy the advantages of Steiner's system?

Basically, the answer to this question also follows from what I have already said. Because, dear attendees, it is really not a matter of devising some ideal state in which it can no longer happen that one or the other eats up something, but rather it is a matter of finding the best possible state adapted to some specific human society. What is here called the “cousin's” way and the like, that would, if you only really think about things - but think about them practically, according to reality - become quite impossible. For just consider that in this threefold social organism the circulation of the means of production takes place on the widest possible scale, and that, furthermore, the cooperation of the manual workers with the intellectual workers is based on a completely free contract regarding their respective services. So there are much greater safeguards than anywhere else. If you consider, for example, what can arise from corruption and informers in a large economic cooperative that has become a tyrannical state, then I would like to know how that compares with what can arise in the threefold social organism due to a flaw in human nature in the individual, certainly here and there, but which will of course soon be corrected. The greatest safeguard against the spread of damage that is inherent in human nature is offered by the very liveliness that takes place in the threefold social organism, because the three limbs of the social organism themselves control each other. A unified organism, especially one that is built on the purely material economic life, carries within itself the dangers that are characterized by this question. And because these dangers can be foreseen, the question has arisen – again out of a practical necessity – how to remove the possibility of these damages arising from a unified economic body. By taking out the legal life, thus creating a correction for what can arise as injustice. How do you remove the damage to the spiritual realm caused by the economic system of production? By the spiritual realm governing itself; it must be based on trust in one's fellow human beings, and the unfit must withdraw from the spiritual life and become manual laborers or the like. All this arises directly from the threefold social organism, because this threefold structure also provides the possibility of correction for damage that occurs in one or the other area.

Another question is asked here:

How do you envision the self-administration of the spiritual realm and which organizations will support it?

Now, dear attendees, to characterize this complicated self-administration of the spiritual realm in detail would take a long, long time. I can only hint that it will be a matter of only those people being involved in the self-administration of the spiritual realm who are also active in this spiritual realm themselves. Thus, for example, in the field of education, nothing but that which the pedagogue, as pedagogue, must properly exert as influence, will enter into the self-administration. The selection of personalities for certain posts will not be based on examinations, decrees and the like, but on the actual pedagogical knowledge of abilities and so on, so that the question of where I stand in the spiritual organism will depend, let us say in the specific field of schooling, on pedagogical considerations alone, that is, on inner considerations. Never will any other body, the economic or state body, be able to organize the schools according to its own needs. The schools will be organized solely on the basis of human needs up to the age of fifteen, and from the age of fifteen on, according to the needs of the social organism, according to the needs of the life of this social organism. But this means that what is administration depends precisely on the same points of view as teaching itself in educational institutions. In the future, the human being must not be placed in one place by a state and then also have to follow the state's decrees; rather, everything that is active in the spiritual life is placed only in an administration that has arisen from the point of view of this spiritual life itself.

The question then arises:

Has the Federation for Threefolding already considered the establishment of a cultural council for the spiritual realm? If not, then the assembly should take the initiative to do so.

Now, esteemed attendees, it is of no use today if we do not speak openly and honestly about the great tasks that present us with the present, Economic life has taken on forms that have led the proletariat to vigorously defend its economic interests. It is well known, through a wide variety of circumstances, that today the proletariat suffers greatly from the fact that it has more or less a theoretical goal but no practice. Nevertheless, what lives in the proletariat is a definite will, which is also the result of a very definite political education that has gone through decades. From this will, something like a works council or a council of intellectual and physical workers can be formed today. This will not be easy, especially since if it does not happen quickly, it could be too late.

But, I would like to say, today it is a struggle with obstacles that are less and less formidable than those of the creation of a cultural council, because the most diverse [obstacles] confront one. For example, there are party leaders today who believe they think socialist, completely socialist, no longer in the sense of the old intellectual culture of the privileged classes, and yet they have adopted nothing but that intellectual culture. Nothing but the ultimate consequence of this intellectual culture lives in their heads. This intellectual culture of the leading and ruling circles can be characterized by the fact that, over the past four centuries, it has increasingly merged with economic life to such an extent that intellectual life is now actually only a consequence of economic life, a kind of superstructure over economic life. From this experience of the last three to four centuries, the proletariat, or rather proletarian theory, has now formed the view that intellectual life may only be something that arises from economic life. The moment you put this into practice, the moment you say that intellectual life may only arise from economic life, you lay the foundation for the complete destruction of intellectual life, for the complete destruction of culture. The bourgeoisie cannot now demand that the proletariat should take a different view and expect everything from economic life, because the bourgeoisie itself has brought everything to the point where ultimately everything of a spiritual nature is somehow dependent on economic life.

The course of development was such that, in the beginning, historical development overcame those damages that arose for man within human society from the aristocratic order. From this aristocratic order, legal damages arose; the bourgeoisie fought for rights against what used to be the aristocratic order. Then, in the course of historical development, the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is, between the propertied and the propertyless, emerged as a further consequence. The great struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is aimed at no longer allowing labor power to be a commodity. As things stand today, the proletariat is vigorously demanding – and this is not only a proletarian demand, but an historical one – that in the future physical labor should no longer be a commodity. The bourgeoisie demanded liberalism because it no longer wanted the old aristocratic privileges, because it no longer wanted to make the law a thing to be conquered and bought. The proletariat demands the emancipation of labor from the character of a commodity. If we do not want to leave something behind that would plunge all of Central and Eastern Europe into a state of barbarism, we must recognize something else today. If the proletariat were not to demand cooperation with intellectual labor in a spirit of understanding, the proletariat would succeed in divesting physical labor of its commercial character. However, the consequence of this would be that in the future a state would arise in which all intellectual human labor would become a commodity. This state must not be allowed to come about, must not be brought about. The seriousness of the task must be grasped in such a way that at the same time as physical labor, spiritual, truly spiritual labor, also comes into its own. The old aristocracy brought about the lack of rights of the people, the old bourgeoisie brought about the lack of property of the proletariat. If the purely materialistic-economic view of the proletarian question remained, the dehumanization of intellectual life would remain. We are facing this danger if those who have a heart and mind for cultural life do not take the initiative to liberate this intellectual life themselves. And this intellectual life can only be liberated if we break away from the dependence of intellectual life, which I have characterized in so many different ways, and really bring about a reorganization of intellectual life through a serious cultural council. But today we must speak honestly and openly: interest in this area is unfortunately still far too low. The most pressing task at hand is to recognize that this is an urgent issue. A cultural council must be formed.

The attempts we have made, including a meeting yesterday, have not been very promising, because people do not yet realize what is at stake today if we do not manage to put intellectual work on its own feet and not let it be a slave of economic or state life. It is therefore an urgent necessity that in the very near future hearts and minds be stirred precisely for a cultural council. The apolitical nature of our Central European people, which has unfortunately manifested itself in such a dreadful way in the last four to five years, is what should lead to self-knowledge precisely in the spiritual realm. This is what should open people's spiritual eyes and hearts to the fact that our spiritual life has so far been the spiritual life of a small clique, calculated on the basis that it would develop on the soil of broad masses of people who could not participate in this spiritual life, and that today we must create a spiritual life in which every human being can find a dignified existence not only physically but also spiritually and soulfully. Dearly beloved, if one looked into the damage to this spiritual life, especially in the years that have proven to be the decades of preparation for the current world catastrophe, one could truly be seized by cultural concerns.

Then the question was:

What is the best way to educate our children?

In the time when people were so proud of the fact that they did not want to pay homage to any authority, children were still being educated in such a way that the blindest belief in the authority of the established was the most authoritative of all, and the connection between this established order and life could no longer be judged at all. They had neither the heart nor the mind to appreciate that, for example, the habits of thought that a person absorbs in the last years of youth permeate his entire being and constitute his entire being. Do we, as members of the intellectual elite, really absorb anything vital for the present day?

Interjection: Very true!

Oh, this spiritual life needs a thorough transformation, and it is very difficult to find an open ear among people in this field today. But until this open ear is found, there will be no salvation. There is no one-sided solution to the social question, only a three-pronged one. It is essential to stand on the ground of a spiritual life that really arises out of life. This requires goodwill, not the unconscious evil will of the pigtails. Therefore, it is urgently necessary that precisely in this area, something arises that can be called a cultural council. I can only say that a cultural council seems to me to be an absolutely essential requirement, because it must develop an activity that saves us from the commercialization of intellectual work in the external life.

This question seems to be related to the other question that was asked:

If we can expect the transformation of economic life in the sense of the separation from the unitary state through the organization of the works council to take place quickly, how then can intellectual life quickly be made independent and its reconstruction tackled?

Precisely by forming a cultural council and exploring the requirements within this cultural council that are necessary for the rebuilding of our intellectual life. That is what I have to say in response to these questions.

Lively applause and hand clapping.

Dr. Carl Unger: Dear attendees, a whole series of further questions have been received, which we will probably – and I hope you will agree – postpone answering until a later evening.

