The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 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.

[ 1 ] The public nurturance of spiritual and cultural life in education has in recent years become more and more a matter for the state. That the schools are the state's business is presently a notion so deeply rooted in people's minds that anyone who tries to dislodge it is regarded as an unworldly “ideologue.” Yet this is a sphere of life that presents matter for the most serious consideration. People who complain in this way of “unworldliness” have no idea of how far what they uphold is removed from the world. Our school system is marked especially by features that reflect the tendencies toward decline in modern cultural life. The social structures of modern governments have not followed the requirements of actual life. For instance, they have taken on a form that does not satisfy the economic demands of modern humanity. They have also set this same backward stamp upon the school system, which, having liberated it from the religious confessions, they have now brought into complete dependence on themselves. At every level, schools mold human beings into the form the state requires for doing what the state deems necessary. Arrangements in the schools reflect the government's requirements. There is much talk, certainly, of striving to achieve an all-around development of the person, and so on; but the modern person unconsciously feels so completely a part of the whole order of the state that he does not even notice, when talking about the all-around development of the human being, that what is meant is molding the human being into a useful servant of the state.

[ 2 ] In this regard, no good may be expected from the way of thinking of those today who hold socialist views. They are bent on transforming the old state into a huge economic organization. State schools are supposed to project themselves on into this economic organization. This would magnify all the faults of present-day schools in the most dubious way imaginable. Up until now, much that originated before the state took control of the educational system still has remained in the schools. One cannot, of course, wish a return to the old form of spirituality that has come down from those earlier times; rather, one should endeavor to bring the new spirit of evolving humanity into the schools. This spirit shall not be in the schools if the state is transformed into an economic organization and the schools are redesigned to turn out people meant to be the most serviceable labor machines for this economic organization. People today talk much about the comprehensive school [“Einheitsschule”]. It is beside the point that this imagined comprehensive school is in theory a very fine thing, for if they make it an organic part of an economic organization it cannot really be such a fine thing.

[ 3 ] The real need of the present is that the schools be totally grounded in a free spiritual and cultural life. What should be taught and cultivated in these schools must be drawn solely from a knowledge of the growing human being and of individual capacities. A genuine anthropology must form the basis of education and instruction. The question should not be: What does a human being need to know and be able to do for the social order that now exists?, but rather: What capacities are latent in this human being, and what lies within that can be developed? Then it will be possible to bring ever new forces into the social order from the rising generations. The life of the social order will be what is made of it by a succession of fully developed human beings who take their places in the social order. The rising generation should not be molded into what the existing social order chooses to make of it.

[ 4 ] A healthy relation exists between school and society only when society is kept constantly supplied with the new and individual potentials of persons whose educations have allowed them to develop unhampered. This can be realized only if the schools and the whole educational system are placed on a footing of self-administration within the social organism. The government and the economy must receive people educated by the independent spiritual-cultural life; they must not, however, have the power to prescribe according to their own wants how these human beings are to be educated. What a person ought to know and be able to do at any particular stage of life must be decided by human nature itself. Both the state and economic life will have to conform to the demands of human nature. It is neither for the state nor the economic life to say: We need someone of this sort for a particular post; therefore test the people that we need and pay heed above all that they know and can do what we want. Rather, the spiritual-cultural organ of the social organism should, following the dictates of its own independent administration, bring those who are suitably gifted to a certain level of cultivation, and the state and economic life should organize themselves in accordance with the results of work in the spiritual-cultural sphere.

