The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The challenges which contemporary society presents will be misunderstood by those who approach them with utopian ideas. It is of course possible to believe that any one of diverse theories, arrived at through personal observation and conviction, will result in making men happy. Such a belief can acquire overwhelming persuasive power. Nevertheless, as far as the social question of the times is concerned, it becomes irrelevant as soon as the attempt is made to assert it.

[ 2 ] The following example, although seeming to carry this proposition to an extreme, is nevertheless valid. Let us assume that someone is in possession of a perfect, theoretical ‘solution’ to the social question. In spite of this, in attempting to offer it to the public he becomes the victim of an unpractical belief. We no longer live in an age in which public life can be influenced in this way. People's minds are simply not disposed to accept the ideas of another as far as this subject is concerned. They will not say: here is someone who knows how society should be structured, so we will act according to his opinions.

[ 3 ] People are not interested in social ideas which are presented to them in this way. This book, which has already reached a fairly large audience, takes this phenomenon into consideration. Those who accuse it of having a utopian character have completely misunderstood my intentions. It is interesting to note that such criticism has come principally from people who themselves indulge almost exclusively in utopian thinking and are inclined to attribute their own mental habits to others.

[ 4 ] Truly practical people know from experience that even the most convincing utopian ideas lead absolutely nowhere. In spite of this, many of them seem to feel obliged to propound just such ideas, especially in the field of economics. They should realize that they are wasting their breath, that their fellow men will not be able to apply such propositions.

[ 5 ] The above should be treated as a fact of life inasmuch as it indicates an important characteristic of contemporary public life, namely, that our present notions concerning economics, for example, have little relation to reality. How can we then hope to cope with the chaotic condition of society if we approach it with a thought process which has no relation to reality?

[ 6 ] This question can hardly meet with favour as it requires the admission that our thinking is indeed remote from reality. Nevertheless, without such an admission we will not get to the bottom of the social question. Only when we understand that this divorce of thought from reality is a condition of the utmost seriousness for contemporary civilization, can we become clear in our own minds as to what society really needs.

[ 7 ] The whole question revolves around the shape of contemporary spiritual life. Modern man has developed a spiritual life which is to a very large extent dependent upon political institutions and economic forces. While still a child he is given over to a state educational system, and his upbringing must correspond to the economic circumstances of his environment.

[ 8 ] It is easy to believe that this situation results in the individual becoming well adjusted to contemporary life, that the state is best qualified to organize the educational system—and therewith the foundation of public cultural affairs—for the benefit of the community. It is also easy to believe that the individual who is educated according to the economic conditions of his environment and who is then placed according to these conditions becomes the best possible member of human society.

[ 9 ] This book must assume the unpopular task of showing that the chaotic condition of our public life derives from the dependence of spiritual life on the political state and economic interests. It must also show that the liberation of spiritual life and culture from this dependence constitutes an important element of the burning social question.

[ 10 ] This involves attacking certain wide-spread errors. For example, the political state's assumption of responsibility for education has long been considered to be beneficial for human progress. For people with socialistic ideas it is inconceivable that society should do anything but shape the individual according to its standards and for its service.

[ 11 ] It is not easy to accept a very important fact of historical development, namely, that what was proper during an earlier period can be erroneous for a later period. For a new era in human relations to emerge, it was necessary that the circles which controlled education and culture be relieved of this function and that it be transferred to the political state. However, to persist in this arrangement is a grave social error.

[ 12 ] The first part of this book attempts to indicate this. Human culture has matured toward freedom within the framework of the state, but it cannot exercise this freedom without complete autonomy of action. The nature which spiritual life has assumed requires that it constitute a fully autonomous member of the social organism. The administration of education, from which all culture develops, must be turned over to the educators. Economic and political considerations should be entirely excluded from this administration. Each teacher should arrange his or her time so that he can also be an administrator in his field. He should be just as much at home attending to administrative matters as he is in the classroom. No one should make decisions who is not directly engaged in the educational process. No parliament or congress, nor any individual who was perhaps once an educator, is to have anything to say. What is experienced in the teaching process would then flow naturally into the administration. By its very nature such a system would engender competence and objectivity.

[ 13 ] Of course one could object that such a self-governing spiritual life would also not attain to perfection. But we cannot expect perfection; we can only strive toward the best possible situation. The capabilities which the child develops can best be transmitted to the community if his education is the exclusive responsibility of those whose judgement rests on a spiritual foundation. To what extent a child should be taught one thing or another can only be correctly determined within a free cultural community. How such determinations are to be made binding is also a matter for this community. The state and the economy would be able to absorb vigour from such a community, which is not attainable when the organization of cultural institutions is based on political and economic standards.

[ 14 ] Even the schools which directly serve the state and the economy should be administered by the educators: law schools, trade-schools, agriculture and industrial colleges, all should be administered by the representatives of a free spiritual life. This book will necessarily arouse many prejudices, especially if the consequences of its thesis are considered. What is the source of these prejudices? We recognize their antisocial nature when we perceive that they originate in the unconscious belief that teachers are impractical people who cannot be trusted to assume practical responsibilities on their own. It is assumed that all organization must be carried out by those who are engaged in practical matters, and educators should act according to the terms of reference determined for them.

[ 15 ] This assumption ignores the fact that it is just when teachers are not permitted to determine their own functions that they tend to become impractical and remote from reality. As long as the so-called experts determine the terms of reference according to which they must function, they will never be in a position to turn out practical individuals who are equipped for life by their education. The current anti-social state of affairs is the result of individuals entering society who lack social sensitivity because of their education. Socially sensitive individuals can only develop within an educational system which is conducted and administered by other socially sensitive individuals. No progress will be made towards solving the social question if we do not treat the question of education and spirit as an essential part of it. An anti-social situation is not merely the result of economic structures, it is also caused by the anti-social behaviour of the individuals who are active in these structures. It is anti-social to allow youth to be educated by people who themselves have become strangers to reality because the conduct and content of their work has been dictated to them from without.

[ 16 ] The state establishes law-schools and requires that the law they teach be in accordance with the state's own view of jurisprudence. If these schools were established as free cultural institutions, they would derive the substance of their jurisprudence from this very culture. The state would then become the recipient of what this free spiritual life has to offer. It would be enriched by the living ideas which can only arise within such a spiritual environment. [ 17 ] Within a spiritual life of this nature society would encounter the men and women who could grow into it on their own terms. Worldliness does not originate in educational institutions organized by so-called ‘experts’, in which impractical people teach, but only in educators who understand life and the world according to their own viewpoints. Particulars of how a free culture should organize itself are outlined in this book.

[ 18 ] The utopian-minded will approach the book with all kinds of doubts. Anxious artists and other spiritual workers will question whether talent would be better off in a free culture than in one which is provided for by the state and economic interests, as is the case today. Such doubters should bear in mind that this book is not meant to be the least bit utopian. No hard and fast theories are found in it which say that things must be this way or that. On the contrary, its intention is to stimulate the formation of communities which, as a result of their common experience, will be able to bring about what is socially desirable. If we consider life from experience instead of theoretical preconceptions, we will agree that creative individuals would have better prospects of seeing their work fairly judged if a free cultural community existed which could act according to its own values.

[ 19 ] The ‘social question’ is not something which has suddenly appeared at this stage of human evolution and which can be resolved by a few individuals or by some parliamentary body, and stay resolved. It is an integral part of modern civilization which has come to stay, and as such will have to be resolved anew for each moment in the world's historical development. Humanity has now entered into a phase in which social institutions constantly produce anti-social tendencies. These tendencies must be overcome each time. Just as a satiated organism experiences hunger again after a period of time, so the social organism passes from order to disorder. A food which permanently stills hunger does not exist; neither does a universal social panacea. Nevertheless, men can enter into communities in which they would be able to continuously direct their activities in a social direction. One such community is the self-governing spiritual branch of the social organism.

[ 20 ] Observation of the contemporary world indicates that the spiritual life requires free self-administration, while the economy requires associative work. The modern economic process consists of the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. Human needs are satisfied by means of this process and human beings are directly involved in it, each having his own part-interest, each participating to the extent he is able. What each individual really needs can only be known by himself, what he should contribute he can determine through his insight into the situation as a whole. It was not always so, and it is not yet the case the world over; but it is essentially true as far as the civilized inhabitants of the earth are concerned.

[ 21 ] Economic activity has expanded in the course of human evolution. Town economies developed from closed household economies and in turn grew into national economies. Today we stand before a global economy. Undoubtedly the new contains much of the old, just as the old showed indications of what was to come. Nevertheless, human destiny is conditioned by the fact that this process, in most fields of economic endeavour, has already been accomplished. [ 22 ] Any attempt to organize economic forces into an abstract world community is erroneous. In the course of evolution private economic enterprise has, to a large extent, become state economic enterprise. But the political states are not merely the products of economic forces, and the attempt to transform them into economic communities is the cause of the social chaos of modern times. Economic life is striving to structure itself according to its own nature, independent of political institutionalization and mentality. It can only do this if associations, comprised of consumers, distributors and producers, are established according to purely economic criteria. Actual conditions would determine the scope of these associations. If they are too small they would be too costly; if they are too large they would become economically unmanageable. Practical necessity would indicate how inter-associational relations should develop. There is no need to fear that individual mobility would be inhibited due to the existence of associations. He who requires mobility would experience flexibility in passing from one association to another, as long as economic interest and not political organization determines the move. It is possible to foresee processes within such associations which are comparable to currency in circulation.

[ 23 ] Professionalism and objectivity could cause a general harmony of interests to prevail in the associations. Not laws, but men using their immediate insights and interests, would regulate the production, circulation and consumption of goods. They would acquire the necessary insights through their participation in the associations; goods could circulate at their appropriate values due to the fact that the various interests represented would be compensated by means of contracts. This type of economic cooperation is quite different from that practised by the labour-unions which, although operational in the economic field, are established according to political instead of economic principles. Basically parliamentary bodies, they do not function according to economic principles of reciprocal output. In these associations there would be no ‘wage earners’ using their collective strength to demand the highest possible wages from management, but artisans who, together with management and consumer representatives, determine reciprocal outputs by means of price regulation—something which cannot be accomplished by sessions of parliamentary bodies. This is important! For who would do the work if countless man-hours were spent in negotiations about it? But with person to person, association- to association agreements, work would go on as usual. Of course it is necessary that all agreements reflect the workers' insights and the consumers' interests. [ 24 ] This is not the description of a utopia. I am not saying how things should be arranged, but indicating how people will arrange things for themselves once they activate the type of associative communities which correspond to their own insights and interests.

[ 25 ] Human nature would see to it that men and women unite in such economic communities, were they not prevented from doing so by state intervention, for nature determines needs. A free spiritual life would also contribute, for it begets social insights. Anyone who is in a position to consider all this from experience will have to admit that these economic associations could come into being at any moment, and that there is nothing utopian about them. All that stands in their way is modern man's obsession with the external organization of economic life. Free association is the exact opposite of this external organizing for the purpose of production. When men associate, the planning of the whole originates in the reasoning of the individual. What is the point of those who own no property associating with those who do! It may seem preferable to ‘justly’ regulate production and consumption externally. Such external planning sacrifices the free, creative initiative of the individual, thereby depriving the economy of what such initiative alone can give it. If, in spite of all prejudice, an attempt were made today to establish such associations, the reciprocal output between owners and non-owners would necessarily occur. The instincts which govern the consideration of such things nowadays do not originate in economic experience, but in sentiments which have developed from class and other interests. They were able to develop because purely economic thought has not kept pace with the complexities of modern economics. An unfree spiritual life has prevented this. The individuals who labour in industry are caught in a routine, and the formative economic forces are invisible to them. They labour without having an insight into the wholeness of human life. In the associations each individual would learn what he should know through contact with another. Through the participants' insight and experience in relation to their respective activities and their resulting ability to exercise collective judgement, knowledge of what is economically possible would arise. [ 26 ] In a free spiritual life the only active forces are those inherent in it; in the same sense, the only economic values active in an associatively structured economic system would be those which evolve through the associations themselves. The individual's role would emerge from cooperation with his associates. He could thereby exert just as much economic influence as corresponds to his output. How the non-productive elements would be integrated into economic life will be explained in the course of the book. Only an economic system which is self-structured can protect the weak against the strong.

[ 27 ] We have seen that the social organism can arrange itself into two autonomous members able to support each other only because each is self-governing according to its inherent nature. Between them a third element must function: the political state. Here is where each individual who is of age can make his influence and judgement felt. In free spiritual life each person works according to his particular abilities; in the economic sphere each takes his place according to his associative relationship. In the context of the political rights-state the purely human element comes into its own, insofar as it is independent of the abilities by means of which the individual is active in spiritual life, and independent of the value accrued to the goods he produces in the associative economic sphere.

[ 28 ] I have attempted to show in this book how hours and conditions of labour are matters to be dealt with by the political rights-state. All are equal in this area due to the fact that only matters are to be treated in it about which all men are equally competent to form an opinion. Human rights and obligations are to be determined within this member of the social organism.

[ 29 ] The unity of the whole social organism will originate in the independent development of its three members. The book will show how the effectiveness of capital, means of production and land use can be determined through the cooperation of the three members. Those who wish to ‘solve’ the social question by means of some economic scheme will find this book impractical. However, those who have practical experience and would stimulate men and women to cooperative ventures through which they can best recognize and dedicate themselves to the social tasks of the day, will perhaps not deny that the author is in fact advocating something which is in accordance with the practical facts of life.

[ 30 ] This book was first published in 1919. As a supplement I published various articles in the magazine “Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus”, which subsequently appeared as a separate volume with the title “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus”.¹ [ 31 ] In both of these publications much more emphasis is placed on the means which should be employed than on the ends, or ‘objectives’ of the social movement. If we think realistically we know that particular ends appear in diverse forms. Only when we think in abstractions does everything appear to us in clearly defined outlines. The abstract thinker will often reproach the practical realist for lack of distinctness, for not being sufficiently ‘clear’ in his presentations. Often those who consider themselves to be experts are in reality just such abstractionists. They do not realize that life can assume the most varied forms. It is a flowing element, and if we wish to move with it we must adapt our thoughts and feelings to this flowing characteristic. Social tasks can be grasped with this type of thinking. [ 32 ] The ideas presented in this book have been drawn from an observation of life; an understanding of them can be derived from the same source.