However, it is extremely important to us to really take to heart the last words of the esteemed speaker. Right now, a challenge is circulating among us that truly bears the mummification of the bankrupt intellectual life: the question of the galvanization and preservation of the humanistic grammar schools in the old sense. We have heard in which direction we have to look when we look at the dire consequences of contemporary life, and we have heard where we have to attack in the intellectual life. And just in these days we have also noticed how the impulse of a new spiritual, a new artistic life has been met with the greatest philiserosicäs. Dear attendees, we must allow strong impulses to arise within us from the words we have just heard, which work to release forces and strong, even revolutionary willpower for the spiritual life in us in the direction of preparing to found or form a genuine cultural council. But this can only be founded on freedom, on the own initiative of individual personalities who, from whatever situation in the spiritual life, are willing and able to contribute to a real new development of spiritual life. The purpose of my present words is to trigger this initiative and to work towards promoting this idea and the threefold social order among those present. We are prepared, first of all, to accept addresses – and indeed as early as this evening – from personalities who are willing to take on the heavy task that our esteemed speaker has set us. I ask to be allowed to approach you with this request, and I would like to ask you in particular to let the impulses for the rebuilding of intellectual life take effect in you in the strongest possible way and also to bring them to bear in other personalities.

With that, allow me to close today's meeting.

Today I hope to conclude my remarks about human society in the present time and the social demands it makes on us, but I am only too aware that all I have been able to say and still intend to say here can amount to nothing more than a very scanty guideline. The social question in our time is extremely wide-ranging, and there are two main aspects that need taking into account if we are to reach some clarity about it. These are firstly the present historical moment in human evolution and secondly the immediate external circumstances in the world.

The present historical moment in human evolution needs to be approached with the utmost impartiality. Our understanding is all too easily clouded by preconceptions and an emotional approach that leads us to skate over the surface of what is going on in the depths not so much of the human soul as of the very nature of the human being as such.

We are easily misunderstood when we say that we are living in an age of transition, for this has been said in almost every age. Obviously we always live in a time of transition from past to future, but the point is to discern the nature of the particular transition in question. To do this it is necessary to realize that ‘the present’ does not mean this year or even this decade but a much longer period of time. The present time has been in preparation since the fifteenth century, and the nineteenth century was its culmination. Although we are now right in the midst of this age, people in general have little appreciation of the particular character of this particular moment in world history.

To put it plainly, to gain any kind of insight into social life today we have to investigate the way human beings are straining to extricate themselves from old social forms because they long to be free, independent human beings pure and simple.

To use a German term, we need a Weltanschauung der Freiheir, a universal conception of freedom or—since ‘freedom’ in this country has other connotations—a universal conception of spiritual activity in deed, in thought and feeling deriving from the spiritual individuality of the human being.

Early in the 1890s in my book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I endeavoured to paint a picture of what human beings are now striving for not so much in their conscious as in their subconscious activity. In former times human beings were bound within a social context as far as their thoughts and actions were concerned. Look at someone in the Middle Ages: he was not an individual in the sense we mean today, but rather a member of a class or a particular station in life; he was a Christian, or a nobleman or a citizen. All his thoughts were bourgeois or aristocratic or priestly. Itis only in recent centuries that individuals have extricated themselves from these structures. If one wanted to fit into society in a social way in former times one had to ask oneself: ‘What is priestly behaviour? How should a priest behave towards others? How should a citizen behave towards others? How should a nobleman behave towards others?” Nowadays we ask: ‘How should one behave in a way that is in keeping with one’s worth as a human being and one’s rights as a human being?’

To find the answer one has to look for something within oneself. We now have to seek within ourselves the impulses that formerly showed us how to behave in society in consequence of being a citizen, a nobleman or a priest. These impulses are not in our body but in our spirit which is impressed into our soul. That is why in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I described the moral impulse that is at the same time the most profound social impulse guiding the human being as ‘moral intuition’.’? Something needs to come to fruition in us that can guide us even in the most concrete situations and tell us: This is what you must do now.

Then, you see, everything depends on the individual. Then you have to look at the individuality of each human being with the presupposition that moral intuitions reside in his or her heart and soul. All education must be aimed at awakening these moral intuitions, so that every individual can express the sense: ‘I belong not only to this earth, I am not solely a product of physical heredity; I have come down to the earth from spiritual worlds and as this particular individual I have a specific task to do here on earth.’

But to know that we have a task is not enough; we also need to find out what that task is. In each concrete situation we must find within ourselves what it is that we have to do. Our soul must tell us. Vague pricks of conscience must develop into individual moral intuition. This is what it means to become free as a human being; it means to build only on what we can discover within ourselves.

A good many people have taken strong exception to this because they imagine it would lead to placing the whole moral sphere in society at the mercy of individual caprice. But this is not the case. The moral sphere then rests on the only basis suitable for society, which is, on the one hand, the basis of mutual trust. We must learn to acquire this mutual trust in the larger concerns of life, just as we already have it in small things. If I come up against Mr K. in the doorway as I leave, I instinctively trust that he will not come straight for me and knock me down. I myself act in accordance with the same trust and we both make way so as not to knock into each other. We already do this in the lesser events of life, but it is something that can be applied in all our affairs if we learn to see ourselves rightly as free beings. There has to be trust between individuals—what a golden word this is! In educating ourselves and others to trust and believe in the individual human being, rather than just the nation or humanity as a whole, in working towards trust in the individual we are doing the only thing that can generate an impulse for social life in the future, for only such trust can create community among individuals. This is the one aspect. The other is that when there is no longer anyone telling us what to do or compelling us to do it, we shall have to find the necessary impetus within ourselves not only to act but also to respond to situations with feeling, to be active in our soul. What does this mean? If someone was a priest in former times he knew his station in society. Without having to look it up in a book he knew how to behave when he wore the habit of a religious order, and that certain obligations were connected with this. Likewise if he wore the sword of the nobility he knew that his place in human society was based on being a nobleman. He had his specific place in the social order, and the same applied to the citizen.

Whether we like it or not, this is something that is no longer appropriate in human society. Of course there are plenty of people who want to go back to those days, but world history is telling us otherwise. There is absolutely no point in establishing abstract programmes for all kinds of social set-ups. The only useful thing we can do is look at what current history is telling us.

So now we have to ask ourselves what the emotive impulse for our social actions can be when we are no longer pushed along by virtue of being a priest, a citizen, a nobleman or a member of the fourth estate. Only this: we must have as much trust in our dealings with other people as we have in a person whom we love. To be free means to realize oneself in actions carried out with love.

One golden word that must rule social life in the future is ‘trust’. The other is ‘love’ for the task we have to do. In future, actions will be good for society as a whole if they arise out of love for the whole of humanity.

But first we have to learn what love for the whole of humanity means. It is no good jumping to the conclusion that it already exists. It does not, and the more we tell ourselves that it does not yet exist the better it will be. Love for the whole of humanity must be a love of deeds, it must become active and must realize itself in freedom. Then it will gradually move on from the domestic hearth or the local pulpit and become a universal, world-wide appraisal.

From this point of view I now want to ask how you think a worldwide appraisal of this kind can be applied, for example, to that most dreadful and heartbreaking example of social chaos now taking hold in Eastern Europe, in Russia.

In such a situation it is important to ask the right question, and the right question is: ‘Is there too little food on the earth for the whole of mankind?’ We have to refer to the whole globe, for since the last third of the nineteenth century we have a world economy, not national economies, and it is important to take this into account in the social context. No one will reply that there is too little food on the earth for the whole of humanity. Such a time may come, and then people will have to use their ingenuity to solve the problem. But for now we can still be sure that if countless people are going hungry in any corner of the earth, it is because human arrangements in recent decades have brought this about. It is these human arrangements that are preventing the right food supplies from reaching the starving corner of the earth in time. It is a question of distributing the food supplies in the right way at the right time.

What has happened? At a specific moment in history Russia has isolated a huge territory from the rest of the world by instituting a continuation of Tsarism on the basis of a purely intellectual abstraction. A feeling of nationalism extending over a large territory has locked Russia away from the rest of the world, thus preventing global social arrangements from enabling human hands to let nature from one part of the world help out generously in another where nature has failed for once.

When we can find the right angle from which to view these things, the sight of such social distress will lead each of us to cry: “Mea culpa.’ For although we feel we are all individuals, this does not deprive us of a sense of unity with the whole of humanity. In our human evolution we have no right to feel ourselves as individuals unless we also have a sense of belonging to humanity as a whole.

I should like to call this the fundamental ground from which any ‘philosophy of freedom’ must spring, for such a philosophy must place each individual human being in the social context in an entirely new way. Our questions, t00, will then become quite new.

Very many questions have been asked about society in recent centuries, and especially in the nineteenth century; and what have the proletarian millions made of these questions which arose first among members of the higher classes? Why is there such a widespread view that the proletarian millions are on the wrong track? It is because they have taken erroneous doctrines on board from the higher classes. They have become the pupils of the higher classes; the doctrines are not their own.