[ 5 ] Since political and economic life are not something apart from human nature, but rather the outcome of human nature itself, there need never be any fear that a really free cultural life, placed on its own footing, will produce people who are unworldly. On the contrary, unworldliness results precisely when the existing governmental and economic institutions are allowed to shape educational matters according to their own dictates. For in the state and in economic life attitudes must necessarily be adopted in accordance with the existing order. The development of the growing human being requires entirely different kinds of thought and feeling as its guide. One can only do one's work as an educator when one stands in a free, individual relationship to the pupil one teaches. One must know that, for the guidelines of one's work, one is dependent only on knowledge of human nature, the principles of social life and such things; but not upon regulations or laws prescribed from outside. If one serously desires to transform the present order of society into one in which social attitudes prevail, then one must not be afraid to place the spiritual-cultural life (including the school and educational system) under its own independent control because from such a free, independent system within the social organism men and women will go forth with joy and zeal to take an active part in all its life. After all, only people who lack this joy and zeal can come out of schools ruled by the state and the economic system; these people feel as deadly blight the after-effects of a domination to which they should not have been subjected before they had become fully conscious citizens and co-workers in the state and the economic system. The growing human being should mature with the aid of educators and teachers independent of the state and the economic system, educators who can allow individual faculties to develop freely because their own have been given free rein.

[ 6 ] In my book, Toward Social Renewal, I have taken pains to show that the world view adopted by the leaders among party socialists is in all essentials simply a continuance (carried to a certain extreme) of the bourgeois world view of the last three or four centuries. The socialists cherish the illusion that their ideas represent a complete break with this world view. They do not represent a break, but rather only a peculiar coloring of the bourgeois world view with working-class feelings and sentiments. This is shown very markedly by the attitude these socialist leaders adopt toward cultural life and its place in the social organism. Owing to the predominance of economics in bourgeois society during the last few centuries, the spiritual and cultural life has fallen into great dependence on economic life. The consciousness of a self-sustaining spiritual-cultural life, in which the human soul partakes, has been lost. Industrialism and our view of nature have collaborated to bring about this loss. Linked to this loss is the particular way the schools were incorporated into the social organism in recent times. To make the human being serviceable for external life in state and industry—that became the main thing. That man is above all a being with a soul who therefore should be filled with the consciousness of his connection with a spiritual order of things, and that it is through his consciousness that he imparts sense to the state and economic system in which he lives—all this was considered less and less. Minds were directed ever less toward the spiritual order of the world, and ever more toward the conditions of economic production. In the middle class this became a manner of feeling, an instinctive psychological tendency. Working class leaders made it into a philosophy of life—or rather, into a dogma.

[ 7 ] This dogma would have disastrous consequences if it were to remain the foundation of the school system into the future. For in reality, since even at its best an economically-determined social organism cannot make suitable provision for any genuine cultural life (and, in particular, not for a productive educational system), this educational system would have to owe its existence first of all to a continuation of the old world of thought. The parties that claim to represent a new order would be obliged to leave the cultural life of the schools in the hands of the representatives of the old world views. However, since under such conditions there could be no question of any internal link between the newly rising generation and the old, artificially prolonged culture, cultural life would necessarily become more and more stagnant. The souls of this generaton would wither away after being sown on the rocky ground of a world view that can give them no inner source of strength. Men would grow up soulless beings within a social order arising out of industrialism.

[ 8 ] In order that this may not take place, the movement for the threefold social order strives for the complete disassociation of the educational system from government and industry. The place and function of educators within society should depend solely upon the authority of those engaged in this activity. The administration of the educational institutions, the organization of courses of instruction and their goals should be entirely in the hands of persons who themselves are simultaneously either teaching or otherwise productively engaged in cultural life. In each case, such persons would divide their time between actual teaching (or some other form of cultural productivity) and the administrative control of the educational system. It will be evident to anyone who can bring himself to an unbiased examination of cultural life that the peculiar vitality and energy of soul required for organizing and directing educational institutions will be called forth only in someone actively engaged in teaching or in some sort of cultural creativity.