• 1. Page 21 (Preface) In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus. These 22 essays by Rudolf Steiner, along with 44 others on the subject, are now contained in a volume entitled Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus (Essays on the Triformation of the Social Organism) published in 1961 by the Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland.

[ 1 ] The contemporary social situation poses grave and comprehensive challenges. The demands which have arisen for new structures indicate that the solutions to these challenges must be sought in ways which have not been previously considered. Conditions being what they are, the time has perhaps come when attention will be paid to one whose experience in life obliges him to contend that thoughtlessness concerning the ways which have become necessary has resulted in social chaos. The arguments presented in this book are based on this opinion. They deal with the prerequisites for transforming the demands of a large part of contemporary humanity into purposeful social will. The formation of this will should not depend on whether the demands please some of us or not. They exist, and must be dealt with as social facts. This should be kept in mind by those whose position in life causes them to find distasteful the author's description of proletarian demands as something which must be reconciled by social will. The author wishes to speak only in accordance with the realities of contemporary life, insofar as his experience enables him to do so. He has seen the inevitable consequences of ignoring the facts which have unfolded in the life of modern man and of being blind to the necessity of a social will to deal with them.

[ 2 ] Self-styled experts in practical matters (what have come to be regarded as practical matters under the influence of routine) will, at first, be dissatisfied with the arguments presented in this book. But it is just such persons as these who should undergo a relearning process, for their ‘expertise’ has been proven by recent events to be absolutely erroneous and has led to disastrous consequences. They must learn to recognize many things as practical which have seemed to them to be eccentric idealism. They may be critical of the fact that the early parts of the book deal more with the spiritual life of modern mankind than with economics. The author is obliged however, from his personal knowledge of life, to take the position that the errors of the past will only multiply if the decision is not made to focus attention on modern mankind's spiritual life. Equally dissatisfied with what the author says in this book will be those who are continuously intoning clichés about mankind abandoning purely materialistic interests and turning to ‘the spirit’, to ‘idealism’, for he attaches little importance to the mere reference to ‘the spirit’ and talk about a nebulous spiritual world. He can only recognize a spirituality which constitutes the life substance of humanity. This manifests itself in the mastery of practical aspects as well as in the formulation of a conception of the world and of life which is capable of satisfying the needs of the soul. It is not a matter of knowing—or believing to know—about spirituality, but that it be a spirituality which is also applicable to the practical realities of everyday life, one which accompanies these everyday realities and is not a mere sideline reserved for the inner life of the soul. To the ‘spiritualists’ the arguments presented in this book will be too unspiritual, while to the ‘practical’ ones they will seem unrealistic. The author is of the opinion, however, that he may be useful to contemporary society in his way just because he does not share the impracticality of those persons who consider themselves to be practical, nor can he find any justification for the kind of talk about the ‘spirit’ that results in illusions.

[ 3 ] The ‘social question’ is spoken of in this book as an economic, a legal rights and a spiritual question. The author is convinced that the true nature of this question reveals itself in the requirements of the economic, rights and spiritual-cultural areas of society. The impulse for a healthy coordination of these three areas within the social organism can emerge from a recognition of this fact. During previous periods of human evolution social instincts saw to it that the three areas were integrated in society in a way which corresponded to human nature as it was then. At the present however, it is necessary for mankind to structure society by means of purposeful social will. Between those past epochs and the present there is a confusion of old instincts and modern consciousness which is no longer competent to deal with the demands of modern mankind, at least as far as those countries are concerned in which such a will is meaningful. Often the old instincts persist in what passes today for purposeful social thinking. This weakens thinking in relation to the tasks it must face. A more profound effort than has been hitherto supposed must be made by the men and women of the present in order to work their way free of what is no longer viable. How the economic, rights and spiritual areas are to be structured in a way which corresponds to the demands of modern society can, in the author's opinion, only be determined if sufficient good will is developed to recognize this fact. What the author believes is necessary concerning the shape such structures should take is submitted to contemporary judgement by means of this book. The author's wish is to provide a stimulus along a way which leads to social objectives that correspond to contemporary realities and necessities. For he believes that only such efforts can transcend emotionality and utopianism where social will is concerned.

If, in spite of this, some readers find elements of this book utopian, then the author would suggest they consider how often ideas concerning possible social developments are so completely divorced from reality that they degenerate into nonsense. For this reason, one is inclined to find utopias even in arguments which derive from reality and direct experience, as has been attempted in this book. One sees an argument as ‘abstract’ because only the habitual is ‘concrete’, and the concrete is abstract if it does not coincide with the habitual manner of thinking.¹

[ 4 ] The author knows that strict followers of party programs will at first be unhappy with this book. Nevertheless, he is confident that many political party people will soon come to the conclusion that events have already far outstripped party programs and that a determination, independent of such programs, concerning the immediate objectives of social will is, above all, necessary.

April 1919
Rudolf Steiner

• 1. The author has purposely avoided confining himself to the customary political economic terminology. He knows exactly which are the passages a ‘specialist’ opinion will call amateurish. His form of expression was determined not only by his desire to address himself also to people who are not familiar with political and social scientific literature, but primarily because of his view that a new age will judge most of what is specialized in this literature, including its terminology, to be one-sided and inadequate. The author would remind those who feel that he should have referred to seemingly similar social ideas of others, that the points of departure and the ways described here, for which the author can thank decades of experience, are the essential points towards a practical realization of the given impulses, and not merely Chapter Four, the author had already committed himself to an attempt at practical realization when seemingly similar ideas in respect to one point or another had not yet been noticed.

[ 1 ] One of the significant issues that has been transformed by the catastrophe of the Great War is that of democracy. Anybody with an open mind for historical change ought to see that inevitably democracy must permeate the various nationalities completely. The worldwide catastrophe has also shown that the factions opposing democracy have no future. Everything anti-democratic has brought on its own destruction. Advocates of anti-democratic institutions should not forget what reality has demonstrated with torrents of blood.

[ 2 ] The question of how to make democracy a reality requires that adherents take a stand not previously possible in the same way. Before the social movement entered its present historical stage, it could still be considered in a different way. But now we must ask, “How can the social movement be incorporated into democratic life?”

[ 3 ] It is not just a matter of promoting vague political ideals or demands, nor of shaping political ideals as a result of that which one-sided interest groups understandably raise as demands. A true understanding of the social organism becomes more necessary with every passing day.

[ 4 ] The servants of capitalism were not alone in their apprehension when they considered the consequences of the social wave threatening to inundate contemporary life. In addition to a majority of self-centered individuals, a few honest persons recognized in the precise shape assumed by this wave a danger to true democracy. When spiritual life, even in practical affairs, comes to be seen as an ideological superstructure of economic life, how will a genuine unfolding of human individuality be possible? For it has become such a superstructure in the thinking of those who want to make a social form of life dependent upon humanity's adopting a materialistic view of history. If it does not make possible the free unfolding of human individuality, socialism will not be able to liberate culture from its capitalistic prison, but rather it will bring death with no hope of revival.

[ 5 ] If one judges the demands made by the social movement not in accordance with the interests that have resulted from its earlier stages, but rather as a historical necessity that is not to be avoided, a very grave question emerges: How can these demands of the movement be accomplished without suppressing human talent or creativity, the free unfolding of which determines the extent and future of human development? In a social order founded upon a capitalist economy, democratization was something entirely different from what it must be in an order imbued with social impulses.

[ 6 ] Ever more urgent is the need to seek possibilities of developing the life of the human spirit together with social impulses. One should not allow oneself to be hypnotized by the dogma: Socialism in the economy will generate, on its own, a healthy spiritual-cultural life as a superstructure. An economy standing alone without constant fertilization by a cultural life founded on free human individuality cannot continue to develop and becomes rigid. Only those immersed in such a dogma can fail to understand this. That quality of human individuality which must creatively influence and direct the social life has to be wrought from the very essence of human nature through impulses that economic life cannot produce. Economics are the foundation of human existence; but human spirit rises above it. Economic forces are confined within much narrower boundaries than human nature as a whole. As obvious as this may seem for the comprehension of the individual, it has not been assimilated by contemporary thinking. More and more, public opinion and, above all, public action reveal a trend of thought that resists this self-evident truth. Men become accustomed to certain conditions, and come to demand modes of existence that would seem impossible to them if they truly wanted to think about it. By deadening their sensibilities to this contradiction, they conceal it from themselves and are thus able to live with it.

[ 7 ] A significant fact of life reveals itself in this contradiction. Our innate powers of judgment and feeling, which should be developed through a healthy nurturing of cultural life, do not find their way into our modern social institutions. These institutions then smother the free development of the individual.

[ 8 ] This suppression makes itself felt from two sides: from that of the state, and from that of the economy. Consciously or unconsciously we fight against the oppression. Here lies the real cause underlying the social demands being raised. What lives in these demands is like a wave driven along the surface, hiding what really is at work in the depths.

[ 9 ] The rebellion against state oppression manifests itself in the aspiration of the people to true democracy; their revolt against an oppressive economy finds expression in their endeavor to structure economic life in a truly social way.

[ 10 ] For that which has developed over the last three to four centuries, humanity demands democracy. If democracy is to become a reality, then it must be built upon those forces in human nature that actually unfold themselves democratically. If nations would become democracies, then they must become institutions that permit human beings to bring into play that which governs relationships among all who have come of age. Every adult citizen must share equally in the regulatory process. Administration and representation must provide a climate in which a healthy consciousness of rights and responsibilities is allowed to unfold.

[ 11 ] Can such administration and representation also regulate the cultural life—life that must bring about the full development of individual human potential—if this development is not to wither and be thwarted to the detriment of social life? The premise for such a development is that it be tended in a milieu encouraging only such actions as have their source in the cultural life itself. Specific talent can be truly recognized and properly nurtured only by someone endowed with the same abilities. Emerging talent can be properly channeled only if a knowing guide acts from experience gained precisely in that realm of life into which he is to show the way. The proper nurture of a socially sound community requires individuals who, through their own experience, have acquired intimate knowledge of the various branches of life, and who have cultivated within themselves the ability to explain their experience to those who need to know. Think for a moment about the socially most significant branch of cultural life-schools on every level! Is it not true that development of individual human capacities and their preparation for life in a particular field can best be guided by that teacher who has personal experience in the field? Or can social renewal ever take place if the criterion for hiring such teachers is something other than their own individual capabilities? Democratic sentiments can relate only to that which each adult has in common with every other adult. It is impossible to find within democratic processes a regulatory function for matters that lie entirely within the domain of the individual. If true democracy is to become a reality, then one must exclude from its province everything that belongs in the domain of the individual. Within the province of democracy and the administrative establishments growing out of it, no impulse directing the free flow of individual human talent can arise. Democracy has to declare its impotence to provide such an impulse if it wants to be a true democracy. If a true democracy is to be formed out of the state that has existed heretofore, then one must remove from it and deliver to full self-regulation all those matters for which only the individual development of each particular person can manifest the right impulses. Such matters cannot be regulated just because a person is of age and is a citizen.

[ 12 ] The social relationships that every adult is competent to judge are the legal relationships between one person and another. At the same time, they represent conditions of life that can maintain their social character only because in democratic institutions they manifest the collective will—a composite of equal individual human wills working together. By contrast, the collective will cannot express what is to arise from individual human abilities; here institutions must function so as to allow the individual to achieve full expression. In away, the human being might be compared to a natural landscape. One cannot cultivate and manage an expanse of land without considering its different aspects. The nature of each part must be studied so that one can learn what it might produce. Thus, in the realm of culture, individual initiative based on individual capabilities must become socially effective; cultural life may not be determined through the will of all. Within the realm of culture this universal will becomes antisocial because it deprives the community of the fruits that individual human capabilities can provide.

[ 13 ] Thus self-administration of the cultural life is the only way to promote individual abilities. Only through self- administration will conditions exist that give rise not to a universal will that suppresses the fruitfulness of the individual for social life, but rather a condition in which individual human accomplishments can be taken up into the life of the whole for its benefit.

[ 14 ] Certain criteria will be established from within such a self-governing spiritual-cultural life whereby the right people may be put into the right positions, and immediate, vital trust can take the place of laws and regulations. Educators will not look to laws and regulations for their educational aims; instead, they will become observers of life and seek to learn, by listening to life, what it is they have to inculcate. It will be possible within the cultural sphere to avail oneself of persons who, through years of experience in practical life, are well versed in the ways of law and economics. In the cultural sphere, they will in turn encounter people with whom they can, through lively intercourse, exchange and reshape, their practical experience and bring it to educational fruition. On the other hand, administrators in the cultural sphere may occasionally feel the need to enter the arena of practical life in order to utilize and revitalize their own knowledge.

[ 15 ] If the structuring of the social organism is done in such a way that a self-governing cultural life can unfold within it, this will not destroy the vital unity of the organism; on the contrary, it will support and enhance it. Only the administration is articulated: in the life of the people, unity will be allowed to develop. One will no longer need to isolate oneself from life by encapsulating oneself within a rigid condition. A lively exchange can take place between the cultural organism and other branches of society. When tradition and public opinion is reshaped in the cultural life, the potential for vitality is far greater than in an inflexible system. The structuring of the social organism should, in the future, be based on real social facts, and these concrete forces should develop, through self-regulation, into something that is a source of a power that can leave us free.

[ 16 ] There should be no doubt that the economic and legal spheres can develop only when people are allowed to think and feel socially. Unbiased experience of present conditions should convince one that cultural life fused with the legal system cannot accomplish this. Anyone who has sound judgment and comprehends life in its fullness has difficulty being understood at present. He finds himself dealing with people whose souls do not resound with life experience in thinking and feeling; people whose educations in state-run schools have given them an abstract disposition, divorced from life. Those who believe they are the most practical, show the least practicality. They have achieved a certain routine in the narrow channel in which they function. They call this their practical sense and regard with arrogance anyone who has not tied himself to their routine, calling him impractical. But all the rest of their thinking, feeling, and willing is permeated with and ruled by abstractions inimical to life. Such personalities are made to flourish by state-governed education, which remains impervious to life-experience. All that can enter into this kind of education, allowed to act exclusively, is the abstract thinking and feeling that is accessible to every adult apart from any special experience. This is the reason why in so many quarters social needs meet with so little understanding. Even the origins of social sensibilities show themselves to be inadequate to the demands of the social organism. One thinks: many people are calling for a restructuring of society! Let one come to meet them, and create laws and ordinances. But the restructuring of society cannot be accomplished that way. Today's needs are such that their fulfIllment cannot be found in a temporary transfer of power. The “social question” has reached the surface of humanity's historical evolution, and will remain there now forever. It will demand new ways of thinking and feeling that presuppose a living intercourse between the cultural sphere and life as a whole. To socialize only to be done with it, once and for all, will not be possible. The effort has to be renewed constantly; or rather, social life will have to be subject to a constant process of socialization.