We must learn to see things clearly. Some maintain that human beings are the product of their environment, that they are produced by the social circumstances and arrangements all around them. Others say that social circumstances are what people have made them. All such views are just about as clever as asking: Is the human physical body the product of the head or of the stomach? The physical human being is the product of neither but rather of a continuous interaction between the two. The two have to work together; the head is both cause and effect, and the stomach is both cause and effect. Indeed, if you look a little deeper you will find that the stomach is made by the head, for in the embryo the head is created before the stomach is formed; but on the other hand it is the stomach that forms the organism.

So we must not ask whether human beings have been created by circumstances or circumstances by human beings. It is essential to understand that each is both cause and effect, that everything affects everything else. The foremost question to ask is: “What social arrangements will enable people to have the right thoughts on matters of social concern, and what kind of thoughts must exist so that these right social arrangements can arise?’

In practical life people tend to think in terms of doing one thing after another. But this leads nowhere. We can only make progress if we think in circles, but many people do not feel up to doing this because it would be like having a mill-wheel turning in their head. It is essential to think in circles. Looking at external circumstances we must admit that they have been created by people but also that people are affected by them. And looking at the things people do we must realize that these actions bring about the external circumstances but also that they are sustained by these same external circumstances. To arrive at reality we must skip back and forth in our thoughts, but people do not like doing this. They want to set up a procedure and make a programme: Point 1, Point 2, Point 3, right up to, let us say, Point 12, with Point 1 coming first and Point 12 last. But there is no life in this. Any programme should be reversible, so that we can begin with Point 12 and work back to Point 1, just as the stomach nourishes the organism, and if the nerves situated underneath the cerebellum are not in good order we cannot breathe properly. Just as things can be reversed in life, so must we also see to it that they can be reversed in social life.

In the same vein, when I wrote my book Towards Social Renewal I had to assume, on the basis of the social situation at the time, that it would find readers who would be capable of going both forwards and backwards in their ideas. But people do not want this. They prefer to begin at the beginning and read through to the end, at which point they know that they have finished. They are not interested in being told that the end is also the beginning. The worst misunderstanding connected with this book with its social intentions was that people read it the wrong way; and they continue to do so. They do not want to adapt their thoughts to life; they want life to adapt to their thoughts. This, however, is not at all the precondition for social arrangements with which we are dealing here. I shall continue with this theme after the translation.

When people began to discuss the idea of a threefold social organism I heard about an interesting opinion. The idea of a threefold society draws attention to the three streams in social life that I have been describing over the last few days. Firstly there is the cultural, spiritual stream which is today the heritage of the old theocracies, for all cultural life can ultimately be traced back to the origins of theocracy. Secondly there is what I have called the sphere of political, legal affairs, and thirdly what can be termed economic life. When attention was focused on the threefolding impulse, on these three ideas, there were people of good standing in the world, manufacturers perhaps, or clergymen, people with a specific position in society, who came and pronounced on the matter: ‘How delightful to discover a new suggestion emerging that will once again validate Plato’s grand ideas.” These people thought I had breathed new life into Plato’s division of society into the order of agricultural producers, the order of soldiers and the order of statesmen and scholars.

All I could say was that perhaps this might seem so to those who rush to the libraries to ascertain the origins of any new idea. But for those who understand what I mean by a threefolding of social life it will be obvious that it is the opposite of what Plato meant by his three orders, for Plato lived a good many years prior to the Mystery of Golgotha. His three orders were appropriate in his time, but to bring them back to life now would be absurd. The idea of a threefold organism is not concerned with dividing individuals into groups with some being producers, others soldiers and yet others statesmen. What we want to do now is create arrangements, institutions in which every individual can partake in turn, for today we are concerned with human individuals and not with orders or categories. There will be arrangements in which the cultural, spiritual life of humanity can be cultivated, this being built solely on people’s individual capabilities. Secondly there will be independent arrangements that govern political and legal life without wanting to swallow up the other two elements of the social organism. And thirdly there will be arrangements dealing solely with economic affairs.

The political, legal life will deal with agreements people have to make with one another, with things that are determined between individuals.

In the cultural, spiritual sphere not everyone will be able to make judgements, for in this sphere only those can judge who have the necessary competence in a particular subject. Here everything emanates from the individual human being. There is a wholeness in the cultural life; it has to be a coherent, uniform body. You will object that this is not so, but I shall come to this in a moment.

The political, legal sphere requires individuals to work together in the sense of present-day democracy in matters that require no specialist knowledge, so that every individual is competent to form judgements. Such a sphere exists; it is the legal and political life.

Thirdly there is the sphere of economics. Here individuals do not make judgements; indeed, an individual opinion is irrelevant, for it can never be correct. In associations or communities of individuals judgements arise when opinions merge in a common judgement.

The whole point in all of this is not the division of the state, or for that matter any other community, into three parts. The important thing is that each of the three aspects is in a position to make its own contribution to the health of the overall social organism.

The way of thinking I have represented here is capable of holding its own in the midst of life. Suppose someone wants to apply his capabilities and do something, using the necessary skills or techniques. What this person does is then carried forward by others. It is important that I should do something, but it is not the main thing. The main thing is that a second, third, fourth person or any number of people carry my action further in an appropriate manner. For this to happen the social organism must be so managed that traces of my activity do not disappear. Otherwise I might do something here in Oxford that is carried on further for a while, but by the time it reaches Whitechapel there is no trace of it. All that remains visible are the external symptoms of the hardship prevalent there. Hardship will inevitably arise if human forces cannot enter into the social organism in the right way.

Look at the misery in Russia. What causes it? It is there because social forces cannot come to grips properly with the social organism, because the social organism is not structured in the right way according to its natural three parts. The actions of individual human beings will be able to percolate through the whole social organism like blood through the human body only if that social organism is so arranged that the cultural life depends freely on individuals, if there is a legal and political life that orders all the business that falls within the competence of every individual regardless of each person’s level of education, and if, thirdly, there is an independent economic sphere concerned solely with production, consumption and distribution.

Such a thing can indeed result from a true and realistic insight into the world so long as people really do come to grips with it on the basis of a realistic understanding. But if such things, once stated, are merely explained away by Marxist theories and doctrinaire intellectualism, then of course they remain incomprehensible. No one then knows what is meant by someone who does not look at hardship superficially but who delves down more deeply, saying: ‘You cannot improve matters in this way. First you must create social interrelationships of a kind that enables the hardship to be sent packing.” That is where the problem lies.

We must begin to realize how far what was once theocracy has retreated from real life. The original theocrats did not need libraries; their science was not neatly stored in libraries. To study a science there was no need to sit down and pore over old books, for what they did was go and dwell with living human beings. They paid attention to human beings. They asked how best to do what was right for human beings. The real world was their library. Instead of studying books they looked into human faces, they took account of them; instead of reading books they read the souls of human beings. Today all our science has been swallowed up by libraries or stored by other means, well away from human beings.

We need a sphere of spirit and culture firmly rooted in the real world; we need a sphere of spirit and culture in which books are written from life and for life, full of ideas for life and ways and means of living. Especially in the sphere of spirit and culture we must emerge from our libraries and go out into life. We need education for our children based on the children present in the classroom, not on rules. Our education must be derived from knowledge of the human being; what should be done each day, each week, each year must derive from the children themselves.

We need a legal and political sphere in which human being encounters human being, where the only basis for decisions is the legitimate competence of each individual, as I have already pointed out, regardless of profession or whatever other situation each is in. The legal and political sphere exists for all the situations in which human beings meet one another as equals.

What else will belong to the sphere of spirit and culture if this sphere is accepted in the form I have described? Little by little the administration of capital will move of its own accord from the economic to the spiritual, cultural sphere.

However much we may rail against capitalism there is nothing we can do about it, for we need it. What matters about capital and capitalism is not that they exist but what the social forces are that work in them. Capital has come into being through the intellectual ingenuity of human beings; it came into being out of the cultural, spiritual sphere through the division of labour and intellectual knowledge. Merely as a way of illustrating the possibilities, and not to make a Utopian statement, I described in my book Towards Social Renewal how capital might stream towards the spiritual, cultural sphere of the social organism. Just as the copyright on books lapses after 30 years, so that their content becomes common property, so, I suggested, might someone—having amassed capital and had capital working for him while he was himself engaged in the work which his capital generated—transfer his capital to the common good after 30 years or so. I did not state this as a Utopia but merely as a possibility of how, instead of stagnating everywhere, capital might begin to flow and enter the bloodstream of social life. All the things I wrote were illustrations, not dogmas or Utopian ideas. I merely wanted to hint at what might be brought about by the associations.

What actually happens may turn out to be something quite different. When one has brought life into one’s thinking one does not set down dogmas to be adopted, one counts on human beings. Once they are embraced in the right way by the social organism they themselves will discover what is meaningful and useful socially in the environment in which they find themselves. In everything I say I count on people, not dogmas. Unfortunately it has been my experience that what I really meant in my book Towards Social Renewal is never discussed. Instead people ask questions such as: Is it really possible for capital to be inherited by the most capable after the passage of a specific number of years?’ People do not want realities, they want Utopias. This is what militates against an unprejudiced reception of the threefolding impulse.