[ 9 ] Today few will concede this fully—only those who are unbiased enough to see that a new source of cultural life must spring forth if our devastated social order is to be renewed. In the essay “Marxism and the Threefold Social Order,” I pointed out both the correctness and also the one-sidedness of Engels' notion: “The management of goods and control of the means of production takes the place of governing of people.” Correct though this is, it is nonetheless equally true that in the old order social life was possible only because along with the economic processes of production, people themselves were guided and governed. If this joint governance of people and economic processes ends, then people must receive their motivating impulses (which hitherto came from those governing them) from a free and independent cultural life.

[ 10 ] Moreover, there is something else: The life of the spirit prospers only when able to unfold as a unity. The same exercise of the soul's powers that leads to a humanly satisfying and sustaining world view must also supply the productive power that makes one a good co-worker in economic life. Men and women with a practical sense for outer life will emerge only from an educational system that is able to develop in a healthy way our innate longings for a loftier world view. A social order that only manages goods and controls processes of production must in the end go completely awry if it is not kept supplied with persons whose souls are healthily developed.

[ 11 ] If, then, there is to be any renewal of our social life, we must find the strength to introduce an independent, self-sustaining educational system. If men are no longer to “govern” their fellows in the old way, then it must be made possible for the free spirit in every human soul, with all the strength possible for the human individualities of any one age, to make itself the guide of life. This spirit will not allow itself to be suppressed. Institutions that tried to rule educational life from the point of view of the economic system alone would constitute an attempt at suppression. This would lead the free spirit to revolt constantly out of the depths of its own natural foundations. Incessant shocks to the whole social edifice would be the inevitable consequence of any system that tried to organize education in the same way it controlled the processes of production.

[ 12 ] For anyone who perceives these things clearly, one of the most urgent demands of the times shall be the founding of a human community that will strive with utmost energy to realize the freedom and self-determination of the educational system. Other necessary demands of the times cannot find satisfaction as long as what is proper for this sphere remains unrecognized. It really requires only an unbiased observation of our spiritual life in its present form—in its distraction and disunity, its lack of strength to sustain the human soul—in order to recognize that just this is proper.

[ 1 ] The sense for reality that lives in the idea of the threefold social organism will not be found by comparing it with that which traditional education and habits have taught people to think possible. The very reason for our present confusions in government and society is that these traditions have led to habits of thought and feeling that life itself has outgrown. Therefore anyone who objects that the idea of a threefold social order takes no account of the impulses that have formed until now the basis of all human institutions, are under the delusion that the overcoming of these old impulses is a sin against any possible social order. Rather, the threefold order is founded upon the recognition that a belief in the sustaining power of the old impulses is the worst obstacle to healthy and progressive steps which take into account our present stage of evolution.

[ 2 ] The impossibility of continuing to cultivate the old impulses should be clear from the fact that they have lost their power as an incentive to productive labor. The old econonomic motives of capital returns and wage earnings could maintain their power as incentives only as long as enough of the old treasured objects remained that could arouse people's inclination and love. These treasures have plainly become exhausted in the age that has just ended. Ever more numerous were the people who, as capitalists, no lon ger knew why they were amassing capital; ever more numerous, too, were wage earners who did not know why they were working.

[ 3 ] The exhaustion of the impulses that had kept together the nexus of the state was shown by the fact that in recent times many people have come almost as a matter of course to regard the state as an end in itself, and to forget that the state exists for the sake of human beings. To regard the state as an end in itself is possible only when one has so much lost the ability to assert one's inner, human individuality that one no longer expects from the state the kind of institutions this self-assertion would demand. Then one is indeed obliged to look for the essence of the state in all sorts of institutions that are quite contrary to its proper task. One will become determined to put more into the institutions of the state than is needed for the self-assertion of the human beings who compose it. However, every such more in the state evidences a less in the human beings who bear the burden of the state.

[ 4 ] In cultural life, the sterility of the old impulses is displayed in the mistrust with which people look on the spirit.What proceeds from life's unspiritual concerns arouses people's interest; they form views and concepts of it. What originates in spiritual productivity, people choose to regard as a private affair of the particular producer; they are inclined to hinder rather than help if it tries to find a place in public life. One of the most widespread characteristics of our contemporaries is that they remain closed to the individual spiritual achievements of their fellows.