[ 17 ] The unsocial, often even antisocial, feelings of those who claim to be today's socialist thinkers, stem from the cultural life of an earlier era, especially as it is manifested in the educational system. This spiritual-cultural sphere alienated from life itself has called forth a twisted notion of spiritual life. Broad segments of the populace believe that the genuine human impulses reside within economic forms. According to them, cultural life is nothing but a “superstructure” with its foundations in the economy, an ideology arising from a particular mode of economic activity. This view has been adopted (consciously or unconsciously) by almost the entire working class, the bearers of the social demands of the age. This working class developed during an age in which spiritual culture has foregone the attempt to find a direction and a goal of itself; an age in which the outward social form this spiritual culture has adopted is the result of political and economic life. Only self-administration can rescue the spiritual-cultural life from its present condition. Yoked firmly to the economy by the capitalistic system and technology, the proletariat now believes that mere organization of economic life will necessarily bring about “by itself” the needed reforms in the legal and cultural domain as well. The working class was obliged to experience how modern cultural life had become a mere adjunct to political and economic life, and so they formed the opinion that all cultural life must be such an appendage.

If, in truth, they could see this dismal concept embodied within a social organism, it would be a bitter disappointment actually to discover that a cultural life arising from a social reform based on economic principles alone would lead to even more dire and pitiful conditions than the present ones. The proletariat will have to struggle through to the insight that the present situation cannot be improved through a mere reorganization of the economy, but only through separation of the cultural and legal spheres from the economic, thus creating a healthy threefold social organism. The proletarian movement will find the right track only when its members cease to reiterate, “Modern economic life created a cultural and a legal sphere which have an asocial effect; it is time for an economic change which, in turn, will generate from within itself brand new cultural and legal forms.” The proletarian movement will succeed only when its members can say, “Modern culture has led to an economic system that can be transformed only when both the cultural and legal spheres are separated from it and are released to their own administration.” For this modern cultural life has led to a situation in which everything non-economic is dependent on the economy: the healing processes can start only with the elimination of this dependency, and not with an even greater subjection. The fact that today's working class has been harnessed into the economic system has led to the notion that only economic reconstruction can cure the ailment. The day that sets the working class free from this superstition; the day that allows people to become aware of their own instincts and to recognize that cultural and legal life cannot function as an ideology born from the economic environment; the day the proletariat perceives that the calamity of the modern age lies precisely in the fact that such an ideology has emerged; that will be the day that brings the dawn awaited by many.

[ 18 ] An economy in which the state does not participate will be able to proceed from independent economic experience on the one hand and the support of particular individuals and economic groups on the other. Economic experience cannot play itself out in the sphere where the rights due every adult should come to the fore, but rather only in the sphere of the self-governing economic body. Recognition given a person because of work in a special field of the economy cannot be expressed in the structure of the state, where only that which is valid for all persons equally prevails, but rather only in the effect this person exerts upon other branches of the economy. Persons who belong to the same branch of the economy will have to unite with each other; they will have to form associations with those from other economic sectors. Through a lively intercourse between such associations and cooperatives the interests of producers and consumers will be able to organize themselves. In this way, economic impulses alone will be able to work within the economy.

[ 19 ] When blue collar and white collar workers meet with each other, they need only consider economic issues because legal matters will be dealt with separately under the state's jurisdiction. The blue collar worker can associate freely with the manager of the business, because only the division, on economic principles, of that which they have earned together will be allowed; there will be no economic compulsion resulting from the greater economic resources of the manager. The associative structuring of the economic body will place the blue collar worker's contractual relationship to the business manager in a totally different light. Up to now, he has been forced to fight against the interests of the business manager, but in his new associative role he will share in the fruits of production. Through the heightened awareness he has gained as a consumer, he will cultivate and profit by—rather than oppose—the same interest in production as the manager. This can never happen in an economy the aim of which is the profitability of capital assets; it can happen only in an economy that regulates the value of products on the basis of self-equilibrating processes of production and consumption within the social structure as a whole. A social partnership such as this is possible only if the interests of special professionals, consumers and producers can find expression in various self-subsisting associations and can come to agreements within the economic body as a whole. The special interests of the individual branches of industry give rise to the individual associations; determinations of economic value will arise out of the coalition of these associations, and in the central administrative body that will emerge from these economic interests.

An individual business cannot be socialized; socialization happens only when the production of economic value that a separate business contributes to the total economic life has no antisocial effect. As a result of such genuine socialization, the capitalist system will lose its harmful tendencies. (In my book, Toward Social Renewal, I have described how capital must function within a healthy three-fold organism.) It should be clear by now that one cannot “do away” with capital, since capital is nothing other than the means of production working for the community. It ii not capital itself that is harmful, but rather capital in private hands, especially if this private ownership is able to control the social structure of the economic body. But if society can be structured in the manner previously described, then capital can no longer have any antisocial influence. The beneficial social structure will always prevent the capital assets from being isolated from the management of the means of production. It will also put a stop to the attempts of those who strive only for capital assets, but shirk participation in the economic process. One could readily object that others who do participate would gain nothing, should the earning of nonparticipants be “divided up.” The objection has some validity, and yet it disguises the truth, for its validity has no significance for the structuring of the social organism. The harmfulness of the nonworking recipient of dividends is not that to a small degree they diminish the working man's earnings, but that the sheer possibility of someone being able to have income without working for it lends an antisocial aspect to the whole economic body. The economic body that blocks the possibility to derive income from dividends differs from the one that cannot block it just as human organisms, too, differ—the one is healthy and impervious in all areas to the invasion of a tumor; the other, through the accumulation of unhealthy elements, is beset by a tumorous growth.

[ 20 ] A healthy social organism requires, however, that certain measures unacceptable to contemporary economic prejudices growing out of the aforementioned associations be instituted. In a healthy social organism, capital goods and other means of production will have a one-time cost at the time of delivery. The producer will then be able to manage them, but only for as long as he can contribute to production by his management. The business will then have to be transferred to another not by sale nor by inheritance, but rather as a free gift to the one best able to manage it. It will have no sale value, and thus no value in the hands of an heir who does not work. Capital with independent economic power will work in the establishment of the means of production; it will dissolve itself instantly when the creation of the means of production is finished. Now, however, capital consists mostly of such “already established means of production.”

[ 21 ] The socially correct value of a piece of goods can only be determined by comparison with other goods. Its value must equal the value of all other goods needed by the producer to fulfill his own requirements, until the time when he can again produce a similar piece of goods. This he must do while considering all those requirements necessary in the interest of other people. (Herein must be included, for instance, the needs of his children and what he must contribute for the support of persons incapable of working, etc.) The institutions and provisions of a healthy economy must act in an intermediary capacity to guarantee the value of such goods. These institutions can only be created through a network of corporations that regulate production by considering consumption. The justification for these requirements is not the issue. The issue is the mediation between consumption and production based on economic experience and real economic relationships. If felt needs arise that cannot be borne by the economy as a whole, these needs will find no counter or reciprocal value in the goods produced by the person who feels those needs.

[ 22 ] An economy can be regulated in this way only when its development is based on mutually supporting measures taken by individual corporations. These measures must stem from expertise and concrete facts. Any incursion of democratic principles would necessarily have a detrimental effect upon the development of expert knowledge. Similarly, economic interests would have a detrimental effect upon everything that should emerge under the influence of democracy.

[ 23 ] The health of the social organism depends upon its articulation into three independent spheres: a spiritual-cultural sphere, a legal or rights-sphere, and an economic sphere. Far from dividing people into three social strata, the articulation will allow them to participate in all three spheres according to their interests as whole human beings. The separation will be such that in the cultural or legal spheres, for instance, no decision can be made concerning problems arising within the economy. In the unitary state, where the three systems are intertwined, an economic group will have the power to legalize its interests and declare them public rights. In the threefold organism this can never happen, because economic interests can play themselves out only within the economic cycle, and there will be no possibility of overflow into the legal sphere.

[ 24 ] The greatest possible guarantee that one sphere of the threefold organism cannot be violated by another lies in their union, effected by the total corporate body consisting of the delegates of the three central administrations and agencies. For these central administrative committees will have to deal with actual developments within their own spheres. They will not arrive at a situation where, for instance, the rights sphere or the cultural sphere would be impinged upon by the economic, because this would place them in opposition to the developments taking place in their several spheres. Should, however, the influence of one department over another become necessary, the factual basis for such influence can lie only in the sphere of corporate interest and not in the individual group's interest.

[ 25 ] No one should cherish the illusion that any social institution could ever create an “ideal situation.” What can be attained, however, is a viable, healthy social organism. Anything beyond that must be found through something other than social development. It is not the task of this articulation to guarantee “happiness,” but rather to find the living conditions needed by a healthy social organism. Within it, however, men must be able to seek what they need to lead a dignified human existence. Nor does the healthy physical organism create from within itself that culture which the soul alone can unfold from its own depths; but a diseased organism prevents the soul from doing so. Thus a healthy social organism can only provide the prerequisites necessary for all that human beings must nurture and develop through their own capabilities and needs.

[ 26 ] Anyone who descries as utopian or as mere ideology what reveals itself to be a guideline for social development, and wants to leave everything to evolution, resembles a person who becomes indisposed because he sits in an unventilated room and refuses to open a window while waiting for the stale air to renew itself.

[ 27 ] The merger of cultural life and economics with the state would rob democracy of its real foundations. Anyone desiring genuine democracy will insist on granting the cultural and the economic spheres self-determination.

[ 1 ] The contradiction that has gradually developed between the self-imposed tasks of nation-states and the tendencies of economic life is one of the most significant facts of recent history. The nation-states have sought to draw the regulation of economic life within their boundaries into the sphere of their responsibilities. Persons, or groups of persons, who administer economic life seek support for their activities in the power of the state. One state confronts the other not only as a separate cultural and political realm, but also as a bearer of the economic interests at work within the region.

[ 2 ] Marxist ideology would like not only to continue these national efforts, but to devlop them to the extreme. Using the present national framework, it would like to change private capitalism into a cooperative through socialization of the means of production. Industries within the national framework would be combined into economic organisms wherein methodical production would be organized according to existing needs and wherein the distribution of the products among the people living in the nation would be managed.

[ 3] Recent developments in economics conflict with this endeavor, however. Economic life tends to evolve into a uniform world economy without considering the given national boundaries. Humanity as a whole is striving to become one single economic community. The nations' positions are such that those living within them are bound together through interests that conflict to a large degree with the economic relationships ready to unfold. Economic life is striving to grow beyond the national structures that evolved under historical conditions that definitely did not conform to the economic interests in all cases.

[ 4 ] The catastrophe of World War I has revealed the disparity between national structures and the interests of world economy. A large part of the war's causes must be sought in the fact that the nations exploited the economy to augment their power, or in the fact that people involved in economic pursuits sought to promote their own economic interests by means of politics. Individual economies served to disrupt a world economy striving for unity. The various nations sought to turn the economic gains that should have remained within the economy to political advantage.

[ 5 ] Within the national states, cultural and political interests become entangled with those of the economy. Within the national boundaries that have arisen historically, cultural, political and economic interests will not necessarily coincide. If humanity is to take serious steps toward realizing its justified demands for spiritual freedom, political democracy and a social economy, one must not think for a minute that the administrations of the cultural and political spheres would be able to regulate economic life as well. For all cultural and political relationships on an international level would have to adapt themselves slavishly to the conditions of an economy whose coercive nature would influence their development.

[ 6 ] In theory, Marxist socialism easily avoids such criticisms. Its exponents argue that cultural attainments and political provisions are ideological constructs founded upon economic realities. Marxists believe, therefore, that they need not worry for now about the organization of the cultural and political domains. They want to create closed economic systems on a grand scale, and believe that within these systems cultural and political conditions will arise that will permit international relations to start up on their own once the economic systems begin doing business with each other. This socialist approach recognizes a truth, yet it is a one-sided truth. In the existing states—so the Marxist discovered—branches of production are administered, products are managed, and both administration and management are combined with a form of government that denies cultural freedom and is politically far from ideal. He concludes from this that henceforth the social organism need only produce more and administer more production lines. Because he believes that out of all this the cultural and legal-political spheres originate “by themselves,” the Marxist overlooks one thing: to the extent that one takes the government of people out of economic administration, precisely to that extent must another form of government be found.

[ 7 ] The idea of a threefold articulation of the social organism makes provision for that which Marxist socialism ignores. It takes seriously the ideal of an administration of economic life that is based solely upon economic perspectives. Yet it also allows one to recognize that the spiritual needs and political demands of humanity have to be articulated into separate administrations. This permits cultural and legal relationships on an international level to become independent of economic life, which must pursue its own path.

[ 8 ] Conflicts that stem from one sphere of life will thus be balanced through another sphere. Nations or alliances that are in economic conflict drag the cultural and legal interests into the conflict if they are unitary states whose governments combine the administrations of cultural, legal and economic concerns. However, in a social organism where each of these three spheres has a separate administration, economic interests will, for example, have a balancing effect on opposing cultural interests.

[ 9 ] In the southeastern corner of Europe, where the catastrophe of the World War started, one could observe the effect of the merger imposed by the unitary nation-states on the three areas of life. In general, the cultural contrast between Germanicism and Slavism was at the root of the conflict. This was aggravated by a political element in the sphere of rights. In Turkey, the democratically-minded Young Turks replaced the old reactionary government. As a result of this political realignment, Bosnia and Herzegovnia were annexed by Austria, which did not want merely to stand by while the Turkish democracy drew the inhabitants of these lands to its parliamentary system (even though legally both areas belonged to Turkey—despite Austria's occupation going back to the Congress of Berlin). The third element in the conflict related to Austria's economic ambitions. Austria intended to build a railroad from Sarajevo to Mitrovitza in order to establish a profitable trade connection with the Aegean Sea. These three elements, then, were important factors leading to war. If railroads were constructed only on economic grounds, they could not contribute to the conflicts that exist between nations.