Once the legal, political sphere is able to function properly people will notice that it will involve itself with questions of labour. Today labour is entirely enmeshed in the economic life and is not treated as something to do with how people relate with one another. In 1905 I wrote an article on the social question in which I demonstrated that with today’s division of labour, labour is reduced to a commodity as it flows into the rest of the social organism. Qur own labour only has an apparent value for us. What others do for us has real value, and what we do for them also has value. This has been achieved by technology, but our moral outlook has not kept pace with it. Within the social order as it is today one can, technically speaking, make nothing for oneself, not even a jacket. If you make it yourself it still costs as much, taking the whole social structure into account, as if it had been made by someone else. The economic aspect of the jacket is universal in the sense that it is determined by the community at large. It is an illusion to imagine that the jacket made for you by a tailor is cheaper. If you work it out in figures it might appear cheaper. But if you were to calculate its price as part of the overall balance sheet you would see that by making your own clothes you can no more jump out of your own skin than you can remove the process from the economic sphere or change that sphere in any way. The price of the garment you make for yourself remains an item in the total balance sheet. Labour is what one person does for another. It cannot be measured by the number of man/hours required in a factory setting. The value put on labour is a supreme example of something belonging in the realm of law, the legal, political sphere.

You can tell that this is not an outdated idea by the way labour is everywhere protected and safeguarded by laws. But these regulations are not even half-measures, they are quarter measures. No regulations will be properly effective until there is a proper threefolding of the social organism. Only when this has happened will human beings meet each other as equals. Only then will labour be rightly regulated when human worth meets human worth in that sphere where all are competent to speak.

You might want to object: ‘Perhaps there will sometimes not be enough work to go round if work is determined in this way in a democratic state.’ This is indeed one of the areas where the social life is affected by history, by the evolution of humanity as a whole. The economic sphere must not be allowed to determine the amount of work available. The economic sphere must be bounded on the one hand by nature and on the other by the amount of labour determined by the legal, political sphere. You cannot get a committee to decide in advance how many rainy days there are to be in 1923 so as to enable the economy to run on course in that year. Just as you have to accept the limitations set by nature, so in an independent economic organism will you have to reckon with the amount of labour available being determined by the legal, political organism. I can only mention this in general terms here, as an example.

Within the economic sphere of the social organism there will be associations in which consumers, producers and distributors will together reach an associative judgement based on practical experience—not an individual judgement that can only be irrelevant in this sphere. The small beginnings being tried today show that this is not yet possible, but the fact that these small beginnings are being tried shows that unconsciously humanity does have the intention to form associations. Co-operatives, trade unions, all kinds of communities show that this intention exists. But when co-operatives are founded side by side with ordinary social life as it exists today they will perish unless they conform to this social life by charging the same prices and using the same marketing practices. In working towards a threefold social organism we should not be trying to create new realities based on Utopian concepts; we should be coming to grips with what is already there. Institutions already in existence, consumers, producers, the entrepreneur, everything already in existence needs to come together in associations. There is no need to ask how to create associations. The question to ask is: ‘How can existing economic organizations and institutions be inte grated in associations?’

If such associations can be achieved, commercial experience will enable something to arise that can indeed lead to a genuine social ordering, just as a healthy human organism leads to a healthy life. There will be circulation in the economy, circulation of production money, loan money and gift money. There can be no social organism without these three. We may want to rail against gifts and donations, but they are a necessary part. You deceive yourself if you say that a healthy social organism should make gifts unnecessary. Yet you pay tax, and taxes are merely a roundabout way of making donations to schools and other facilities.

People deserve to have a social order in which they can always see how things flow without having to make suppositions. When social life has been extricated from today’s general muddle, in which everything is mixed up together, we shall begin to see—just as we can already observe the blood circulating in the human organism—how money circulates in the form of production money, loan money and gift money. ‘We shall see the different way human beings relate on the one hand to money they invest—money for trading, production and purchase—which goes back into production because of the way it earns interest, and on the other hand to the money they give as donations, which must flow into an independent cultural sphere.

People can only participate in social life as a whole through associations which make visible how the life of society flows. Then the social organism will be healthy. Abstract thinking is incompatible with the idea of a threefolding of the social order; only living thinking can encompass it.

Yet even in the economic sphere our thinking is no longer alive. Everywhere we have abstraction. Where is there any life in the economic sphere today? How did it begin in the days when people jotted down their income and expenditure on odd scraps of paper? As things grew more complicated clerics were employed to do the job; they became the clerks. They ran external life to the best of their ability. And who are the successors of those clerks taken from the church to record the economic affairs of princes? They are today’s bookkeepers. In some districts you still occasionally come across a small reminder of those early times. If you turn to the first page in their ledgers—is this the case in your country also?—you see the inscription: “With God’. But there is little in subsequent pages that is ‘with God’. What you find there is an abstraction of something that ought to be full of life, something that ought to be present as life in the associations and not stored up in ledgers.

In working towards a threefolding of society we certainly do not aim to juggle about in old ways with concepts such as cultural life, political life, economic life, mixing them up perhaps in slightly different ways, as has been done in recent times. Our main concern is to comprehend what an organism really is, and then to bring back into real life those things that have become such total abstractions. The most important task is to rescue things from abstraction and bring them back to life. Every individual will belong to the associations of the economic sphere, including representatives of the cultural sphere, for they, too, have to eat, as do the representatives of the legal, political sphere. Conversely, too, every individual also belongs to each of the other spheres as well.

There is a necessary consequence of all this that shocks people a good deal when the subject is brought up, especially when the examples one uses are somewhat exaggerated so as to be more explicit. I once told an industrialist, an excellent man at his job, what was needed in order to bring things back to life: ‘Suppose you have an employee who is fully integrated in the life of your factory. Then along comes a technical college and snaps this man up, not someone recently trained but someone who is fully immersed in the life of the factory. For five or ten years this man can talk to the youngsters about what the life of a factory really is. Then, when he gets a bit stale, he can return to the factory.” Well, such things will make life complicated, but they are what our time requires. There is no getting away from it.

Just as new life must continually flow through the social organism if it is not to decay, so must people either become full human beings, which means that they must be able to circulate through all the spheres of the social organism, or we shall fall into decadence. Of course we can choose decadence if we like, by standing still with our old points of view. But evolution will not allow us to stand still. This is the salient fact.

In conclusion I should like to add that I have developed the subject of my lectures more from a feeling angle. It should not be taken one-sidedly as being purely spiritual except in the sense that it arises out of the spirit of real life. I have only been able to give you a kind of feeling for the impulses that are to arise out of these social ideas. More is not possible in only three lectures.

However, as I bring these lectures to a close I want to thank you in the warmest possible way for allowing me to speak to you about these things. I especially want to thank Mrs Mackenzie who has chaired the committee, for without her efforts this whole Oxford enterprise would not have taken place.’* I also thank the committee for all they have done to assist her. Another thing I am especially grateful for is the opportunity given us here in Oxford during this meeting to bring in the artistic endeavours, eurythmy specifically, which we are trying to send out into the world from Dornach. Thank you all for your endeavours!

You will sense how seriously I want to express my thanks when I remind you that everything we are starting in Dornach is only a beginning that cannot become reality without such efforts as have taken place here in Oxford. The understanding and stoutness of heart we need in Dornach is expressed in a fact which I also want to mention to you, although this is not in any way at all intended as a hint. It is likely that by November we shall have to break off our building work in Dornach because by then we shall have run out of funds. These funds do exist in the world, I believe, but somewhere there is a blockage in this connection. If things were to proceed as they ought in a rightly functioning social organism, then . .. The fact that this work has begun but may well have to be interrupted because of the unfavourable times if an understanding for the need to continue does not emerge in time—this is something that oppresses us greatly in Dornach. I have mentioned this to show you how very heartfelt and cordial are the thanks I have expressed to you.

I have endeavoured to speak to you about education on the one hand, and about social matters on the other. From Dornach these things will be cultivated in a general way. When the anthroposophical movement was founded the point of departure initially was that of a world view and a theoretical understanding. Then people began to see and feel what strong forces of decline exist in our time, whereupon they realized that something needed doing in education and in social life. That was when they began to approach me with the question: “What has anthroposophy got to offer with regard to the establishment of schools that take the fullness of real life into account, and with regard to a future that needs to emerge from the deeper layers of humanity?’ For there is not much to be gained for the future from the more superficial layers of human existence.

The education movement did not arise out of some fad or abstract idea. It came about because people began to enquire what anthroposophy had to offer on the basis of real life rather than out of some kind of sectarian effort.

This was even more strongly the case with the social question. Here, too, people whose hearts were filled with dismay at today’s signs of decay came to ask what anthroposophy might say out of its encounter with genuine reality about impulses that could be sent towards the future.