[ 5 ] The present age needs to see clearly that it has exhausted its economic, political and cultural impulses. Such insight must kindle energetic will and social purpose. Until people recognize that our economic, political and cultural troubles are not due merely to external life circumstances, but also to the state of our souls, the necessary renewal has not yet been given its proper foundation.

[ 6 ] A split has come about in the constitution of the human soul. In the instinctive, unconscious impulses of human nature, something new is stirring. In conscious thought, the old ideas refuse to follow the instinctive stirrings. However, when the best instinctive promptings are not illuminated by corresponding thoughts, they became barbaric, animalistic. Modern humanity is rushing into a dangerous situation through this animalization of the instincts. Salvation can be found only in striving for new thoughts to meet a new world situation.

[ 7 ] Any cry for socialization that disregards this fact can lead to nothing salutary. Our disinclination to recognize ourselves as beings of soul and of spirit must be overcome. A one-sided transformation of the economic life, a one-sided reconstruction of political institutions without nurturing a socially healthy and productive state of soul, is more likely to lull humanity with deceptive dreams than to fill it with a sense for reality. It is because there are so few who can bring themselves to look on the problems of today and tomorrow as questions comprehending both external arrangements and inner renewal that we move so slowly along the road to a new social order. When many people say: Inner renewal takes a long time; it is a process that must not be hurried, behind such words lurks a fear of such renewal. For the right mood can only be this: to examine energetically everything that might lead to renewal, and then watch and see how slowly or quickly life's voyage proceeds.

[ 8 ] The events of recent years have cast a certain weariness about the souls of our contemporaries. For the sake of the coming generations, for the sake of the civilization of the near future, this weariness must be combatted. These are the feelings that have brought the idea of the threefold order before the public. Say that this idea is imperfect, say that it is all wrong; its supporters will understand if it is opposed from the standpoint of other new ideas. That it should so often be found to be “incomprehensible” because it contradicts the old and customary—this they cannot regard as a sign that such opponents can hear the present call of human evolution. One would think this call is sounding plainly enough for all to hear.

[ 1 ] Socialists tend to look upon the profit motive, which has functioned heretofore as the primary incentive to work, as something that must be eliminated if healthier conditions are to be brought about in society. For such people this becomes an urgent question: What will induce us to use our abilities with sufficient energy in the service of economic production, when egotism (which finds its satisfaction in profit) is no longer able to exert itself? This question cannot be said to receive adequate attention from those who are planning to institute socialism. The demand that in the future one shall not work for oneself but for the community, remains quite empty as long as one has no concrete idea how human souls can be induced to work as willingly “for the community” as they do for themselves. One may no doubt indulge in the notion that some central managing body will place each of us at his or her place of work, and that this organization of labor will also enable the central management to make a fair distribution of the products of the labor. Any such notion is, however, based on a delusion. While it takes into account that human beings have need of consumer goods, and that these needs must be satisfied, it does not take into account that mere awareness of the existence of these needs will not engender devotion to the work of production, if they are expected to produce not for themselves, but for the community. The mere awareness that one is working for society will not give any sensible satisfaction; accordingly it cannot provide an incentive to work.

[ 2 ] It should be obvious that a new incentive to work must he created the moment there is any thought of eliminating the old incentive of egotistical gain. An economic management that does not include this profit motive among the forces at work within the economy cannot of itself exert any effect whatever upon the human will to work. And precisely because it cannot do so, it meets a social demand that a large part of humanity has begun to raise in the present stage of development. This part of humanity no longer wants to be led to work by economic compulsion. They want to work from motives more befitting human dignity. Undoubtedly, for many of those who come to mind when this demand is raised, it is somewhat unconscious; but in social life such unconscious, instinctive impulses are of much more significance than the ideas people consciously express. Conscious ideas often owe their origin merely to the fact that people do not have the spiritual energy to see into what really goes on within them. If one deals with such ideas, one is moving within an insubstantial element. Therefore it is necessary to see through the deceptive ideas on the surface into the real demands (such as the one just mentioned), and to turn one's attention to these real demands. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in times like the present, when social life tosses about like wild waves, that the lower human instincts, too, run riot. However, the above mentioned demand for a dignified human existence is justified; one cannot dismiss it by arguing the turbulence of our lower instincts.