[ 10 ] One can see in the negotiations over the Baghdad problem also how cultural and political interests prevailed against economic factors. The economic advantages of such a railroad could have been viewed entirely from the perspective of world economy if the negotiations would have involved only economic administrations whose decisions could not be influenced by other, national interests.

[ 11 ] The objection can be made, of course, that in earlier times conflicts also arose between nations through such conflation of economic interests with cultural and political ones. However, this objection should not be raised against the idea of the threefold social order. For this idea is an expression of modern consciousness, for which such catastrophes are unbearable, whereas in earlier ages humanity reacted to them differently. The people of those times who, unlike today's men and women, did not aspire to cultural freedom, democracy, political and social economy, could not even consider such a social organism that alone takes these aspirations seriously. Just as they instinctively regarded their own social organism as adequate, so they also accepted the international conflicts arising from them as a natural necessity.

[ 12 ] The expansion of national economies into a unified world economy cannot become a reality unless the economy is separated from cultural life on the one hand and from political and legal life on the other. There are some who are generally sympathetic to the idea of a threefold social order because they understand its justification in the light of present and future needs. Nevertheless, these same people are keeping their distance because they feel that one single state could not even begin to set the wheels in motion toward its realization. They believe the other nations, which have kept their unitary character, would take drastic economic measures to make life impossible for the threefold organism. Such an objection is justified against the development of a state in the Marxist sense, but it is not valid where it concerns the idea of a threefold social order. An economic super-cooperative forced into the framework of a present-day national government could not develop economically profitable relations with the private capitalist economies of foreign countries. When centrally administered, economic operations are hampered in their free unfolding, which is required in relationships with foreign countries. Free initiative and speed, so important for decision-making within such relationships, can only be attained when commerce between industry and foreign markets (as well as commerce between foreign industry and domestic markets) is direct and handled solely by those immediately involved. Emphasizing these points, the opponents of centrally controlled economic super-cooperatives are always in the right, even if advocates of the super-systems are willing to grant far-reaching independence to their manager. In practice, for instance, the procurement of raw materials (a process that should involve many managing authorities) would result in business procedures that might not fit with the way in which the demands of foreign countries must be satisfied. Similar difficulties would arise when ordering raw materials from abroad.

[ 13 ] The threefold social organism would place economic life on its own foundation. Marxist socialism designates the state as the economic organization. The threefold social order frees economic life from the bonds of the state. Therefore, it can consider only those measures that evolve naturally from within the economy itself. However, the economy withers if it is built upon a centrally-oriented administration because regulations and tasks necessary for production must be based on free initiative. This free initiative does not preclude production within the social organism corresponding to consumer needs through socially justified prices, as I have indicated in my previous article. The preservation of free initiative in management is possible only if the leadership is not yolked to a central administration, but rather is permitted to combine into associations. The result of this is that a central administration does not control management operations; management retains full freedom, and the social orientation of the economic body is based upon agreements between independent management operations. A management responsible for export will be able to act completely out of its own free initiative in its commercial dealings with foreign countries; and domestically it will maintain relations with those associations that will help the most with the supply of raw materials and the like, to satisfy foreign demands. The same will be possible for import management.

It will be necessary, however, that in trade with foreign countries no products will be imported whose production costs or purchase price will impair the population's life style. Nor should relationships with foreign countries cause domestic production branches to be destroyed because the lower cost of foreign products makes continuation of domestic production unprofitable. Yet all this can be effectively prevented through a system of associations. Should a firm or a trading corporation conduct its business to the detriment of domestic production, they could be prevented from doing so by those respective associations from which they cannot exclude themselves without making their working situation impossible.

The necessity can arise, however, that the cost is too high for certain products that must be purchased from abroad for various reasons. Faced with such a necessity, one will need to consider what I wrote in my book, Toward Social Renewal: “An administration that occupies itself solely with economic processes will be able to bring about adjustments that show themselves within these economic processes to be necessary. Suppose, for instance, a business concern were not in a position to pay its investors the interest on the savings of their labor, then—if it is a business that is nevertheless recognized as meeting a need—it will be possible to arrange for other industrial concerns to make up the deficiency by the voluntary agreement of everyone concerned.” In the same way, the excessive cost of a foreign good can be offset through subsidies from concerns whose earnings surpass the need of its workers.

[ 14 ] In addition to all such preventative steps that a threefold social organism can take to counteract the damage it sustains through commerce with states averse to the threefold idea, it may become necessary to resort to additional measures that are similar to the principle of tariff. It is easy to see that autonomy of economic life dictates different premises for such measures than those needed when treatment of import and export depends upon majority rule within groups of people united by common political and cultural interests. Economic organizations that combine their efforts for practical reasons have as their goal a price structuring that has a social effect; such endeavors could never arise out of individual groups' desire for profit. That is why the economic life of threefold social organisms strives toward the ideal of free trade. Within a unified world economy, free trade offers the best way of guaranteeing that production in separate parts of the world is neither too expensive nor too cheap. A social body with independent economic management that is not surrounded by threefold organisms will, of course, be forced to protect certain branches of production from economically unfeasible price reduction by raising tariffs. The management of these tariffs will then be entrusted to associations for the public's benefit.

[ 15 ] If disadvantages can be overcome in the manner indicated, an isolated threefold social organism will present itself to foreign countries as a comprehensive economic structure whose internal organization will be of no consequence for commerce with non-articulated states, since this commerce is not based on the internal structure, but rather on the free initiative of those engaged. On the other hand, the individual nation's progress toward establishing a threefold order will be highly exemplary for other states. The effect will make itself felt not only morally, through the social character of the way of life the inhabitants of the threefold organism enjoy, but also through the awakening of purely economic interests. These will arise because the threefold social order will prove to be markedly less profitable for the non-articulated states when they retain their unitary character than it would were they to adopt the threefold order themselves. In this way, then, a threefold social order could be instrumental in clearing away obstacles to a unified world economy. Through its structure, based on free associations, the threefold organism can prevent damage to itself as a single economic body. Through organizing its labor force rationally to make certain products attractive to foreign countries, the threefold organism can assure that the disturbances it causes among unitary states will not lead to boycott of its economy. An oasis within the area it shares with the national economies, the threefold nation will prove that the changeover to threefolding indeed represents economic progress and, in general, a step forward for humanity.

[ 16 ] Today it is stressed on many sides, and rightly so, that the salvation of the world economy has to come from a heightened will to work, a will that has been diminished by the war. Anyone who understands human nature knows that this commitment to work can only come when people are convinced that in the future their work will be done under social conditions that guarantee them a dignified human existence.

The belief that the old social system can lead to an even better way of life is crumbling on all sides. And, within certain areas, the disaster of the World War has shattered this belief completely. The idea of the threefold social order will exert a compelling influence in the direction indicated here. It will create an impetus toward work through the vistas it opens up into humanity's social future. To disseminate this idea in a way that can be received with understanding, and that will put to rest the misgivings of its opponents, seems to be an essential part of the task confronting contemporary social thinking.

[ 1 ] In the present social movement there is a great deal of talk about social institutions, but very little talk about social and antisocial human beings. Very little regard is paid to the “social question” that arises when one considers that institutions in a community take their social or antisocial stamp from the people who run them. Socialist thinkers expect to see in the community's control of the means of production something that will satisfy the demands of a wide range of people. They take for granted that, under communal control of the economy, human relations will necessarily assume a social form as well. They have seen that the economic system along the lines of private capitalism has led to antisocial conditions. They believe that when this industrial system has disappeared, the antisocial tendencies at work within it will also necessarily come to an end.

[ 2 ] Undoubtedly, along with the modern private capitalist form of industrial economy there have arisen social evils—evils that embrace the widest range of social life; but is this in any way a proof that they are a necessary consequence of this industrial system? An industrial system can, in and of itself, do nothing beyond putting men into life situations that enable them to produce goods for themselves or for others in a more or less efficient manner. The modern industrial system has brought the means of production under the power of individual persons or groups. The achievements of technology were such that the best use could be made of them by a concentration of industrial and economic power. So long as this power is employed in the one field—the production of goods alone—its social effect is essentially different from what it is when this power oversteps its bounds and trespasses into the fields of law or culture. It is this trespassing into the other fields that, in the course of the last few centuries, has led to the social evils that the modern social movement is striving to abolish. He who possesses the means of production acquires economic power over others. This economic power has resulted in the capitalist allying himself with the powers of government, whereby he is able to procure other advantages in society, opposing those who were economically dependent on him—advantages which, even in a democratically constituted state, are in practice of a legal nature. This economic domination has led to a similar monopolization of the cultural life by those who held economic power.

[ 3 ] The simplest thing would seem to be to get rid of this economic predominance of individuals, and thereby do away with their dominance in the spheres of rights and spiritual culture as well. One arrives at this “simplicity” of social thought when one fails to remember that the combination of technological and economic activity afforded by modern life necessitates allowing the most fruitful possible development of individual initiative and personal talent within the business community. The form production must take under modern conditions makes this a necessity. The individual cannot bring his abilities to bear in business if in his work and decision-making he is tied down to the will of the community. However dazzling is the thought of the individual producing not for himself but collectively for society, its justice within certain bounds should not hinder one from also recognizing the other truth—collectively, society is incapable of giving birth to economic schemes that can be realized through individuals in the most desirable way. Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of economic life that would substitute communal production for private management of the means of production. Rather, the endeavor should be to forestall evils that may spring up along with management by individual initiative and personal talent, without impairing this management itself. This is possible only if neither the legal relationship among those engaged in industry, nor that which the spiritual-cultural sphere must contribute, are influenced by the interests of industrial and economic life.

[ 4 ] It cannot be said that those who manage the business of economic life can, while occupied by economic interests, preserve sound judgment on legal affairs and that, because their experience and work have made them well acquainted with the requirements of economic life, they will therefore be best able to settle legal matters that may arise within the workings of the economy. To hold such an opinion is to overlook the fact that a sphere of life calls forth interests arising only within that sphere. Out of the economic sphere one can develop only economic interests. If one is called out of this sphere to produce legal judgements as well, then these will merely be economic interests in disguise. Genuine political interests can only grow upon the field of political life, where the only consideration will be what are the rights of a matter. And if people proceed from such considerations to frame legal regulations, then the law thus made will have an effect upon economic life. It will then be unnecessary to place restrictions on the individual in respect to acquiring economic power; for such economic power will only result in his rendering economic services proportionate to his abilities—not in his using it to obtain special rights and privileges in social life.

[ 5 ] An obvious objection is that political and legal questions do after all arise in people's dealing with one another in business, so it is quite impossible to conceive of them as something distinct from economic life. Theoretically this is right enough, but it does not necessarily follow that in practice economic interests should be paramount in determining these legal relations. The manager who directs a business must necessarily have a legal relationship to manual workers in the same business; but this does not mean that he, as a business manager, is to have a say in determining what that relationship is to be. Yet he will have a say in it, and he will throw his economic predominance into the scales if economic cooperation and legal administration are conjoined. Only when laws are made in a field where business considerations cannot in any way come into question, and where business cannot gain any power over this legal system, will the two be able to work together in such a way that our sense of justice will not be violated, nor business acumen be turned into a curse instead of a blessing for the whole community.

[ 6 ] When the economically powerful are in a position to use that power to wrest legal privileges for themselves, among the economically weak will grow a corresponding opposition to these privileges. As soon as it has become strong enough, such opposition will lead to revolutionary disturbances. If the existence of a separate political and legal province makes it impossible for such privileges to arise, then disturbances of this sort cannot occur. What this special legal province does is to give constant orderly scope to those forces which, in its absence, accumulate until at last they vent themselves violently. Whoever wants to avoid revolutions should learn to establish a social order that shall accomplish in the steady flow of time what will otherwise try to realize itself in one historical moment.

[ 7 ] It will be said that the immediate concern of the modern social movement is not legal relations, but rather the removal of economic inequalities. One must reply to such an objection that our conscious thoughts are not always the true expression of the real demands stirring within us. Our conscious thoughts are the outcome of immediate experience; but the demands themselves originate in far deeper strata that are not experienced immediately. And if one aims at bringing about conditions that can satisfy these demands, one must attempt to penetrate to these deeper strata. A consideration of the relations that have come about in modern times between industrial economy and law shows that the legal sphere has become dependent upon the economic. If one were to try superficially, by means of a one-sided alteration in the forms of economic life, to abolish those economic inequalities that the law's dependence on the economy has brought about, then in a very short while similar inequalities would inevitably result as long as the new economic order were again allowed to build up the system of rights out of itself. One will never really touch what is working its way up through the social movement to the surface of modern life until one brings about social conditions in which, alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of politics and law can be realized and satisfied upon their own independent basis.

[ 8 ] It is in a similar manner, again, that one must approach the question of the cultural life and its bearings on that of law and the economy. In the last few centuries the cultural life has been cultivated under conditions that allowed it to exercise only the smallest independent influence upon politics or the economy. One of the most important aspects of culture, education, was shaped by governmental interests. People were trained and taught according to the requirements of the state. And the power of the state was reinforced by economic power. If anyone were to develop his or her human capacities within the existing educational institutions, this depended directly on his or her economic station in life. Accordingly, the spiritual forces that were able to find scope within the political or economic spheres bore the stamp of these economic factors. Free cultural life had to forego any attempt to make itself useful within the political state. And it could influence the economic sphere only to the extent that economics had remained independent of state control. For a vibrant economy demands that competent people be given full scope; economic matters cannot be left to just anyone whom circumstances may have left in control. If, however, the typical socialist program were to be carried out, and economic life were to be administered on the model of politics and the law, the cultivation of the free spiritual life would be forced to withdraw from the public sector altogether. However, a cultural life that has to develop apart from civil and economic realities loses touch with real life. It is forced to draw its substance from sources not vitally linked to those realities. Over the course of time the cultural life makes of this substance a sort of animated abstraction that runs alongside real events without having any concrete effect upon them. In this way, two different currents arise within cultural life. One of them draws its waters from political rights and economics, and is occupied with their daily requirements, trying to devise systems to meet these requirements—without, however, penetrating to the needs of our spiritual nature. All it does is devise external systems and harness men into them, ignoring what their inner nature has to say about it. The other current of cultural life proceeds from the inner striving for knowledge and from ideals of the will. These it shapes to suit our inner nature. However, such knowledge is derived from contemplation: it is not the precipitate of practical experience. These ideals have arisen from concepts of what is true and good and beautiful, but they do not have the strength to shape the conduct of life. Consider what concepts, what religious ideals, what artistic interests, form the inner life of the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, or the government official, outside and apart from his daily practical life; and then consider what ideas are contained in those activities that find expression in his bookkeeping, or for which he is trained by the education that prepared him for his profession. A gulf lies between these two currents of cultural life. The gulf has grown all the wider in recent years because the kind of thinking that is quite justified in natural science has become the measure of our relationship to reality as a whole. This way of thinking seeks to understand the lawfulness of phenomena that lie beyond human activity and human influence, so that the human being is a mere spectator of what he comprehends in a scheme of natural law. And although he sets these laws of nature into motion in technology, he himself does no more than allow the forces that lie outside his own being and nature to be active. The knowledge he employs in this kind of activity has a character that is quite different from his own nature. It reveals to him nothing of what lies in cosmic processes with which human nature is interwoven. For such knowledge as this he needs a world view that unites both the human world and the world outside him.