I am immensely grateful to have been met with understanding here, for what needs saying must go forth into the fullness of life; from this college it must send its effects out into the world where real human beings are at work. I am grateful that it is not antiquated knowledge, for the centres of cultural life must send out impulses to ensure that the right people are in position in the factories, the people who know how to administer capital that generates life. You will not take it amiss that I endeavoured to demonstrate this by means of such examples as came to hand, for on the other side I want to repeat what I have already said before: I have been most happy to explain these impulses here in Oxford where every step you take outside in the street brings inspiration from ancient times and where such strong influences come to the aid of someone wanting to speak out of the spirit.

The spirit that lived in former times was not the one that is needed now to work on into the future. But it was a living spirit that can still inspire. Therefore it has been deeply satisfying to give these lectures and suggestions for the future here in Oxford surrounded by impressions of ancient, venerable learning.

Finally, yet more thanks remain to be expressed. I am sure you will all understand how grateful I am to Mr Kaufmann who has done all the translating with such great love. When you know how much effort goes into translating quite complicated texts and how much this effort can deplete a person’s strength in quite a short time you can appreciate the work Mr Kaufmann has done here during this holiday conference over the past weeks. I want to express my sincere thanks to him, and I hope that many of you will also do so. I now ask him to translate these final words as accurately and faithfully as he has translated all the previous things I have said.

Today I should like to introduce as a sort of parenthesis a deeper, Spiritual-Scientific consideration of the subject of our preceding lecture, the threefolding of the social organism. Naturally much of the thought underlying what I want to say, you will yourselves discover gradually from the general world-conception of Spiritual Science. One can hardly present the whole foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth in each single lecture. But today, in order to obtain a deeper view, will consider from the inside, as it were, that which confronts us outwardly as the necessity of threefolding the social organism.

It is really not difficult for one who has lived to some extent with spiritual-scientific conceptions to call up in himself a feeling for the profound differences between those three spheres of life into which it is our intention that the social organism should be divided. As soon as one realizes that the Threefold Commonwealth is something to be taken very seriously, there develops in one's feelings the possibility of strongly differentiating among the three spheres. They are already fairly well known to you. First, that sphere of life which we call the spiritual life, in so far as it manifests itself or has form in what we call the physical world—thus, the entire field of the so-called (I must use a paradox) physical-spiritual life. You know of course what we have to understand by that. It embraces everything that is connected with men's individual faculties and talents. As we shall see directly the spiritual life is much more comprehensive for us than for a person of materialistic mind. We think of the spiritual life as much more material than the materialistic person does, in so far as we speak of the physical-spiritual life. That fact is ingrained already in my lectures. One can only understand the spiritual life if one starts with the realization that all material life is really concretely saturated by the spiritual: so that for us there is never a purely material something; that which reveals itself through the medium of matter is always according to its inner being also—I say also—a spiritual something. Art, science, conceptions of right, the ethical impulses of mankind—all these things, roughly speaking, come within the boundaries or the spiritual life. Above all, It includes everything that belongs to the cultivation of individual talents, thus the whole field of education and individual training.

Next, it is important to distinguish something which is connected in a certain way with the physical-spiritual life but which nevertheless is fundamentally different. That is, everything that one can described as rights-life, political life, state life. Naturally one must employ all one's powers of perception hare to see the important distinction, otherwise one will make the mistake of thinking that the rights-life is practically the same as the sense of right. But we who are accustomed, to careful discrimination must distinguish between phases of ideas of right, between—if I may so express myself—the being-inspired with ideas of right, and right as it is applied in the outer world. We will speak more fully about all these things directly.

The third sphere is the one you can most easily distinguish from the other two, the economic life.

Now, as we have said, man stands in an entirely different relation to each one of these three spheres of life. If you try with a healthy feeling to understand what the physical-spiritual life is, you will feel (try to lead your soul-faculties of perception in the direction I have indicated) that anything rooted in any degree in man's individual talents, individual faculties, leads into the innermost part of human nature, springs from the very depths of human nature. Now if one proceeds quite scientifically in the work of perceiving, then one experiences everything that comes to expression in art and science, in the impulses of education, as a psychic-spiritual something that lives and works in us, when we surrender to its activity, in such a way that we can only experience it properly if we withdraw somewhat from the outer world. Certainly we must give expression to it in the outer world; but that is different from experiencing it inwardly: we cannot as men get a true conception of that something that manifests itself in art and science, in educational impulses, we cannot grasp it inwardly, unless we are able to withdraw a little from life. One does not need, of course, to withdraw to a hermit's cell: One can be taking a walk, as far as that matters; but one must withdraw into one's self, into one's soul-life, one must live in oneself. That fact becomes apparent to the human soul as soon as it cultivates the most simple feeling for the physical- spiritual Spiritual Science must express it in these words: the physical-spiritual life is lived in such a way by our human soul that in unfolding it we do not entirely depend upon our body. In this respect, Spiritual Science—as you can gather from everything that Spiritual Science has already disclosed—takes the very opposite stand to the materialistic analysis of the human being, which nurses the delusion that when one creates within oneself something that belongs to the physical-spiritual life, one accomplishes this creation entirely through the instrument of the brain, the nervous system, etc.. We know that is not true. We know that an independent inner life must be present in man in order that manifestations of this physical-spiritual life may be possible. Something is present in man in this physical-spiritual life without there being any corresponding physical manifestation in the physical body; something transpires solely within the spiritual-psychic being of man.

It is different when we manifest those life impulses which we desire to place on a democratic basis in our Threefold Commonwealth, to which every man rives expression in relation to all other men. They appear when men allow themselves to be instruments of their bodily nature, in order to unite with each other. Not theoretical ideas of right, but impulses of right for life; not inner ethical ideas, but ethical impulses for life, that are active among men, and that are manifested in the way men meet one another, work with one another, in the way men exchange their experiences with one another. Those Rights-impulses are only present when men do business with one another, when men turn their bodily outer nature to one another, when they communicate with one another, see and live with one another in mutual experiences—in short, they can only be cultivated amid the vicissitudes of human intercourse. With respect to everything that is cultivated on the basis of our individual talents, that is, with respect to what in the sense of the above is independent of our body, we live as individual men, each one a separate personality, an entity. Except for slight distinctions that arise through differences in race and people, but which are a small matter as compared with the differences in men caused by individual talents and abilities (if one has any perceptive organ one must know that)—with that exception, we are equal as men with respect to our outer physical humanness, through which we meet men as men; through which we express ethical impulses, impulses of right. We are equal here as men in the physical world precisely through the sameness of our human body, simply through the fact that we all have a human face. This fact makes us develop for ourselves as outer physical man impulses of right, ethical impulses, on a democratic basis,—it makes us equal in this sphere. We are different one another in our individual talents, which belong to our inner nature.

With respect to the third, the economic sphere: truly one does not need to adopt a false asceticism (it is certainly contrary to the prevailing tendency of our day, that is, in the West) in order to perceive how the economic life allows men to be submerged, as it were, here in the physical world, in a stream of life in which to a certain degree they are lost as men. Do you not feel, my dear friends, that in economic life you are immersed in something that does not allow you to be so fully man as in the rights- or state-life? And it is so in still greater contrast to the life that flows out of your individual talents, out of the individual talents of all mankind. Without, as I said, adopting a false ascetic attitude, one feels with respect to the economic life that we cease to be complete men when we engage in economic activity. We are obliged to pay tribute to that part of us which is sub-human when we concern ourselves with economic life. (We have the same processes of economic life, that is, production, circulation, and consumption of commodities in spiritual production that grows out of economic life and has the same character as the circulation of commodities—and we have all of that life because, so to say, we are men and not animals. When its economic aspect comes into consideration, spiritual production has the same character as any economic activity concerned with material goods. The material goods are necessary to satisfy our bodily needs; also, spiritual,activity within the economic life—dentistry, for instance, and the like—in the end leads to this, that through an exchange of commodities the dentist, etc., is able to live physically within the economic life.) At all events, economic life is always connected with physical life, and that brings us into a certain relation with animal life, even though it is on the human plane. It submerges us in experiences which we have instinctively together with the animals. There you have as a beginning a simple healthy feeling for the different relations an individual man has to these three spheres of life.