[ 3 ] If the economic system is to be organized in a way that can have no effect on our will to work, then our will to work must be stimulated in some other way. The threefold social order recognizes that at the present stage of human evolution, the economic sphere must limit itself exclusively to economic processes. The administration of such an economic order will be able, through its various organs, to determine the extent of consumers' needs, how the produce may best be brought to the consumers and the extent to which various articles should be produced. However, it will have no way of calling forth the will to produce; neither will it be in a position to cultivate the individual abilities that are the vital source of the entire economic process. Under the old economic system that still survives, people cultivated these abilities hoping they would bring personal profit. It would be a dire mistake to believe that the mere command of an administrative body overseeing only the economy could arouse a desire to develop men's individual abilities, or to believe that such a command would have power enough to induce them to put their will into their work. The threefold social order seeks to prevent people from making this mistake. It aims at establishing within an independent, self-sustaining cultural life a realm where one learns in a living way to understand this human society for which one is called upon to work; a realm where one learns to see what each single piece of work means for the combined fabric of the social order, to see it in such a light that one will learn to love it because of its value for the whole. It aims at creating in this free life of spirit the profounder principles that can replace the motive of personal gain. Only in a free spiritual life can a love for the human social order spring up that is comparable to the love an artist has for the creation of his works. If one is not prepared to consider fostering this kind of love within a free spiritual-cultural life, then one may as well renounce all striving for a new social order. Anyone who doubts that men and women are capable of being brought to this kind of love must also renounce all hope of eliminating personal profit from economic life. Anyone who fails to believe that a free spiritual life generates this kind of love is unaware that it is the dependence of spiritual and cultural life upon the state and the economy that creates desire for personal profit—this desire for profit is not a fundamental aspect of human nature. It is this mistake that makes people say constantly, “to realize the threefold order, human beings must be different than they are now.” No! Through the threefold order, people will be educated in such a way that they will grow up to be different than they were previously under the economic state.

[ 4 ] And just as the free spiritual life will create the impulses for developing individual ability, the democratically ordered life of the legal sphere will provide the impulses for the will to work. Real relationships will grow up between people united in a social organism where each adult has a voice in government and is co-equal with every other adult: it is relationships such as these that are able to enkindle the will to work “for the community.” One must reflect that a truly communal feeling can grow only from such relationships, and that from this feeling, the will to work can grow. For in actual practice the consequence of such a state founded on democratic rights will be that each human being will take his place with vitality and full consciousness in the common field of work. Each will know what he or she is working for; and each will want to work within the working community of which he knows himself a member through his will.

[ 5 ] It will be plain to anyone who understands the threefold social order that the vast syndicate with its state-like structure (such as the Marxist model) can supply impulses neither for the ability nor for the will to work. Anyone who understands will take care that the essence of human nature not be forgotten for the sake of the exigencies of outer life. For social thinking cannot reckon with external institutions alone; it must take into account what man is and what he may become.

[ 1 ] It appears that many people are kept from the idea of a threefold social order by the fear that it entails sundering things that in reality must work together as an undivided unity within society. Now it is true that a person engaged in economic activity is brought thereby into relationships with his fellow men that involve laws. It is also true that one's spiritual life is dependent on these legal relationships, and is also conditioned by one's economic position. In the human being, these three functions are united; in the course of life, one becomes involved in all three.