[ 9 ] Anthroposophy strives for such knowledge. While fully recognizing all that scientific thinking means for the progress of modern humanity, anthroposophy sees that the scientific method framed for the study of nature is able to convey only that which comprehends the outer human being. It also recognizes the essential nature of the religious world views, but is aware that in the modern age these concepts of the world have become an internal concern of the soul, and not something applied in any way to the transformation of external life, which runs on separately alongside.

[ 10 ] In order to arrive at its insights, spiritual science makes demands to which people are still little inclined, because in the last few centuries they have become used to carrying on their outer and inner lives as two separate and distinct existences. Thus the incredulity that meets every endeavor to bring spiritual insight to bear upon social questions. People remember past attempts that were born of a spirit estranged from life. When there is any talk of such things, they recall St. Simon, Fourier and others. The opinion is justified insofar as such ideas stem not from living experience, but rather from an artificial thought-construct. Thus they conclude that spiritual thinking is generally unable to produce ideas that can be realized in practical life. From this general theory come the various views that in their modern form are all more or less attributable to Marx. Those who hold them have no use for ideas as active agents in bringing about satisfactory social conditions. Rather, they maintain that the evolution of economic realities is tending inevitably toward a goal from which such conditions will result. They are inclined to let practical life more or less take its own course because in actual practice ideas are powerless. They have lost faith in the strength of spiritual life. They do not believe that there can be any kind of spiritual life able to overcome the remoteness and unreality that has characterized it during the last few centuries.

It is a kind of spiritual life such as this, nevertheless, that is the goal of anthroposophy. The sources it would draw from are the sources of reality itself. Those forces that hold sway in our innermost being are the same forces that are at work in external reality. Scientific thinking cannot penetrate down to these forces when it merely elaborates natural law intellectually out of external experience. Yet the world views that are founded on a more religious basis are no longer in touch with these forces either. They accept the traditions that have been handed down without penetrating to their fountainhead in the depths of human nature. The spiritual science of anthroposophy, however, seeks to penetrate to this fountainhead. It develops epistemological methods that lead down into those regions of our inner nature where the processes external to us find their continuation within human nature itself. The insights of spiritual science represent a reality actually experienced within our inmost self. These insights shape themselves into ideas that are not mere mental constructs, but rather something saturated with the forces of reality. Hence such ideas are able to carry within them the force of reality when they offer themselves as guides to social action. One can well understand that, at first, a spiritual science such as this should meet with mistrust. Such mistrust will not last when people come to recognize the essential difference that exists between this spiritual science and modern natural science, which is assumed today to be the only kind of science possible. If one can struggle through to a recognition of the difference, then one will cease to believe that one must avoid social ideas when one is intent upon the practical work of shaping social reality. One will begin to see, instead, that practical social ideas can be had only from a spiritual life that can find its way to the roots of human nature. One will see clearly that in modern times social events have fallen into disorder because people have tried to master them with thoughts from which reality constantly struggled free.

[ 11 ] Spiritual insight that penetrates to the essence of human-nature finds there motives for action that are immediately good in the ethical sense as well. The impulse toward evil arises in us only because in our thoughts and feelings we silence the depths of our own nature. Accordingly, social ideas that are arrived at through the sort of spiritual concepts indicated here must, by their very nature, he ethical ideas as well. Since they are drawn not from thought alone, but from life, they possess the strength to take hold of the will and to live on in action. In true spiritual insight, social thought and ethical thought become one. And the life that grows out of such spiritual insight is intimately linked with every form of activity in human life—even in our practical dealings with the most insignificant matters. Thus as a consequence of social awareness, ethical impulse and practical conduct become so closely interwoven that they form a unity.

[ 12 ] This kind of spirituality can thrive, however, only when its growth is completely independent of all authority except that derived directly from cultural life itself. Political and legal measures for the nurturance of the spirit sap the strength of cultural life, while a cultural life that is left entirely to its own inherent interests and impulses will strengthen every aspect of social life. It is frequently objected that humanity would need to be completely transformed before one could found social behavior upon ethical impulses. Such an objection does not take into account that human ethical impulses wither away if they are not allowed to arise within a free cultural life, but are instead forced to take the particular turn that the political-legal structure of society finds necessary for carrying on work in the spheres it has previously mapped out. A person brought up and educated within a free cultural life will certainly, through his very initiative, bring along into his calling much of the stamp of his or her own personality. Such a person will not allow himself to be fitted into the social works like a cog into a machine. In the end, however, what he brings into it will not disturb the harmony of the whole, but rather increase it. What goes on in each particular part of the communal life will be the outcome of what lives in the spirits of the people at work there.

[ 13 ] People whose souls breathe the atmosphere created by a spirit such as this will vitalize the institutions needed for practical economic purposes in such a way that social needs, too, will be satisfied. Institutions devised to satisfy these social needs will never work so long as people feel their inner nature to be out of harmony with their outward occupation. For institutions of themselves cannot work socially. To work socially requires socially attuned human beings working within an ordered legal system created by a living interest in this legal system, and with an economic life that produces in the most efficient fashion the goods required for actual needs.

[ 14 ] If the life of culture is a free one, evolved only from those impulses that reside within itself, then legal institutions will thrive to the degree that people are educated intelligently in the ordering of their legal relations and rights; the basis of this intelligence must be a living experience of the spirit. Then economic life will be fruitful as well to the degree that cultivation of the spirit has developed new capacities within us.

[ 15 ] Every institution that has arisen within communal life had its origin in the will that shaped it; the life of the spirit has contributed to its growth. Only when life becomes complicated, as it has under modern technical methods of production, does the will that dwells in thought lose touch with social reality. The latter then pursues its own course mechanically. We withdraw in spirit, and seek in some remote corner the spiritual substance needed to satisfy our souls.

It is this mechanical course of events, over which the individual will had no control, that gave rise to conditions which the modern social movement aims at changing. It is because the spirit that is at work within the legal sphere and the economy is no longer one through which the individual spiritual life can flow, that the individual sees himself in a social order which gives him, as an individual, no legal or economic scope for self-development.

People who do not see through this will always object to viewing the social organism as consisting of three systems, each requiring its own distinct basis—cultural life, political institutions, and the economy. They will protest that such a differentiation will destroy the necessary unity of communal life. To this one must reply that right now this unity is destroying itself in the effort to maintain itself intact. Legal institutions based upon economic power actually work to undermine that economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to be a foreign body within the social organism. And when the spirit that reigns within legal and economic life tries to regulate the activity of the organism as a whole, it condemns the living spirit (which works its way up from the depths of each individual soul) to powerlessness in the face of practical life. If, however, the legal system grows up on independent ground out of the consciousness of rights, and if the will of the individual dwelling in the spirit is developed in a free cultural life, then the legal system, strength of spirit and economic activity work together as a unity. They will be able to do so when they can develop, each according to its own proper nature, in distinct fields of life. It is just in separation that they will turn to unity; when an artificial unity is imposed, they become estranged.

[ 16 ] Many socialist thinkers will thus dismiss such a view: “It is impossible to bring about satisfactory conditions through this organic formation of society. It can be done only through a suitable economic organization.” They overlook the fact that those who work in their economic organization are endowed with wills. If one tells them this, they will smile, for they regard it as self-evident. Yet their thoughts are busy constructing a social edifice in which this “self-evident fact” is ignored. Their economic organization is to be controlled by a communal will. However, this must after all be the result of the individual wills of the people united in the organization. These individual wills can never take effect if the communal will is derived entirely from the idea of economic organization. Individual wills can expand unfettered if, alongside the economic sphere, there is a legal sphere where the standard is set, not by any economic point of view, but only by the consciousness of rights, and if, alongside both the economic and legal spheres, a free cultural life can find place, following only the impulses of the spirit. Then we shall not have a social order running like clockwork, in which individual wills could never find a lasting place. Then human beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent and to bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances. Under the free cultural life the individual will shall become social. When legal institutions are self-subsisting, these socially attuned individual wills shall yield a communal will that works justly. The individual wills, socially oriented and organized by the independent legal system, will exert themselves within the economic system, producing and distributing goods as social needs demand.

[ 17 ] Most people today still lack faith in the possibility of establishing a social order based on individual wills. They have no faith in it because such a faith cannot come from a cultural life that has developed in dependence on the state and the economy. The kind of spirit that does not develop in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself but rather out of an external organization simply does not know what are the spirit's potentials. It looks about for something to guide and manage it, not knowing how the spirit guides and manages itself if it can but draw its strength from its own sources. It would like to have a board of management for the spirit—a branch of the economic and legal organizations—totally disregarding the fact that the economy and the legal system can thrive only when permeated with the spirit that is self-subsistent.

[ 18 ] It is not good will that is needed in order to transform the social order; what is needed is a courage to oppose this lack of faith in the spirit's power. A truly spiritual view can inspire this courage, for such a spiritual view feels able to bring forth ideas that serve not only the inner needs of the soul, but also the needs of outer, practical life. The will to enter the depths of the spirit can become a will so strong as to suffuse every deed that one performs.

[ 19 ] When one speaks of a spiritual view having its roots in life itself, many people take one to mean the sum total of those instincts that become a refuge when one travels along the familiar paths of life and holds every intervention from, spiritual spheres to be a piece of eccentric idealism. The spiritual view intended here, however, must not be confused with that abstract spirituality incapable of extending its interests to practical life, nor with that spiritual tendency which actually denies the spirit flatly when it considers the guidelines of practical life. Both these views ignore the way in which the spirit rules in the facts of external life, and therefore feel no urgent need to penetrate to its foundations. Yet only such a sense of urgency brings forth that knowledge which sees the “social question” in its true light. The experiments now being made to resolve this issue yield such unsatisfactory results because many people have not yet become able to see the true nature of the question. They see this question arise in economic spheres, and they look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they will find the solution in economic transformation. They fail to recognize that these transformations can only come about through forces that are released from within human nature itself in the revival of independent cultural and legal life.

[ 1 ] Various people¹ have expressed the opinion that all questions concerning money are so complicated that they are almost impossible to grasp in clear, precise thought.

[ 2 ] A similar view can be taken regarding many questions of modern social life. At the same time, we should consider the consequences that must follow if we allow our social dealings to be guided by impulses rooted in imprecise thoughts, or at any rate in thoughts that are very hard to define. Such thoughts do not merely signify a lack of insight and a confusion in theory; they are potent forces in actual life. Their vagueness lives on in the institutions they inspire; these, in turn, result in impossible social conditions.

[ 3 ] The conditions under which we live in modern civilization arise from just such chaotic thinking. This will have to be acknowledged if a healthy insight into the social question is to be attained. We first become aware of the social question when our eyes are opened to the straits in which we find ourselves. But there is far too little inclination to follow objectively the path that leads from a mere perception of these troubles to the human thoughts that underlie them. It is too easy to dismiss as impractical idealism any attempt to proceed from bread-and-butter issues to ideas. People do not see how impractical their accustomed way of life is, how it is based on unviable thoughts. [ 4 ] Such thoughts are deeply rooted within present-day social life. If we try to get at the root of the “social question,” we are bound to see that at present even the most material demands of life can be mastered only by proceeding to the thoughts that underlie the cooperation of people in a community.

[ 5 ] To be sure, many such thoughts have been pointed out within specific contexts. For example, people whose activity is closely connected with the land have indicated how, under the influence of modern economic forces, the buying and selling of land has reduced it to a mere commodity. They believe this is harmful to society. Yet opinions such as these do not lead to practical results, for because of their own interests, those in other spheres of life do not admit that these opinions are justified.

[ 6 ] It is from an unflinching perception of such facts that the impetus should come to guide and direct any attempt to solve “the social question.” For such a perception can show that one who opposes justified social demands because they require a way of thinking opposed to his own particular interests, is in the long run undermining the very foundations on which his own interests are built.

[ 7 ] Such an observation can be made when considering the social significance of land. First we must take into account how the purely capitalist tendency in economic life affects the valuation of land. As a result of this purely capitalist tendency, capital creates the laws of its own increase; and in certain spheres of life these laws are no longer consistent with the principles that determine the increase of capital along sound lines.

[ 8 ] This is especially evident in the case of land. Certain conditions may very well make it necessary for a district to be cultivated in a particular way. Such conditions may be of a moral nature; they may be founded on spiritual and cultural peculiarities. However, it is entirely possible that the fulfillment of these conditions would result in a smaller interest on capital than would investment in some other undertaking. As a consequence of the purely capitalist tendency, the land will then be exploited, not in accordance with these spiritual or cultural viewpoints (which are not purely capitalist in character), but in such a way that the resulting interest on capital will equal the interest resulting from other undertakings. Thus values that may be very necessary to a real civilization are left undeveloped. Under the influence of this purely capitalist orientation, the estimation of economic values becomes one-sided; it is no longer rooted in the living connection we must have with nature and with cultural life, if nature and spiritual life are to give us satisfaction in body and in soul.