Now let us approach the subject in a more deeply spiritual-scientific way. Spiritual Science must first of all observe the periods of human life, the evolution of human life between birth, or conception, and death. Whoever allows himself the possibility of perceiving the course of human life will be strongly impressed by the way in which everything that partakes of the nature of a man's individual faculties is unmistakably announced during the early days of childhood. To one who has a spiritual eye for it and who acknowledges his life experience, the special form of the child soul is easily perceptible. In what develops during the first three life-periods, from the 1st to the 7th year, the 7th to the 14th, and the 14th to the 21st year, there lies the prophecy as from an inner elementary force, of the man's future individual gifts. And not only what we are accustomed to think of as a man's individual gifts, but connected with that, whether he will be able to do much or little muscular work. That is where we are obliged to extend the spiritual further into the material than materialistic thinkers do. Through spiritual vision we see a strong connection between the nature of a man's muscular system and his individual talents. For one who can observe the human being, everything is connected with the development of the human head. Even a man's outer form, whether he has strong less or weak legs, whether he can run much: all that is seen by one who has developed his spiritual vision, from the man's head, precisely from his head. Whether a man is skillful or clumsy, one sees from his head. These so-called physical abilities of man, which are closely connected with his fitness for outer physical , manual work, are connected with the form or his head. Now you know what I have often told you about the shape of the head, basing my remarks on the most varied fundamental facts: everything that comes into shape in the human head, that gives the human head its conformation, its form, points to something before birth, to that which man brings through birth into physical life from out of the spiritual worlds—from the spiritual world itself or from previous incarnations on the earth. And so, when one sees the connection between all human individual talents, either spiritual or manual, and the formation of the human head: then one is led further in one's seeing, and one is able to trace back everything that comes from man's individual talents to his life before birth. That, you see, is what gives the spiritual-scientist such important enlightenment as to physical-spiritual life is. Physical-spiritual life, my dear friends, is here in the physical world because we as men bring something with us at birth. Physical-spiritual life, in the sense in which I have spoken of it today, does not arise out or this physical world: all of it arises out of impulses which we bring from the spiritual world through birth into physical existence. Inasmuch as we bring into physical existence echoes of a supersense existence, we create in human society here in the physical world that which comprises the physical-spiritual life. There would be no art, no science—at the most, in science, a recording of experiments—there would be no impulse for education, no education of children at all, if we did not bring impulses through birth into physical life out of our life previous to birth. That, then, is one thing.

Now let take everything in my book Theosophy, or in Occult Science, that describes the supersense world. Take especially what is said in those books about the relation that exists between human souls when they are disembodied, when they are living between death and a new birth. You know that we have to speak of quite other relations existing between souls there than those which exist here in tae physical world. You remember how I described what is experienced there from soul to soul as being reflected here in shadowy images. You remember the description in Theosophy of life in the soul-world: when I wanted to describe the disembodied life of the supersensible world between death and a new birth I had to speak of certain reciprocal influences, of soul forces and astral forces, that do not exist in the physical world. There, souls have an inner relation to one another, a relation of soul to soul which is called out by the inner force of the soul itself. Now if one is thoroughly imbued with the idea of what relation exists in the supersensible world between souls, if one fixes one's vision upon the relation quite objectively, then one makes a remarkable discovery if one draws a comparison to it in the right way. You know it depends very much on the tendency to such inner activity as this, whether one is led to knowledge of the supersense world, or even to knowledge of the connections between the supersensible world and the sense world. If one turns directly to the Rights-, State-, or political life, one finds that there is no greater contrast to the particular form of supersense life than the political or Rights-life here on the physical plane. They are the two great opposites, my dear friends, that one experiences when one ready learns to know the supersense life. Supersense life has nothing at all that can be regulated bylaws of right or outer ethical impulses; there, everything is regulated through inner soul impulses. It is just the opposite here in the physical world where everywhere state-life has to be established because through birth into the physical world we lose those deep impulses that are alive in the soul in the supersense world and that make the relations there between souls. Here, we make laws of right that will create what must be created: relations of Right—because man has lost that which in the supersense world makes the relation between souls. Those are the two opposite poles: supersense relation of soul to soul, and state-relation here on the physical plane.

In the physical-spiritual cultural life we carry from man to man something that stays with us after birth as a reflection from the supersense world. We spread, as it were, a lustre over life here by letting in the light from the supersense world, and seeking to reflect it here in art, science, and education. It is quite different with the Rights life: we have to establish that on the physical earth as a substitute for what we lose of supersense relations when we enter through birth into physical existence. That gives you an idea, too, of what certain religious documents mean (and you know how far religious documents are always penetrated by this or that absolute truth) when they speak of the authorized “Kingdom of this world”. They mean by that, that the state should not presume to any right to control that which man brings with him as a reflection of the supersense world when he comes through birth into the physical world. It should confine itself to ruling the kingdom of Rights, which is the life we need here because by our physical birth we have lost the impulses of the spiritual world. The task of the state life is to create what is necessary for human intercourse in the physical world. It has meaning only for our life between birth and death.

Let us look at the third, the economic life. Something must be said about it that is quite paradoxical: expressing it crudely, we are submerged in a sub-humanness, in engaging in an economic life. At the same time, however, something is going on in our soul when we concern ourselves with the subhuman. And that, you can experience. Think how very actively you must struggle within yourselves when you give yourselves up to spiritual culture; and on the other hand, how thoughtless men can be in purely economic life, often following mere impulses and instincts. Economic activity proceeds, on the whole, without much truly active inner thought. And in that case, we sink into a subhumanness. Our soul stays hidden in the background. Spiritual Science would say that our body is more exerted when we are engaged in a material activity than one ordinarily believes. Consider the end members of the economic process, eating and drinking: we can realize that there is not a complete balance there between bodily and spiritual activity, that the body outweighs the spiritual-psychic in activity. But then this spiritual-psychic carries on a strong unconscious activity. And within this unconscious activity a seed is hidden. We carry this seed through the gate of death. The soul can rest, as it were, when we are busy with economic life; but in what appears to outer consciousness as rest, a seed is developing which we carry through the gate of death. And if we cultivate brotherliness in economic life, as I always describe it, then we carry a good seed through the gate of death—precisely by virtue of what we cultivate in our relations with men in the economic life. It may seem materialistic to you when I say: Precisely in the brotherliness of economic life man is planting the seed in his soul for his life after death; in his spiritual culture, he is spending his inheritance from his life before birth. It may appear materialistic to you, but it is true, simply true to the spiritual-scientific investigator. However materialistic this may seem to you it is true when I say: when you are submerged in animalness take care of your humanness, for you are planting supersensible seeds for time after death.

Man is a threefold being. He has in the first place an inheritance from time before birth; then, he evolves something here that has value only for the time between birth and death; finally, he develops here in the physical world something by which he links his physical life here with lire after death. That which is manifested here as the lustre of life and the promise and interest of life, in the physical-spiritual culture, is an inheritance from the spiritual world that we bring with us into this physical world. In possessing this spiritual wealth we show ourselves as belonging to the spiritual world; we bring into the physical world a reflection of the supersense world through which we passed before our conception and birth.

You see, abstract science, even abstract philosophy, talks—naturally—always in abstractions. They talk about proving the eternity of substance, how the human substance present at birth remains and then lasts on through death. Such proofs can never be gained out of mere thinking. The philosophers have always sought them, but no proof has ever held against inner logical knowing, because the thing simply is not so. Something much more spiritual is connected with immortality. Nothing at all material, much less anything substantial, is present in any such way. What is present after death is consciousness: consciousness that looks back into this world. That is what we have to consider when we are considering immortality. We must be much less materialistic than the abstract philosophers themselves when we talk of these higher things. It is like this: we use up what I have characterized as a reflection of the supersense world , which we reveal as the ornament, the polished surface of life here—we use that up, and must make here, during our life, a new link for the chain of our eternal existence, to carry through death. Anyone who only thinks of what goes forward in this life, must conclude, if he is consistent, that the thread wears out; only when he knows that he makes here a new part of the chain that goes out beyond death, only then has he come to immortality.

And so man is this threefold being. He cultivates talents in himself that bring a reflection of the supersense world into this life. He develops a life that forms the bridge between life before death and life after death, that expresses itself in all that which has its roots only in the time between birth and death, the outward Rights, or State-impulses, etc. And in that he is submerged in economic life and is able to plant something moral in this economic life—brotherliness—he develops the seed for his life after death. That is the threefold man.

Now think of this threefold man in such a phase of evolution ever since the 15th century that he must now cultivate consciously everything that formerly was instinctive. For that reason it is necessary today that his outer social life should afford him the opportunity of standing with his threefold human nature in a threefold organism. We unite in ourselves three very distinct members of one being, the pre-birthly, the one that is active on the earth, and the after-death member; therefore, we can only stand in the social organism properly in three parts. Otherwise we come as conscious men into disharmony with the rest of the world; and we will come into more and more disharmony unless we will consider shaping this world that lies around us into a threefold social organism.

There, you see, you have the question from the inside. I am trying to show how spiritual-scientific research points out the way to the threefold social organism: how it must be wrested out of human nature itself.

Many persons nave thoughts about what I have evolved. But in open lectures and also on other occasions I have always warned you that these thoughts to which I give expression should not be confused with the thoughts of the elder Schäffle in his book On the Structure of the Social Organism, or with the dilettantism of Merey's most recent book Concerning World-mutations, and similar works. The spiritual scientist cannot be concerned with mere play of analogy, such as these books offer; it is at most unfruitful. What I should like when speaking about the social organism is that men should train their thinking.