[ 2 ] Is this, however, a reason why these three life-functions should be governed from a single center? Does it necessitate all three being governed according to the same principles? In the human being and in his activities, many currents run together that have flowed from a great variety of sources. We are dependent on the qualities inherited from our fore-fathers. We think and act according to what our education has made of us, education we received from persons to whom we are not related. How strange it would be if anyone tried to assert that our unity were destroyed because we are influenced from different quarters by heredity and education. Should it not be said, rather, that we remain incomplete if heredity and education work from a single source to shape our lives?

[ 3 ] That such things from various sources must converge within us in order (through this very variety) to satisfy the many requirements of our nature—people can understand this, for to not understand it would be absurd. However, they will not see that the development of spiritual abilities, the regulation of legal affairs and the shaping of economic life afford us our proper place within the social order only when each is governed from its separate center and from its special viewpoint. An economy that governs the rights of human beings, and educates them according to its own interests, reduces the person to a mere cog in the economic machinery. It stunts the human spirit, which can develop freely only when it unfolds according to its own innate im-pulses. It stunts, too, those relations with our fellows that stem from the feelings, and refuse to be influenced by economic considerations—relations that are striving rather to be governed in accordance with the equality of all regarding what is purely human.

When the political sphere or the sphere of rights controls the development of our individual abilities, it weighs on this development like a crushing burden. For the interests that arise out of these spheres must naturally produce a tendency to develop such abilities according to the government's needs and not according to their own proper nature, however good may be the original intentions to allow for individual characteristics. Such a legal or political sphere also imposes an alien character upon economic matters. Those subject to this kind of political system become through constant tutelage spiritually cramped and economically hampered in the pursuit of interests inappropriate to their own nature.

A spiritual life that attempted to determine legal relations on its own terms would inevitably be led from the in-equality of human abilities to inequality in the law. It would be false to its own nature if it were to allow itself to be determined by economic interests. Under such a spiritual culture, people would never come to a true consciousness of what, in reality, the spirit may be for human life, for they would watch the spirit degrade itself through injustice and falsify itself through economic aims.

[ 4 ] What has brought humanity to the present state of affairs in the civilized world is that during the last few centuries these three spheres have in many respects grown together into a single, unified state. And the cause of the present unrest is that an enormous number of people are struggling (while unconscious of the real nature of their striving) toward a delimitation of these three spheres of life into separate systems of the social organism, so that the spiritual-cultural life may be free to shape itself according to its own spiritual impulses; that the sphere of rights may be built up democratically through the interaction (direct or representational) of people on equal terms; and that the economic life may extend solely to the production, circulation and consumption of commodities.

[ 5 ] Starting from any number of standpoints one can come to see the necessity of a threefold organization of society. One of these standpoints is an understanding of present-day human nature. From the standpoint of some particular social theory or party dogma, it may appear very unscientific or impractical to say that when arranging institutions for communal life, one should consult psychology to learn (so far as it can tell us) what is suited to human nature. Yet it would be a great misfortune if everyone who tried to give this “social psychology” its due in the shaping of social life were to be silenced. There are colorblind people who see the world as gray on gray; so, too, there are social reformers and social revolutionaries blind to psychology who would like to mold the social organism into an economic syndicate in which people would live and move like mechanical beings. These agitators have no idea of their blindness. They know only that there has always existed a legal and a spiritual life beside the economic life; and they imagine that if they fashion the economic life after their own ideas, all the rest will come “of itself.” It will not come; it will come to ruin. Thus it is very hard to arrive at any understanding with those blind to psychology; and thus it is, unfortunately, also necessary to take up against them—a battle begun not by those who can see, but by those who are blind.