[ 9 ] It is easy to jump to the conclusion that for this reason capitalism must be abandoned. The question is whether in so doing we would not also be abandoning the very foundations of modern civilization. [ 10 ] Anyone who thinks the capitalist orientation a mere intruder into modern economic life will demand its removal. However, he who sees that division of labor and social function are the essence of modern life, will only consider how best to exclude from social life the disadvantages that arise as a byproduct of this capitalist tendency. He will clearly perceive that the capitalist method of production is a consequence of modern life, and that its disadvantages can make themselves felt only as long as increase of capital is made the sole criterion of economic value.

[ 11 ] The ideal is to work towards a social structure in which the criterion of capital increase will no longer be the only power to which production is subjected. In an appropriate social structure, increase of capital should rather serve as an indicator that the economic life, by taking into account all the requirements of our bodily and spiritual nature, is correctly formed and organized.

[ 12 ] Anyone who allows his thought to be determined by the one-sided point of view of capital increase or of a rise in wages will fail to gain clear and direct insight into the effects of the various specific branches of production in the economy. If the object is to gain an increase in capital or a rise in wages, it is immaterial through what branch of production the result is achieved. The natural and sensible relation of people to what they produce is thereby undermined. For the mere quantity of a capital sum, it is of no account whether it is used to acquire one kind of commodity or another. Nor does it matter if one considers only the amount of a wage whether it is earned through one kind of work or another.

[ 13 ] Now it is precisely insofar as they can be bought and sold for sums of capital in which their specific nature cannot find expression, that economic values become “commodities.” Their commodity-nature is suited, however, only to those goods or values meant for immediate human consumption; for the valuation of these, we have an immediate standard in our physical and spiritual needs. There is no such standard in the case of land or artificially created means of production. The valuation of these things depends on many factors that become apparent only when one takes into account the entire social structure of human life.

[ 14 ] If cultural interests demand that a certain district be put to economic uses that, from the viewpoint of capital, seem to yield a lower return than other industries, the lower return will not in the long run harm the community. In time the lower return of the one branch of production will affect other branches such that the prices of their products will also be lowered. Only a viewpoint that deals with momentary gain of the most narrow and egotistical kind can fail to see this connection. Where there is simply a market relationship—where supply and demand are the determining factors—only the egotistic type of value can be considered. The “market” relationship must be superseded by associations that regulate the exchange and production of goods through an intelligent consideration of human needs. Such associations can replace mere supply and demand by contracts and negotiations between groups of producers and consumers, and between different groups of producers. Excluding on principle one person's making himself a judge of another's legitimate needs, these negotiations will be based solely on the possibilities afforded by natural resources and by human abilities.

[ 15 ] Life on this basis is impossible so long as the economic cycle is governed by the consideration of capital and wages alone. As a result of this orientation, land, means of production and commodities for human use—things for which there is in reality no common standard of comparison—are exchanged for one another. Even human labor power and the use of our spiritual and intellectual faculties are made dependent on the abstract standard of capital and wages—a standard that eliminates, both in human judgment and in our practical activity, our natural, sensible relationship to our work.

[ 16 ] In modern life, there is no possibility of preserving the relationship to economic values that was still possible under the old system of barter, nor even the relationship still possible under a simpler monetary system. The division of labor and of social function that has become necessary in modern times separates the laborer from the recipient of the product of his work. There is no changing this fact without undermining the conditions of modern civilization; nor is there any way of escaping its consequence—the weakening of one's immediate interest in one's work. The loss of this interest must be accepted as a result of modern life. Yet we must not allow this interest to disappear without finding other kinds to take its place, for human beings cannot live and work indifferently in the community.

[ 17 ] It is from the cultural and the political spheres, as they are made independent, that the necessary new interests will arise. From these two independent spheres will come impulses involving viewpoints other than those of mere increase of capital or wages. [ 18 ] A free spiritual-cultural life creates interests that dwell in the depths of the human being, and imbue one's work and all one's action with a living aim and meaning for social life. Developing and nurturing human faculties for the sake of their own inherent value, such a cultural life will call forth a consciousness that our talents and our place in life have real meaning. Molded by individuals whose faculties have been developed in this spirit, society will continually adapt itself to the free expression of human abilities. The legal life and economic life will take on a form in keeping with the human abilities that have been allowed to develop.

The deep inner interests of individuals cannot unfold fully and freely within a cultural life that is regulated by politics, or that develops and uses human faculties merely according to their economic utility. [ 19 ] This sort of cultural life may provide people with artistic and scientific movements as “idealistic” adjuncts to life, or it may offer them comfort and consolation in religion or philosophy. Yet all these things only lead out of the sphere of social realities into regions more or less remote from everyday affairs. Only a free cultural life can permeate the everyday affairs of the community, for it is only a free cultural life that can set its own stamp on them as they take shape.

In my book, Toward Social Renewal, I tried to show how a free cultural life will, among other things, provide the motives and impulses for a healthy social administration of capital. The fruitful administration of a certain amount of capital is possible only through a person or a group that has the abilities to perform the particular work or social service for which the capital is used. Therefore, it is necessary for such a person or group to administer the capital only as long as they are able to carry on the work of management themselves by virtue of their own abilities. As soon as this ceases to be true, the capital must be transferred to others who have the requisite abilities. Since under a free cultural life faculties are developed purely out of the impulses of the cultural life itself, the administration of capital in the economic sphere will be a result of the unfolding of spiritual powers; the latter will carry into the economic life all those interests that are born within its own sphere.

[ 20 ] An independent legal life will create mutual relationships between people living in a community. Through these relationships, they will have an incentive to work for one another, even when the individual is unable to have an immediate, creative interest in the product of his work. This interest becomes transformed into the interest that he can have in working for the human community whose legal life he helps build. Thus the part one plays in the independent legal life can become the basis for a special impulse to live and work apart from economic and cultural interests. One can look away from one's work and the product of one's work to the human community, where one stands in relation to his fellows purely and simply as an adult human being, without regard to one's particular mental abilities, and without this relation being affected by one's particular station in economic life. When one considers how it serves the community with which one has this direct and intimate human relationship, the product of one's work will appear valuable, and this value will extend to the work itself.

Nothing but an independent legal and political life can bring about this intimate human relationship because it is only in this sphere that each human being can meet every other with equal and undivided interest. All the other spheres of social life must, by their very nature, create distinctions and divisions according to individual talents or kinds of work. This sphere bridges all differences.

[ 21 ] Once the cultural life has been made self-subsistent, mere increase of capital will no longer be an immediate and driving motive. Increase of capital will result only as a natural consequence of other motives; these other motives will proceed from the proper connection of human faculties with the several spheres of economic activity.

[ 22 ] It is only from such viewpoints—viewpoints that lie outside the purely capitalist orientation—that society can be constructed in a way that will bring about a satisfactory balance between human work and its return. And so it is with other matters where modern life has alienated us from the natural basis of life.

[ 23 ] Through the independence of the cultural and legal-political spheres, the means of production, land and human labor power will be divested of their present commodity character. (The reader will find a more exact description of the way this will come about in my book, Toward Social Renewal.) The motives and impulses that shall determine the transference of land and of the means of production when these are no longer treated as marketable commodities shall be rooted in the independent spheres of rights and cultural life, as shall the motives that will inspire human labor.

[ 24 ] In this way, forms of social cooperation suited to the conditions of modern life will be created. It is only from these forms that the greatest possible satisfaction of human needs can come. In a community organized purely on a basis of capital and wages, the individual can apply his powers and talents only insofar as they find an equivalent in monetary gain. Consider, moreover, the confidence with which one individual will place his forces at the disposal of another in order to enable the latter to accomplish certain work. In a capitalist community, this confidence must be based on a purely capitalist point of view.

Work done in confidence of the achievements of others is the social basis of credit. In older civilizations there was a transition from barter to the monetary system; similarly, as a result of the complications of modern life, a transformation has recently occurred from the simpler monetary system to working on a credit basis. In our age, life makes it necessary for one man to work with the means that are entrusted to him by another, or by a community, in confidence of his power to achieve a result. Under capitalism, however, the credit system involves a complete loss of any real and satisfying human relationship to the conditions of one's life and work. Credit is given when there is a prospect of an increase of capital that seems to justify it; one's work is constantly overshadowed by the need to justify it in capitalist terms. These are the motives underlying the giving and taking of credit. And what is the result of all this? Human beings are subjected to the power of a financial sphere remote from life. The moment people become fully conscious of this fact, they feel it to be unworthy of their human dignity.

[ 25 ] Take the case of credit on land. In a healthy social life, an individual or a group possessing the necessary abilities may be given credit on land, enabling them to develop it by establishing some kind of production. It must be a development that seems justified on that land in light of all the cultural conditions involved. If credit is given on land from the purely capitalist viewpoint, in the effort to give it a commodity value corresponding to the credit provided, use of the land which would otherwise be the most desirable is possibly prevented.

[ 26 ] A healthy system of giving credit presupposes a social structure that enables economic values to be estimated by their relation to the satisfaction of people's bodily and spiritual needs. Independent cultural and legal-political spheres will lead to a vital recognition of this relation and make it a guiding force. People's economic dealings will be shaped by it. Production will be considered from the viewpoint of human needs; it will no longer be governed by processes that obscure concrete needs through an abstract scale of capital and wages.

[ 27 ] The economic life in a threefold social order is built up by the cooperation of associations arising out of the needs of producers and the interests of consumers. These associations will have to decide on the giving and taking of credit. In their mutual dealings the impulses and perspectives that enter economic life from the cultural and legal spheres will play a decisive part. These associations will not be bound to a purely capitalist point of view. One association will deal directly with another; thus the one-sided interests of one branch of production will be regulated and balanced by those of the other.

[ 28 ] Responsibility for the giving and taking of credit will thus be left to the associations. This will not impair the scope and activity of individuals with special faculties; on the contrary, only this method will give individual faculties full scope. The individual is responsible to his or her association for achieving the best possible results. The association is responsible to other associations for making good use of these individual abilities. Such a division of responsibility will ensure that the whole activity of production is guided by complementary and mutually corrective points of view. The individual's desire for profit will no longer impose production on the life of the community; production will be regulated by the community's needs, which will make themselves felt in a real and objective way. The need one association establishes will be the occasion for the granting of credit by another.

[ 29 ] People who depend on their accustomed lines of thought will say, “These are very fine ideas, but how are we to make the transition from present conditions to the threefold system?” It is important to see that what has been proposed here can be put into practice without delay. One need only begin by forming such associations. Surely no one who has a healthy sense of reality can deny this is immediately possible. Associations based on the idea of the threefold social order can be formed just as readily as companies and consortia were formed along the old lines. Moreover, all kinds of dealings and transactions are possible between the new associations and the old forms of business. There is no question of the old having to be destroyed and replaced artificially by the new. The new simply takes its place beside the old; the new will then have to justify itself and prove its inherent power, while the old will gradually crumble away.

The threefold idea is not a program or system for society as a whole, requiring the old system to cease suddenly and everything to be “set up” anew. The threefold idea can make a start with individual undertakings in society. The transformation of the whole will then follow through the ever-widening life of these individual institutions. Because it is able to work this way, the threefold idea is not utopian. It is a force adequate to the realities of modern life.

[ 30 ] The essential thing is that the idea of a threefold order shall stimulate a real social intelligence in the people of the community. The economic viewpoint shall be properly fructified by the impulses that come from the independent cultural and political spheres. The individual shall contribute in a very definite sense to the achievements of the community as a whole. Through the role the individual plays in the independent cultural life, through the interests that arise in the political and legal sphere, and through the mutual relations of the economic associations, his or her contribution shall be realized.

[ 31 ] Under the influence of the threefold idea, the operation of social life will in a certain sense be reversed. Presently, one must look to the increase of one's capital or wages as a sign that one is playing a satisfactory part in the life of the community. In the threefold social order, the greatest possible efficiency of common work will result because individual faculties work in harmony with the human relationships founded in the legal sphere, and with the production, circulation and consumption regulated by the economic associations. Increase of capital, and a proper adjustment of work and the return upon work, shall appear as a final consequence of these social institutions and their activities.

[ 32 ] The threefold idea would guide our transforming and constructive power from mere attempts at reform of social effects into the sphere of social causes. Whether one rejects this idea or makes it one's own will depend on summoning the will and energy to work one's way through to the realm of causes. If one does this, one will cease considering only external institutions; instead, one's attention will be guided to the human beings who make the institutions. Modern life has brought about a division of labor in many spheres, for outer methods and institutions demand it. The effects of division of labor must be balanced by vital mutual relations among people in the community. Division of labor separates people; the forces that come to them from the three spheres of social life, once these are made independent, will draw them together again. This division of society has reached its zenith. This is a fact of experience, and it gives our modern social life its stamp. Once we recognize it, we realize the imperative demand of the age: to find and follow the path that leads to reunion.

[ 33 ] This inevitable demand of the times is vividly illustrated by such concrete facts of economic life as the continued intensification of the credit system. The stronger the tendency toward a capitalist point of view, the more highly organized the financial system and the more intense the spirit of enterprise becomes the more the credit system develops.

However, to a healthy way of thinking the growth of the credit system must drive home the urgent need to permeate it with a vital sense of the economic realities—the production of commodities and the people's needs for particular commodities. In the long run, credit cannot work in a healthy way unless the giver of credit feels himself responsible for all that is brought about thereby. The recipient of credit, through his connection with the whole economic sphere (that is, through the associations), must give grounds to justify his taking this responsibility. For a healthy national economy, it is important not merely that credit should further the spirit of enterprise as such, but that the right methods and institutions should exist to enable the spirit of enterprise to work in a socially useful way.

[ 34 ] Theoretically, no one will want to deny that a larger sense of responsibility is necessary in the present-day world of business and economic affairs. To this end, associations must be created that will work to confront individuals with the wider social effects of all their actions.

[ 35 ] Persons whose task it is to be farmers and who have experience in agriculture, very rightly declare that those administering land must not regard it as an ordinary commodity, and that land credit must be considered differently from commodity credit. Yet it is impossible for such insight to come into practical effect in the modern economy until the individual is backed up by the associations. Guided by the real connections between the several spheres of economic life, the associations will set a different stamp on agricultural economy and on the other branches of production.