The general training of thought today is not even adequate for natural science to be able to grasp facts that I investigated at 35, and that I presented in my book Riddles of the Soul, showing that a human being consists of three members: nerve-sense-life, rhythmic life, and metabolic life. The nerve-sense-life can also be called the head life; the rhythmic life can be called the breathing life, or blood life; and the metabolic life includes all the rest of the organism as a kind of structure. Just as this human organism consists of three members, each centred in itself, so in the social organism each of the three members works for the whole because of the very fact that it is centred in itself. The physiology and biology of today believe that man is a centralized, unified being. That is not true. Even in regard to his communication with the outer world man is a threefold being: the head life is in independent connection with the outer world through the senses; the breathing life is connected with the outer world through the air; the metabolic life is in connection with the outer world through independent outlets. The social organism also must be threefold, with each part centred in itself. Just as the head cannot breathe but nevertheless receives what is communicated by the breathing through the rhythmic system, so the social organism should not itself develop a Rights-life, but should receive bights from its State-member.
However, I said that one must not mistake what is presented here for a mere play of analogy, such as arises when one works from all kinds of hypotheses. Spiritual Science is real investigation, and does not stop short at appearances. People believe that a Spiritual Scientist just thinks something out. Before one is a real spiritual investigator one has to learn to observe the spiritual world. One has to give up thinking; that has value only for the physical world. Naturally one does not give it up for the whole of life, only for spiritual research.

I have told you one usually comes to things upside down if one sets out to describe the spiritual world by using analogies from the sense world. Spiritual research shows, for instance, that the earth is really an organism; that what geology and mineralogy find is only a bone system; that the earth is living, it sleeps and wakes like man. But one cannot go farther in the analogy. If ordinarily you ask a man: When is the earth awake and when is it asleep? he will undoubtedly answer: The earth is awake in summer and asleep in winter. And that is the opposite of what is actually the truth. The truth is, the earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter. Naturally one only finds that out if one actually investigates in the spiritual world. That is the puzzle that makes spiritual research so liable to error, the fact that when one goes with some inquiry from the physical into the spiritual world one gets perhaps the very opposite of the physical fact, or perhaps quarter-truths. One has to investigate every single case.

So it is also with the surface analogy that people draw between the three members or the human, and the three members of the social, organism. that will a man say, using this analogy? He has to say: On the outside is a spiritual life, art, science. He will draw a parallel between that and the human head system, the nerve-sense-life. How could he do otherwise? Then, when he establishes that, he will compare the metabolic life , to which I have referred in my Riddles of the Soul as the most material, with economic life. Nothing could be more upside down than that. And nothing whatever is accomplished by looking at it in that way. One must give up toying with analogies if one wants to reach the truth. People outside of Spiritual Science believe that these ideas have been obtained by a thought game of analogies. That is the greatest illusion. It is to no purpose to parallel outer physical-spiritual life with the head system. It is to no purpose to relate economic life to the metabolic system. All that is of no avail if one wants to fathom the question.

When one makes a real investigation one gets a very paradoxical result. Comparing the social organism to the human organism one comes to the truth only if one stands upside down in the social organism. One must compare economic life with the nerve-sense-life, state-life with the rhythmic system,and physical-spiritual life with the metabolic system for the laws obtaining in them are similar. That which is present in economic life as natural conditions is of exactly the same significance for the social organism as are for man the individual talents that ne brings with him at birth. As man in his individual life is dependent upon what he brings into life with him, so the economic organism is dependent upon what Nature bequeaths it in the way of existing conditions. The preliminary natural conditions of economic life—land, etc.,—are the same as the individual talents that man brings into individual life. How much coal, now much metal is in the earth, whether land is fertile or not, are as it were the talents of the social organism. And as man's metabolic system is related to the human organism and its functions, human spiritual production is related to the social organism. The social organism eats and drinks what we give it in the form of art, science, technical ideas, etc. That is its nourishment. That is its metabolism. A country that has unfavorable natural conditions for its economic life is like a man who is poorly gifted. And a country in which the people produce nothing in the way of art, science, or technical ideas, is like a man who must go hungry because he has nothing to eat. That is the reality, the truth! The social organism is our angry spiritual child. And the natural conditions of the social organism are its capacities, its talents. A comparison of the spiritual life with the human head system has meaning perhaps for one who is playing with analogies; out one reaches the correct and helpful truth only if one knows that the laws stand as I have presented them. One can know that these are the laws of human metabolism; but one must direct the same thinking to them as one directs to the social organism and then one easily gets a larger result. To tamper with spiritual things without such guiding threads is extraordinarily difficult and wearisome. Because of the fact that today analogies are often merely toyed with, on account of which there is a prejudice against this drawing of parallels between the social and the human organism, I have only just touched upon it in my book, but I tried at least to indicate it because it can be a great help to those who think healthily about it.

And so you see that today men are in a peculiar position. Natural science which has made this great progress, which has so influenced men's minds that at bottom-even though it is not conscious of social thinking orientates itself in the direction of natural science,—this Natural Science is not capable of analyzing man correctly. For instance; it says the greatest nonsense about feeling being transmitted through the nervous system. That is pure nonsense. Feeling is transmitted directly through the breathing system, the rhythmic system, and thought through the nerve-sense-system. And the will is made possible through the metabolic system, not through the nervous system in any elementary way. The thought or willing is transmitted through the nervous system. Only when you have as men a real consciousness or willing does the nervous system take any part. When you think along with your willing then the nervous system is concerned in it. It is because this is not known that the physiology and anatomy of today have made that frightful error of distinguishing between sensory nerves and motor nerves. There is no greater falsity than this differentiation of sensory and motor nerves in the human body. The anatomists are always in a dilemma when they get to their chanter on nerves and they don't get out of it. They are in a frightful dilemma because there is no difference anatomically between these two kinds of nerves. It is pure speculation. And everything that is deduced by examining the nerves is absolutely without support. The reason that the motor nerves are not distinguishable from the sensory nerves is that there aren't any motor nerves there. The muscles are set in motion by the metabolic system. And as you perceive the outer world through the senses with the so-called sensory nerves, with other nerves you perceive your own movements, your muscular movements. The Physiology of today is wrong when it calls them motor nerves. Frightful mistakes such as this exist in science, and corrupt what goes into the popular consciousness—and they have a much more, corrupt influence than one would ordinarily think.

Thus Natural Science is not so far advanced as to perceive this threefold man. We can wait for theoretical views of Natural Science to become popular; a year sooner or later will not affect men's happiness. But the thinking does not exist for comprehending this threefold man. The same quality of thinking must however exist to comprehend the threefold nature of the social organism. And there the thing is serious. We are today at the point of time when it must be comprehended. Therefore a change of thought, a new method of thinking, is essential not only for the simple man, but, truly, most of all for the learned man. Simple men at least know nothing about all those things that have been advanced in natural science in order unconsciously to conceal man's threefold nature. But the learned men are stuck full of all those concepts that today make this threefolding seem like nonsense. To the physiologist of today it is pure folderol. If one tells him that there are no motor nerves and that feelings are not transmitted in the same way as thoughts—through the nervous system—but only the thought connected with a feeling, in other words the consciousness of it—not the feeling as such as he will object strenuously. His objections are well known. Men can naturally say: Now look, you perceive music; you perceive that through your senses. No, experience of music is much more complicated than that. It is like this: The breathing rhythm meets with the sense perception in our brain, and in the contact of the breathing rhythm with the outer sense perception arises the musical-aesthetic experience. Even there, the fundamental thing is in the rhythmic system. And what brings this fundamental thing to consciousness is in the nervous system.

However, this all shows you, my dear friends, that in regard to many things we are living in a time of transitions. Every period is indeed a transition from the past to the future. That is so if one speaks abstractly and one can see that every period is more or less a time of transition. I want rather to say in what particular respect our time is a transition. it is a time of very important inner transition, in regard to important inner human impulses. To men capable of perception this shows itself clearly in a certain way. Men today are not very apt to consider incidental symptoms with sufficient earnestness.

I want to tell you of a purely spiritual-scientific perception. Naturally I can as little prove this perception to you as the man who has seen a wallfish can prove to you that it exists. He can only tell you about it. Then one has developed one's power of spiritual vision so far as to be able to have communication with human souls that are evolving between death and a new birth, then one makes indeed very surprising discoveries. This communication can only be had in thought; and when we think here in the physical body some element of speech is always present in our thoughts. Something of speech always vibrates with the thoughts. We think in words. I had the experience once of declaring energetically: “I am fully conscious of the fact that I can think without words resounding simultaneously”, and of having Hartmann answer: “That is nonsense! That is not possible; man cannot think unless he thinks in words”. Thus there are very spiritual philosophers who do not believe that one can think without an inner forming of words. One can. But in ordinary everyday thinking man thinks in words, especially when he would develop some spiritual intercourse with the dead. For you know intercourse with the dead cannot be carried on in abstractions—any more than we can think in blue. It has to be concrete, this intercourse with the dead. That is why I have said: definite pictures that are formed very concretely reach the dead, but not abstract thoughts. Because this is so we are especially apt to let speech sound innerly in our thought communication with the dead. Then we make the most peculiar discovery ( you may believe it or not, but it is a fact) that, for instance, the dead do not hear substantives. Substantives are like holes in our sentences when we communicate with the dead.