[ 1 ] Ideas which take account of the realities that gave rise to the demands now agitating humanity, and are in harmony with the conditions under which it is possible for men to live together culturally, politically and economically—such ideas are drowned out by the clamor of others that are remote from life in both regards. People who long for something other than the traditional forms of life, or who have in fact already been torn out of these older forms by events, are people who until now have stood at such a remove from the forces that brought these circumstances to the surface of history that they lack any insight whatever into how they act and what they signify. Within the mass of the working classes, there is a dull consciousness that demands a change in their form of life, which they see as a result of capitalist forces dominating the economy. Yet the manner of their participation in economic life hitherto has not made them aware of the way these forces operate. Thus they are unable to conceive any fruitful way of transforming these forces. The intellectual leaders and agitators of the proletarian masses are blinded by utopian ideas and theories which derive from a social science still based on the old economic concepts that so urgently need changing. These agitators have not even the faintest idea that their notions about politics, economics and cultural life are in no way different from the “bourgeois notions” they are fighting, and that at bot-tom all they are striving for is to see the old notions realized by a new group. However, nothing really new ever comes about when different people do the same old thing in a slightly different way.

[ 2 ] One of these “old ideas” is the attempt to control economics by political and legal means. It is an “old idea” because it has brought a large part of humanity into an untenable position, as the catastrophe of World War I has shown. The new idea that must replace this old one is to liberate the administration of the economy from any kind of interference by political or national power, and to conduct the management of the economy along lines that are based entirely on economic principles and economic interests.

[ 3 ] But surely it is impossible to imagine a form of economic life that is not managed by businessmen using political and legal means! Such is the objection raised by those who believe the proponents of the threefold social order have no insight into what is socially self-evident. But actually those who make this objection refuse to see what a far-reaching transformation it would bring about in economic life if the political and legal views and institutions at work within the economy were not ruled from within the economic system itself according to its interests, but rather guided by something external to the economy, and subject only to considerations that lie within the competence of every adult. Why do so many people, even those of a socialist turn of mind, refuse to see this? The reason is that through their participation in political life they have learned to think about the way a political state governs, but not about the peculiar nature of the forces inherent in economic life. Thus they are able to conceive an economic process managed according to the principles on which a political state is governed; but they are unable to conceive of one structured according to its own economic principles and needs, one that takes its legal regulations from a different quarter altogether. This is true for most of the agitators and leaders of the proletariat. If the mass of workers themselves, from the circumstances previously dis-cussed, have insufficient insight into ways that economic life might possibly be transformed, their leaders are no better off. They exclude themselves from all such insight by confining their thinking wholly within the political arena.

[ 4 ] A consequence of this one-sided confinement to politics are the attempts being made in various quarters to establish Workers' Councils [Betriebsräte]. The current attempt to create such institutions must be consistent with the afore-mentioned “new idea,” if all labor expended on it is not to be wasted. This “new idea” requires, however, that Workers' Councils should be the first institutions with which the state has no concern, but which are free to form according to the purely economic considerations of those engaged in economic life. It should be left to the emerging corporation to promote associations that will create through economic cooperation what has been brought about hitherto by the egotistical competition of individuals. It is a question of free social coordination between the various complexes of production and consumption, and not one of centralized control according to political policies. The point is to promote the economic initiatives of the workers through such an association, not to submit them to the tutelage of a bureaucratic hierarchy. Whether economic life has a political ad-ministration imposed on it by state law, or whether a “system of industrial council boards” [Rätesystem] is planned by people who are able to think and organize only along political lines, the outcome is the same. Among these people there may perhaps be some who, in theory, demand a certain independence of the economic life; in practice, however, their demands can only result in an economy straight-jacketed by a political system because their scheme is the result of political thinking. Before one can conceive such institutions in a way required by the actual conditions of present-day life, one must have a clear idea of the way in which both the governmental and legal system and the spiritual-cultural sphere of the threefold social order should develop in their own manner apart from the economic system. It is possible to form a clear picture of an independent economic life only when one sees other things in their proper place within the whole structure of the social organism—those things that should not fall within the orbit of the economy. If one does not see clearly the proper place for the unfolding of cultural and legal impulses, one will always be tempted to fuse them somehow with economics.