[ 36 ] We can easily understand that some reply to these arguments: “What is the point of it all? When all is said and done, it is human need that rules over production, and no one can give or receive credit unless there is a demand somewhere or other to justify it.” Someone might even say, “After all, these social institutions and methods you have in mind amount to nothing more than a conscious arrangement of the very things that ‘supply and demand’ will surely regulate automatically.” It will be clear to one who looks more closely that this is not the point. The social thoughts that originate in the threefold idea do not aim at replacing the free business dealings governed by supply and demand with a command economy. Their aim is to realize the true relative values of commodities, with the underlying idea that the product of an individual's labor should be of a value equal to all the other commodities consumed in the time spent producing it.

Under the capitalist system, demand may determine whether someone will undertake the production of a certain commodity. Yet demand alone can never determine whether it will be possible to produce it at a price corresponding to its value in the sense defined above. This can be determined only through methods and institutions whereby society, in all its aspects, will bring about a sensible valuation of the different commodities. Anyone who doubts that such methods and institutions are worth striving for lacks vision; he does not see that, under the exclusive rule of supply and demand, needs whose satisfaction would upgrade the life of the community are being starved. He has no feeling for the necessity of trying to include the satisfaction of such needs among the practical incentives of an organized community. The essential aim of the threefold social order is to create a just balance between human needs and the value of the products of human work.

• 1. E.g. the English finance theorist Hartley Withers in his treatise on Money and Credit.

[ 1 ] Germany believed herself secure for time without end in her empire, which was founded half a century ago. In August 1914 she thought the war she was faced with would prove her invincible. Today all she can do is look upon its ruins. Such an experience calls for self-reflection. For such an experience proved that an opinion held for fifty years, and especially the ideas that had prevailed during the war, had been a tragic error. Where can the reasons for this fateful error be found? This question must now call forth a process of self-evaluation within the soul of every German. Will there be enough strength left for such introspection? Germany's very existence depends upon it. Germany's future also hinges upon the sincerity of the questioning mind—how did we fall prey to such fatal misconceptions? If reflection upon this inquiry starts immediately, then it will come in a flash of understanding: yes, we did found an empire half a century ago, but we neglected to give it a task springing from within the very essence of its national spirit.

The empire was founded. During the first years of its existence care was taken to shape its inner possibilities according to demands posed, year after year, by old traditions and new endeavors. Later, progress was made to safeguard and enlarge the outer positions of power that were based on material resources. Linked to it were policies regulating the social demands of the new era, policies that did take into ac-count the requirements of the day, to some extent, but lacked a greater vision.

A goal could have been defined had there been enough sensitivity to the growing needs of the new generation. Thus the empire found itself in the larger world arena without an essential direction or goal to justify its existence. The debacle of the war revealed this truth in an unfortunate way. Until the war, other nations saw nothing to suggest that Germany had a historic world mission that ought not to be swept away. Her failure to manifest such a mission, according to those with real insight, was the underlying cause of Germany's ultimate breakdown.

[ 2 ] Immeasurably much depends now on the ability of the German people to assess this state of affairs objectively. Disaster should call forth an insight that never appeared during the previous fifty years. Instead of petty thoughts about the immediate concerns of the day, the grand sweep of an en-lightened philosophy of life should surge through the present, endeavoring to recognize the evolutionary forces within the new generation, and dedicating itself to them with a courageous will. There really must be an end to all the petty attempts to dismiss as impractical idealists everyone who has his eye on these evolutionary forces. A stop must be put to the arrogance and presumption of those who consider themselves to be practical, yet who are the very ones whose narrow-mindedness, masked as practicality, has led to disaster. Consideration must be given to the evolutionary demands of the new age as enunciated by those who, although labeled impractical idealists, are actually the real practical thinkers.

[ 3 ] For a long time, “pragmatists” of all kinds have fore-seen the emergence of new human needs. However, they wanted to meet them with traditional modes of thought and institutions. The economic life of modern times gave rise to these needs. It seemed impossible to satisfy them following avenues of private initiative. It seemed imperative to one class that, in a few areas, private labor should be changed over into social labor; and where this class's own philosophy deemed it profitable, the change became effective. Another class wanted radically to turn all individual labor into social labor. This group, influenced by recent economic developments, had no interest in the preservation of private goals.

[ 4 ] All efforts regarding humanity's new demands hereto-fore have one thing in common: they all aim at the socialization of the private sector in the expectation that it will be taken over by communal bodies (the state or commune); however, these have their origins in preconceptions that have nothing to do with these new demands. Nor is any consideration given to the fact that the newer cooperatives, which are also expected to play a role in the takeover, have not been formed fully in accordance with the new requirements, but are still imbued with old thought patterns and habits.

[ 5 ] The truth is that none of the communal institutions influenced in any way by these old patterns can be a proper vehicle for the new ideas. The forces at work in modern times urge recognition of a social structure for all humanity that comprehends something entirely different from prevailing views. Heretofore, social communities have been largely shaped by human social instincts. The task of the times must be to permeate these forces with full consciousness.

[ 6 ] The social organism is articulated like a natural organism. Just as the natural organism must take care of the process of thinking through its head and not through its lungs, so the social organism must be organized into systems. No one system can assume the work of the other; each must work harmoniously with the others while preserving its own integrity.

[ 7 ] Economic life can prosper only if it develops according to its own laws and energies as an independent system within the social organism, and if it does not let confusion upset its structure by permitting another part of the social order—that which is at work in politics—to invade it. On the contrary, the political system must function independently alongside the economic system, just as in the natural organism breathing and thinking function side by side. Their wholesome collaboration can be attained only if each member has its own vitally interacting regulations and ad-ministration. However, beneficial interaction falters if both members have one and the same administrative and regulatory organ. If it is allowed to take over, the political system is bound to destroy the economy, and the economic system loses its vitality if it becomes political.

[ 8 ] These two spheres of the social organism must now be joined by a third that is shaped quite independently, from within its own life-possibilities—the cultural sphere, with its own legitimate order and administration. The cultural portions of the other two spheres belong in this sphere and must be submitted to it; yet the cultural sphere has no administrative power over the other two spheres and can influence them only as the organ systems coexisting within a complete natural organism influence each other.

[ 9 ] Today it is already possible to elaborate at length upon the necessity of the social organism and to establish a scientific basis for it in every detail. Here, however, only guidelines can be offered for those who want to pursue the important task.

[ 10 ] The foundation of the German Empire came at a time when the younger generation was already confronted with these necessities. However, its administration did not understand how to give the Empire a mission with a view to these needs. Understanding it would not only have helped provide the right inner structure; it would have guided Ger-many in a justified direction in world politics. Given such an impetus, the German people could have lived together with other nations.

[ 11 ] Disaster ought to give rise now to introspection. The will to make the social organism possible must be strengthened. A new spirit—not the Germany of the past—should now confront the external world. A new Germany with cultural, economic and political systems, each with its own administrations, should now begin the work of rebuilding relation-ships with the victor. Germany failed to recognize in time that, unlike other nations, she needed to become strong through the threefold articulation of the social order; there-fore, she must do so now.

[ 12 ] One can imagine the so-called pragmatists saying how these new concepts are too complicated, and how uncomfortable they are merely thinking about a collaboration of three spheres. Shying away from the real demands of life, they want to pursue complacently their own habits of thought. They must awaken to the fact: either one must deign to sub-mit one's thinking to the demands of reality, or nothing will have been learned from the debacle, and this self-inflicted misery will be endlessly perpetuated and compounded.

[ 1 ] In the year 1858, Hermann Grimm wrote an essay entitled “Schiller and Goethe.” It begins with these words: “The true history of Germany is the history of the spiritual movements among her people. Only when enthusiasm for some great thought has inspired the nation and set its frozen forces flowing, do deeds of great and shining fame occur.” And further on we read: “... the names of the German emperors and kings are not milestones of the nation's progress.”

[ 2 ] Only a revival of the attitude underlying such words can shed light upon the troubled time that has come upon the German people. That something else from this attitude may yet awaken amid the commotion and labor of present times is the one hope to be cherished by he who holds it necessary above all for the German people to turn for help to the saving power of thoughts. Those who say today that one must first wait to see what shall come of the general situation and what relations with the people of the West and East shall result from new world conditions, have no concept of the age's necessities.

This view has led to everything said in these pages about the idea of the threefold social order. I believe that in the previous essays I have sufficiently answered the constant objection that our first thought must be the outcome of our relations with foreign nations before we can turn our attention to social ideas, like that of the threefold system. This objection rests on a fallacy that may prove bitterly fatal to the German people. Germany has come out of the world catastrophe in such a way that she must first create a basis for future relations with the nations around her. Her economic life (if its development were detached from the political life of laws and from the cultural field) would take on a form that could give it a place in the whole system of world economy. As I have tried to show in these essays, it would be in the interest of other nations to give an economic life of this kind its place in the system of world economy. An independent cultural life can be regarded by no other nation as a ground for hostility; a political-legal life among the German people based on the equality of all adults could not be viewed as a hostile element by non-Germans without their deriding themselves.

[ 3 ] However, an idea like the threefold order must come before the world with the driving force of a definite will in public affairs. The moment this idea is observed on the way toward becoming fact, it can become such a revelation of the innermost German being as will give the rest of the world something firm with which to reckon. Facing modern circumstances, facing the lack of faith in the practical efficacy of living ideas, one might well ask what has become of the German spirit. In ideas such as those written by Hermann Grimm sixty years ago, the voice of the greatest spirits of their own history speaks to the German people. In such ideas, these great spirits intended to utter the deepest will and purpose of their people. Shall the descendants of these spirits be deaf to them?

[ 4 ] These descendants are in a situation where truly it is not enough merely to remember the ideas of their forefathers, but where they must carry forward these ideas in a new form suited to modern times. Would the German deny his own being through lack of faith in ideas, and thus lose his very self? Surely the best part of the German spirit lies in this faith in the potency of ideas. And a revelation of the German spirit, once displayed in its genuine truth, would be one with which the world must reckon.

[ 5 ] A large enough number of Germans who share the heritage of faith in the intellectual world, and bring to it all the forces of their souls, must be the saving of their people. No negotiations with the world abroad will be of any good to the German people if carried on with indications of disbelief in ideas and their practical utility, for in all such negotiations the very core of the German spirit is absent.

[ 6 ] All objections stemming from the view that now is not the time to indulge in ideas should be silenced. There can be no question of any time that will bear in it the seeds of any real possibility of life for the German people, until the power of ideas has been recognized by a sufficiently large number of people. Not a faith that trims its ideas according to outer events, but a faith in ideas—that shall be the force that moves the German nation. What results may be confidently awaited in the same faith; to thrust it aside and to wait idly in a round of false activity while destiny pursues its course—this, for every German, is a sin against his own being, a sin against the spirit of this world hour, a sin against the demand of true self-awareness.

[ 7 ] Is not the influence of this sin plain enough to see? Are not the grievous effects of this sin already with us? Do not distress and want proclaim the sin in language comprehensible enough? Have the German people lost the power to recognize the sin they have committed against their own true spirit? These are questions that may well tear at the souls of all who study the public life of the German people. The pain should rightly lead to an awakening. Were the great spirits of the German past, with their faith in ideas, mere dreamers? Such questions find answers only in real life. What kind of solution can b e found? Yes, they were dreamers if their descendants dream away their ideas; but they were radiant spirits of reality if these descendants receive their ideas as a force for living, awakened will and purpose.

[ 1 ] It is time to recognize that party programs, which have been passed down from the remote or more recent past, are inevitably bound to fail when confronted with the events that have arisen from the catastrophe of the Great War. The programs, whose representatives were allowed to share in the ordering of social conditions, should be regarded as sufficiently refuted by the catastrophe itself. Their proponents should recognize that such thoughts were inadequate to master the actual course of events. Events outpaced their thinking, wreaking confusion and havoc. The result of this realization should be a striving to find thoughts more adequate to the actual course of real events.

[ 2 ] “Pragmatism” was the name given to what was only narrow-minded routine. The so-called pragmatists had become used to one narrow sphere of life. They mastered the routine of this one sphere, but were neither inclined nor interested to see its connection with wider spheres around it. Within his own narrow sphere, each prided himself on being “practical.” Each did what the practice of his routine demanded, and allowed what he had done to mesh with the overall social mechanism. How it worked there was not a matter of concern. So at last everything became one great tangle; out of this tangled skein of events emerged the world catastrophe. People gave themselves over to routine without developing the thoughts to master it—such was the fate of the ruling circles. Now, faced with confusion, people cannot shake off old habits of thought. It has been their habit to regard one thing or another as “a practical necessity”; they have no eyes left to see that what they held to be a “practical necessity” had a crumbling foundation.

[ 3 ] The modern economic system has demonstrated graphically the inability of our thinking to keep pace with events. It was the socialist workers' movement that revealed the crumbling foundation of this edifice. A different kind of party program arose within the workers' movement—programs that sprang from immediate experience of this decay, and either called for a change of course or expected salvation from the “unfolding” of the events that had been unleashed. These programs arose theoretically, out of universal human needs, without dealing practically with the facts. This praxis, which was merely routine and which despised thinking, was opposed by socialist praxis, which is pure theory. And now, when events demand that we engage productive, living thoughts—thoughts that have their roots in the real world—these theoretical “thoughts without praxis” reveal themselves to be insufficient. And this insufficiency will become more and more apparent as we are called upon to untangle the knot of modern social life by engaging our thinking.

[ 4 ] Instead of mindless routine and theoretical programs without praxis, good will of a definite sort is necessary for those today who want to think with genuine practicality. The routinized pragmatists, who are actually so very impractical, should try to see that the old way of carrying on business—without plan and without thoughts—will lead not out of the catastrophe, but ever deeper into it. Even now people try to blind themselves to the insight that thoughtlessness, which they mistook for practicality, has led to confusion. They despised those who demanded thoughts as being impractical idealists; now they are unwilling to admit that in so doing they did the most impractical thing of all. Indeed, in so doing they showed themselves to be idealists in the very worst sense of the word.

[ 5 ] On the other side, where theoretical “demand-withoutpractice” rules, they struggle to obtain a human existence for the class that feels it has not yet enjoyed one. They do not see that they are struggling to obtain it without real insight into the vital needs of society. They believe that if they can grab the power necessary for their theoretically noble but impractical demands, then they will be able, again as if by a miracle, to bring about the things for which they are striving. [ 6 ] And those who mean well for humanity within that class as well, and raise demands out of the desperation of the proletariat, and want to achieve their goal in the above mentioned way, must face the question: What will happen if one side insists on programs that are refuted by the actual course of events, while the other side seeks power to enforce demands while never asking what life itself requires of any possible social order?