Adjectives are better, but still very weak; but verbs, words of activity, is what their understanding grasps. One learns that slowly at first. One cannot think why so much of the communication goes badly; and one gradually realizes that it is the nouns. One cannot use many nouns. And you see one comes to realize this: that in using words of activity, verbs, one cannot help but be within the words oneself. There is something personal in verbs—one lives in the activity; while a noun always becomes something quite abstract.

Therein lies the basis of the symptom of which I wanted to speak. You see that speech is something that unites us with the super-sense world only in a very limited measure; and the fact that the whole tendency of speech is more and more toward substantives brings about the possibility of our separating ourselves from the spiritual world. The more we think in substantives the more we break our connection with the spiritual world. I only wanted this fact to indicate to you that speech has a great significance for our supersense life, a fundamental significance. But speech evolves within human evolution itself. And the characteristic of the evolution of speech is that it brings men more and more to abstractions, that it takes them farther and farther away from living inner thought-life. You can become aware of this outwardly by asking yourselves, How are the Western languages formed as compared to the Eastern? Take the language that outwardly on the physical plane has progressed the furthest, the English language: it almost spends itself in words, it has least thought content. That is the progress of speech from East to West. That is an important distinction to make in connection with social folk-life.

Now there is a man of our time who has developed great acuteness in his observation of human speech. This man is so clever that already he is stupid again. There is, in other words, a degree of cleverness where one begins again to be a bit stupid in the face of colossal cleverness. It is true. One may have a great respect for this cleverness but one should not value it too highly in face of the corresponding truth. This man is Fritz Mauthner, who has out-Kanted Kant in his Critique of Speech, and also in his Dictionary: observations, however, made undeniably out of the impulses of the time. Mauthner has reached something quite definite that must especially strike the spiritual-scientist: it is this, that in reality human inner soul-activity has, as it were, three stages. The first is ordinary sense perception as it is reflected in art. Mauthner believes in this as something that is real, something that is a reality. Now through sense perception one can arouse inner experiences, that lead over into the supersensible; Fritz Mauthner allows such inner experience. He calls it “Mystic experience,” “religious experience.” Beautiful; but he says:•;When man has this mystic experience he can only be dreaming. One is permitted to dream, out one is outside of reality them. Mauthner altogether doubts the possibility or reaching reality then; the only reality to him is sense perception—at most, art can reach it. As soon as one gets so far away from sense perception as to be experiencing something in mystic religious life, then one is merely dreaming about reality; one has already let reality go by. And then one can go still further, according to Mauthner.

He comes to all these convictions through a consideration of speech. He makes an analysis, a criticism of speech, especially in his philosophical Dictionary. It makes terrible reading. I have already on another occasion drawn your attention to the torture one undergoes reading these articles—and they go all the way from A to Z. One begins to read one or another of the articles; something is said. Then another sentence in which what has just been said is just a little bit qualified. Then a third sentence, and that which was just qualified is again qualified, so that one comes back a little to the first sentence again. One hedges around and around and around, and in the end—one has got nothing, even though one has read the whole article to the end. The article entitled “Christianity” is awful. A frightful torture. But it is proper, in Mauthner's sense, that it should be so. Mauthner thinks that, and he really condemns his reader to the torture; he has gone through it himself. He does not believe that man is capable, when he wants to know something, of getting anything else than just such hedging. He is an absolute skeptic. He finds nowhere in speech any other content than the speech itself. It has only an incidental value to him.

And so to him, inner mystic experience is only a dream. As soon as one gets out of speech one is inwardly dreaming. But according to Mauthner there is a third stage: one can believe that one is thinking but one is only speaking inwardly. Whether one uses this or that language, the language, the words, originated once in outer sense things. I have spoken to you before of the various opinions of learned men of how speech originated. You know that their opinions can be divided into two main classes: the Bimbam theory and the Wan-wan theory (those are the technical terms). Now Mauthner finds that everything has evolved from outer sense perception; real thoughts do not exist for man. In science he strives for real thoughts, when ne reaches the third stage. But he does not succeed there in knowing anything real. In mysticism he is still dreaming; when he in search of thought reality, for instance to natural laws, then ne is no longer dreaming, then he is fast asleep. Therefore for Mauthner all science is Docta ignorantia (learned ignorance). Those are his three stages.

Now my dear friends, as I told you, one can have a certain respect for such observation for it is not altogether incorrect—that, is, not incorrect for today. Something to which mankind tends today has been felt correctly by Mauthner. It is this: when the man of today wants to come to mysticism it is something quite different than with men formerly. The man of earlier times was still inwardly pound up with reality. The man of today has not that possibility; as a mystic he really is dreaming. And the natural laws that man finds today—well, one cannot quite endorse such crude points of view as those of certain theorizers who have analyzed the matter similarly to Mauthner, as for example the French thinker Boutroux, or Ernst Mach. But nevertheless one must say: if one sounds the content of the so-called natural laws today there are fundamentally no thoughts there; one only believes they ate thoughts; they are only combinations of facts. They are really only records. These things have been noticed by individuals, Mach, for example. Mauthner has observed thoroughly—therefore he speaks of Docta ignorantia, of a learned unknowing, of an ignorant learnedness. Yes, as human evolution is today, that is quite true. Today, in mysticism and in science alike, man has become sterile. Only, in his pride, he is not yet aware of it as having any significance. But that is not generally characteristic of humanity. Mauthner and the others believe that it is, because in reality they do not consider human evolution; they think: as the soul is today, so it was always. But really, it is only a characteristic of the present time. Their observation only has significance for the soul life of today; we do come to dreaming and to learned ignorance today, when we want to rise in these stages.,

But one must not conclude that human nature is such that it is obliged to sink either into mystic dreaming or into learned ignorance (as those do who think as Mauthner does). One must come to this conclusion: what the ancients reached in old ways must therefore be found now in new ways. That means, we must seek a new mysticism, we must not get into old mysticism. This new mysticism is sought in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. must rise to this new Imagination, to a new Inspiration, but we must rise of new methods. I have elaborated that in my book "Riddles of Humanity". Because we dream in mysticism and sleep in science the necessity is before us today of waking up. Therefore I have described the phenomenon of present day knowledge in this book as an "awakening". We must put in the place of mystic dreams a wide-awake Imagination; in the place of Docta ignorantia, Inspiration; in the sense in which I have talked of it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. We live today in a transition period in respect to the human soul; we must evolve out of the deepest foundation of this human soul active power that leads to the spiritual. We will not find our way through the chaos of the present age unless we develop the will to evolve active inner soul powers. The spiritualists do the opposite. They perceive that nothing springs up unconsciously from within, and so they allow themselves to project spirits in outer manifestation, outer sense vision.

And a tragic phenomenon makes its appearance in the present day. We have the experience today of seeing men who a short time ago still believed that materialism could satisfy their souls become alarmed in their advancing years about materialism. That is nothing else than what the healthy soul should feel, in spite of the biology of today, or the sociology: a smell of decay, a smell of the corpse of one's soul, that one only prevents by an inner soul activity. Many do not want that activity today. And therefore the tragedy of men growing old who will not have anything to do with spiritual scientific research and who go back to Catholicism. That allows the soul to remain passive, and gives it something that it can believe is a spiritual content. It is a great danger.

That points from another angle to the transition-humanity is making in the present age. Quite secretly the human soul is going through an important stage of development. And with this transition through an important stage of development is intimately connected the necessity of learning to think anew in many other respects concerning man. Read how the individual man, when entering the supersense world, begins to divide into three parts. Read it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Thinking, feeling, and willing that here in the sense world are fused as the natural condition for man—read the chapter on the “Guardian of the Threshold”: thinking, feeling, and willing become separate from one another when one gets into the supersense world. Mankind is going through that process today secretly in the subconscious. A threshold is being crossed there. Man divides inwardly into a threefold man in a different way than was formerly the case. Observation of this passing of men over a certain threshold teaches one that the threefolding of the social organism is dictated to us out of the spiritual foundations of existence itself. If in the future we want to find a picture of ourselves in the outside world so that we shall agree with it, then we shall have had to threefold the social organism.

You see the signs that spiritual science gives for the Threefold Commonwealth. But I again emphasize the point: once the Threefold Commonwealth is found it can, like all occult truths, be comprehended by a healthy human understanding. To find it, spiritual scientific research is necessary; but once it is found, healthy human, understanding proclaims its truth. That is also something that we must recall at every opportunity.

I have tried today to give you a deeper consideration of what in service to our time must be said today about the Threefold Commonwealth. Next Sunday we will extend this consideration and conclude it, and perhaps bring it to full inner completeness.