[ 7 ] One may perhaps have good intentions toward the proletariat today, yet one is not dealing with them objectively and honestly if one does not make it clear to them that the programs to which their faith is pinned are leading them not to the welfare they desire but to the downfall of European civilization, which seals their own downfall. One is honest with the proletariat today only by awakening them to an understanding that what they are unconsciously striving for can never be achieved by the programs they have embraced.

[ 8 ] The proletariat labors under a terrible illusion. They saw how gradually over the last few centuries human interests have come to be totally absorbed by economics. They could not fail to observe that the legal institutions of society were determined by the forms assumed by economic power and economic requirements. They could see how the whole life of the spirit, particularly the educational system, had grown out of the conditions prescribed by the underlying economic basis and by a state dependent on industry. Thus a disastrous superstition took root among the proletariat: the superstition that all legal and spiritual life arises with the necessity of natural law from the forms of the economic system. Wide circles today outside the working classes are prey to the same superstitution. A feature characteristic of the last few centuries—the dependence of the spiritual and legal realms upon economic life—has come to be regarded as a law of nature. People fail to see the real truth: it is just this dependence of spiritual and legal life upon economics that drove humanity into the disaster—they yield to the superstition that one needs only a different variety of economic system, one that shall produce a different system of legal and spiritual life. They want simply to change the economic system, instead of recognizing that it is necessary to end the dependence of the spiritual and legal spheres upon economic forms.

[ 9 ] At this moment in historical evolution the aim cannot be to establish another way of making the legal and spiritual spheres dependent on the economic. The aim should be to create an economy in which only the production and circulation of commodities are managed, on strictly businesslike lines, and in which a person's position in the economic cycle does not affect his or her rights in relation to others or the possibility of fully developing his or her inborn talents through education.

In the recent past, legal and spiritual culture have been “superstructures” erected upon economics. In the future, they must become independent organs within the social organism that exist apart from the economic cycle. Measures to be adopted within the latter must be the outcome of actual experience of economic life and of people's connection with different branches of industry. Associations must arise within the various professions and trades out of the mutual interests of producers and consumers; each is to be represented within a central economic administration. The same people who participate in this economic system also constitute a legal community that, regarding its administration and representation, works quite independently of the others, and where everything is settled that rightly concerns all those who have reached the age of majority. All those things that make every person the equal of every other will be arranged here, on a democratic basis. For instance, all labor regulations (the manner, amount and length of work) will fall within this community's jurisdiction. In this way such regulations are withdrawn from the economic process. The worker takes his place in economic life as a free contractor in respect to those with whom he has to carry on the common work of production. His economic contribution to some branch of production is a matter to be decided by expert knowledge in that industrial branch; but with regard to everything that affects the exploitation of his labor he, too, can decide as an adult on democratic legal grounds apart from the economic process.

[ 10 ] Just as the legal sphere (the administration of the state) is regulated within the autonomous legal system of the social organism independently from the economy, so shall the life of spirit (the educational system) guide itself in perfect freedom within its independent spiritual organ of the social community. For just as a healthy economic life in the social organism cannot be fused with its legal system (where everything must be based upon the decisions of all co-equal adults), it is impossible for the spiritual life to be administered according to laws, regulations and controls that proceed from the opinions of all people who have merely come of age. The spiritual life requires a self-administration guided only by the best educational insights available. Only under such self-administration is it possible for the individual abilities latent in a community of people to be nurtured truly for the benefit of social life.

[ 11 ] Anyone who examines impartially the real factors at work in present-day society can only conclude that the health of the organism requires its division into three independent systems: a spiritual, a legal and an economic. The unity of the organism will not thereby be endangered in any way, for this unity is securely grounded in reality by the fact that each human being has interests within all three parts of the system, and that (notwithstanding their mutual independence) the central authorities at the head of each will be able to harmonize their various measures.

[ 12 ] That international relations will form no obstacle, even though initially only one state were to organize as a threefold system, will be discussed in the next essay.

[ 1 ] An objection often made to the idea of a threefold organization of society is that any state that organizes itself on the threefold system must necessarily disturb its international relations with other states. Whether this objection makes sense can only be determined by examining the actual character of present-day international relations. In looking at the situation, what strikes one most is that in recent years the actual economic facts have developed along lines that are no longer congruent with national boundaries. Historical circumstances that determined these national boundaries have very little to do with the interests of the economic life led by the people living in those states. As a result, the national governments determine international relations in areas where it would be more natural for the economic groups directly concerned to do so. An industrial concern that needs the raw materials of a foreign nation ought to be able to obtain them by negotiating directly with the owners; everything pertaining to this arrangement should remain entirely within the economic cycle. It is plain to see that recently economic life has assumed forms tending towards this kind of self-contained functioning, and in this self-contained cycle of economic life (which is gradually tending to become a worldwide unity) the intervention of national interests represents a disturbing element. What have the historical circumstances that gave England dominion over India to do with the economic circumstances that make a German manufacturer go to India for his goods?

[ 2 ] The catastrophe of World War I plainly shows that the life of modern humanity, as it strives toward the unity of worldwide economy, will not bear disturbance through national territorial interests. This disturbance lies at bottom of the conflicts Germany became involved in with Western nations. It also plays a part in the conflicts with Eastern countries. Economic interests required a railway running from the Austro-Hungarian territory toward the southeast. The national interests of Austria and of the Balkan countries asserted claims, and the question arose whether that which the economy required ran counter to these national interests. Capital, which is supposed to serve the economy, thus becomes involved with national interests. The states want the capitalists to be at their service; the capitalists want the concentrated power of the state to serve their economic interests. Thus the economy is imprisoned by national territories; while in the latest phase of its own development, it is striving to spread beyond all national borders into a unified economic life.

[ 3 ] This internationalism of the economy indicates that in the future the various regions of the world economy will need to enter into relations independent of the relations that various people may have through life interests outside the economic sphere. The states will need to leave the establishment of economic relations to those persons or groups engaged in economic activity.

[ 4 ] If the cultural relations of the civilized world are not to fall into total dependence on economic interests, these relations will need to develop an international life of their own that is subject to their own special conditions. It is certainly not intended here to dispute the fact that economic relations may also supply a basis for cultural intercourse. However, it must be recognized that the cultural intercourse brought about in this way can be fruitful only if, at the same time, other relations are formed between the various peoples that arise solely from the needs of cultural life itself. In each of the various peoples, the cultural life of individuals emancipates itself from the economic conditions on which it rests, and takes all manner of forms that have nothing to do with the forms of economic life. The forms it takes must be free to enter into relations with corresponding forms of cultural life among other peoples—relations growing out of cultural life itself. There is no denying that at the present moment of human evolution, the international structure which culture is striving to assume is opposed by the egotistical impulse of the various peoples to shut themselves within their own nationalities. People endeavor to construct political entities whose boundaries are those of their nationalities. And then this endeavor is carried further—namely, an attempt is made to turn the closed national state into a closed economic domain as well.

[ 5 ] The aforementioned tendency towards a world economy will in the future work against these national egotisms. If these countertendencies are not to give rise to incessant conflict, the spiritual and cultural interests arising within these peoples must administer themselves in accordance with their own cultural identity, independent of economic conditions. International contacts should then arise out of these independent administrations. This can be done only if a region, governed by a common cultural life, marks its own boundaries that will be relatively independent of the boundaries that arise from the given conditions of economic life.

[ 6 ] Now, of course, the question immediately presents itself: How is the cultural life to draw necessary support from the economic life if the administrative boundaries of their two spheres do not coincide? To find the answer, one need only reflect that a self-governing cultural life confronts the independent economic life as an economic corporation. As an economic corporation, it can enter into agreements for its economic support with the economic administrative bodies of its regions, regardless of any larger economic region to which these administrative regions may belong. Anyone whose concepts of what is possible in practice is limited to what he has already seen, will look upon these proposals as “gray theory.” He will think, too, that the necessary arrangements will prove too complicated to work. Whether the arrangements prove complicated or not will depend entirely on the skill of the particular people who arrange them. However, no one should oppose measures demanded by the present-day necessities of the world for fear of supposed complications. (Compare this to what is said on the subject in Chapter 4 of my book Toward Social Renewal.)

[ 7 ] The international life of humanity is struggling to shape the cultural relations of the various peoples and the economic relations of the various parts of the world independently of each other. The threefold organization of the social organism takes this necessity of human evolution into account. In this threefold order, the legal sphere, founded on a democratic basis, constitutes the link between economics (where international relations are directed by economic necessities) and the life of spirit, which shapes international relations out of its own forces.

[ 8 ] Habits of thought engrained by the prevailing political and social forms might lead one to believe that a transformation of these forms is “pragmatically impossible.” But historical evolution will march on, destroying everything—even new measures—that arises from these old habits of thought. The vital necessities of modern humanity dictate that any further amalgamation of the spiritual, legal and economic spheres is an impossibility. That it is impossible was shown by the catastrophe of World War I: economic and cultural conflicts became conflicts between states that were then obliged to resolve themselves in a way that is impossible when cultural life opposes only cultural life, and economic interest opposes only economic interest.

[ 9 ] That it is possible to put the threefold system into practice in any single nation without damaging international relations (even though this nation will at first stand alone in the attempt) may be shown as follows. [ 10 ] Suppose a certain economic region wanted to fashion itself into a massive association within the framework of a national state. It would be unable to maintain profitable relations with foreign countries that remained capitalist. Institutions like those of a government and subject to central boards of economic control, do not give management the power to supply foreign countries with products that fulfill their needs. However a free hand may be given to the managers with respect to the taking of orders, they must adhere to the association's rules regarding procurement of raw materials. To be hemmed in between requirements from abroad and red tape at home would lead in practice to an impossible state of affairs. The same kind of difficulties would beset both the import and the export trades. Anyone who wants to prove that no fruitful economic intercourse is possible between a country that wishes to work on abstract socialist principles and capitalistic countries abroad, has only to point to such things. Every unprejudiced person will be obliged to admit that he is right.

[ 11 ] The idea of the threefold social order cannot be touched by such objections. It does not impose a state-like structure upon relations that are determined by economic interests themselves. According to the threefold idea, the managements of allied economic concerns will join together in associations; such associations will then link up with others that will distribute them according to the needs of consumers within that particular economic sphere. The management of an export business can act on its own perfectly free initiative in its foreign trade; and at home it will be in a position to make the most advantageous agreements with other associations for the procurement of requisite raw materials, and so on. The same will hold true for an import business. The only guiding rule in creating such an economic order will be that dealings with foreign countries should not lead to the producing or importing of goods whose production cost or selling price might injure the standard of living of the native population. Workers producing goods for export must receive what is required to maintain their standard of living as compensation for what they produce. Products that come from abroad must, generally speaking, be available at prices that allow the native worker who needs them to purchase them. It might happen (no doubt owing to the difference in economic conditions at home and abroad) that certain products, which must be obtained from abroad, may have too high a price. However, on careful examination one will find that situations such as these are taken into account in the ideas underlying the threefold social order. If the reader turns to Chapter 3 of my Toward Social Renewal he will find it said of a similar economic problem: “Moreover, an administration that occupies itself solely with economic processes will be able to bring about adjustments that show themselves within these economic processes to he necessary. Suppose, for instance, a business concern were not in a position to pay its investors the interest on the savings of their labor, then—if it is a business that is nevertheless recognized as meeting a need—it will be possible to arrange for other industrial concerns to make up the deficiency by the voluntary agreement of everyone concerned.” In the same way, the excessively high price of an imported product can be balanced by contributions from businesses that are able to yield returns higher than the requirements of those they employ.

[ 12 ] Anyone who strives for new ideas about the main aspects of economics will not—especially if these ideas are to be practical—be able to give indications for every special instance because in economic life, such special instances are innumerable. However, he will have to frame his thoughts such that anyone who applies them in the right way to a special case will find that they work in practice. One will find that the proposals put forward in my Toward Social Renewal work better the more one is mindful of their particular context of application. In particular, it will be found that the proposed form of an economic body belonging to the threefold social order permits unhampered economic intercourse with foreign countries, even though these countries do not have the threefold system.

[ 13 ] Only someone who failed to perceive that self-administration must be a necessary consequence of the inherent movement of economic life toward world unity could raise doubts as to the possibility of such commerce. In actual fact, a world economy that has been forced into the straight-jacket of separate political entities is striving of itself to break free. Any economic region that is the first to act in accordance with this striving cannot possibly be at a disadvantage compared to others that resist the universal trend of economic evolution. On the contrary, the only result will be that in the threefold social order the profits of foreign trade raise the standard of living of the entire population, while in the capitalist community the profits will benefit only a few. That the threefold social organism apportions it differently among the populace will not affect the balance of trade itself.

[ 14 ] Thus it may be seen that the threefold social order does not represent a reclusive utopia, but rather a number of practical impulses that one can begin to realize anywhere in life. That is what distinguishes this “idea” from the abstract “demands” of the various socialist parties. The socialists look for scapegoats for all the things that have become unbearable in social life. Having discovered a scapegoat, they declare it must be eliminated. The threefold social order speaks of the ways in which the existing order must be altered if that which is unbearable is to disappear. The threefold order is intent upon building up, in contrast to other ideas that can indeed criticize and destroy, but offer nothing constructive whatsoever. This becomes especially clear to any open-minded person who reflects on the foreign trade policy that would have to be implemented by any country adopting such destructive political principles alone. Besides destructive tendencies at home, disastrous foreign relations would result.

[ 15 ] There is no doubt that the economic conditions of any single country under the threefold social order cannot fail to act as a model for foreign countries. The circles concerned about a socially just distribution of wealth will strive to bring about the threefold system in their own country when they see how expediently it works for others. As the idea of the threefold commonwealth gains ground, the end that modern economic life strives for, through its own inherent tendencies, will be realized more and more. And although national interests unfavorable to these tendencies are still powerful in many parts of the world, the people in any field of economic life who have an understanding of the threefold social order need not for that reason be deterred from introducing it. The foregoing has shown that difficulties in international economic trade will not result from the threefold social order.