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WorkRudolf Steiner

The Threefold Commonwealth

Steiner's plan for rebuilding defeated Germany: culture set free, rights made equal, and the economy run by fraternal associations.

by Rudolf Steiner358 passages held

  • German, the original language
  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft
First published
(aged 58)
Original language
German

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Overview

A leaflet headed "To the German People and the Civilised World" went out across Germany, Austria and Switzerland in March 1919, four months after Germany's defeat, with the signatures of the novelist Hermann Hesse, the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck and some three hundred others. Rudolf Steiner had written it, and at the end of April he published the book behind it. He had first sent the idea in 1917, in memoranda, to the German and Austrian governments; now he took it to the public. Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage argues that the unified modern state had failed because it tried to run three different kinds of life as one. Cultural life, meaning schools, universities and the arts, should govern itself in freedom; the rights all citizens share belong to a democratic state in which everyone is equal; and economic life should be run by associations of producers, traders and consumers bound by fraternity. Steiner took the three watchwords of the French Revolution and argued that they could be realised only in a society divided in this way. He wrote with the workers' movement in view: he granted that Marx's thinking met the highest intellectual standards, yet argued that a worker's labour should never be bought and sold as a commodity, and that handing the economy to the state would only repeat the error of running all three spheres as one. The book sold more than forty thousand copies within a year. In Stuttgart a league for the threefold social order formed around the cigarette manufacturer Emil Molt, and in September 1919 a school opened for the children of his Waldorf-Astoria factory workers, run by its teachers independently of the state: the first Waldorf school. Steiner soon saw that post-war Central Europe would not adopt the plan, and the political campaign ended.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by the unified state?

The modern state that runs cultural life, law and the economy through one government, which Steiner treats as the root of the crisis after the war. It licenses schools and universities, makes law and increasingly directs production, so that each sphere is bent to the others' principles. Neither the old parties nor the socialists, the book argues, questioned that unity; the socialists only wanted to take it over.

What are the associations of economic life?

Bodies that bring together the producers, traders and consumers of a branch or region, so that production can be matched to real needs by agreement rather than by competition alone. They carry the fraternity that belongs to economic life. Associations may not make law or run schools; their concern is only what is produced, how it circulates and how it is consumed.

How is capital meant to pass from one holder to the next?

Not by sale or inheritance, but by transfer to another capable person once the one who built or managed it can no longer do so. The choice falls to the outgoing manager or to a body of the cultural life, never to the market. Steiner likens it to intellectual property, which passes to the public some time after its author's death: a right to direct, not a possession to trade.

Why must the life of rights stand apart from the economy?

Because rights concern what every adult shares equally, while economic life runs on interests and power. When the economy makes law, the book argues, the stronger party writes the rules, and a worker's hours and conditions become a matter of bargaining. Separated, a democratic state fixes the measure and kind of labour as a right, and economic forces must work inside that frame, as they work inside the frame of nature.

What is ideology in the book's account of the modern worker?

Marx's term for thought seen as a mere superstructure over economic facts, which Steiner says the modern worker had come to apply to all of cultural life. Religion, art, science and law seemed to him reflections of the ruling class's interests, with no reality of their own. Steiner treats that experience as a true symptom of a culture cut off from life, not an error to be argued away.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Three Spheres, Three Watchwords

Why did liberty, equality and fraternity never fit together in one state? The book's answer is that each belongs to a different sphere of society, and that each sphere must be given its own government.

The unified state, the book argues, failed because it ran three different kinds of life as one. Cultural life, from schools and universities to the arts, needs freedom, since abilities grow only where individuals judge for themselves. The life of rights, which concerns what every adult shares, needs equality and belongs to a democratic state. Economic life, the production and exchange of goods, needs fraternity and should be run by associations of producers, traders and consumers. Steiner likens the three to the systems of the human organism, each working by its own principles while serving the whole.

  • threefold social order
  • social organism
  • social organization
  • state
  • rights
  • social theory
  • social philosophy
  • individual freedom
  • spiritual life
  • education
  • science
  • spirituality

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Labour Is Not a Commodity

Can a person's labour be bought and sold like coal without something being lost? The book says no, and redraws the whole relation of worker, manager and capital around that refusal.

Steiner grants that the worker's protest is justified: under the wage system labour power is a commodity, and a human being feels it as one. His answer is to take labour out of the market. The rights state is to fix how long, how much and under what conditions people work, and worker and manager then share the proceeds of what they produce together. Capital belongs in the hands of the most capable, but only while they can manage it; afterwards it should pass, neither sold nor inherited, to another capable person.

  • labor
  • capital
  • capitalism
  • property
  • private property
  • commodification
  • economic life
  • economic organization
  • economics
  • individual ability
  • human dignity

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What the Workers Were Asking

Why did the modern worker find religion, art and science worthless to him? The book takes the workers' movement seriously, and argues that its demands point beyond the answers socialism gave them.

The modern proletarian, Steiner writes, was trained by the machine and by capitalism to see all cultural life as ideology, a superstructure over economic facts, because nothing in it spoke to his condition. Steiner treats that experience as a real symptom rather than a mistake. He grants that Marx's thinking meets the highest intellectual standard, yet argues that handing the economy to the state would repeat the error of the unified state in a new form. What the workers were truly asking for, he claims, was a life worthy of a human being, which only a threefold order could give.

  • class consciousness
  • ideology
  • labor movement
  • socialism
  • social movements
  • social change
  • social reform

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Within this work

passages held
358
distinct concepts
454
by passages held, corpus-wide
#210

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “ideology” and “spiritual life”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
ideologyspiritual life9
capitallabor6
educationsocial reform6
social changesocial reform5
ideologysocial change4
ideologysocial philosophy3
social changespiritual life3
educationlabor2
educationsocial philosophy2
educationspiritual life2
laborsocial philosophy2
laborsocial reform2
social philosophysocial reform2
social reformspiritual life2
capitaleducation1
capitalsocial change1
capitalsocial reform1
educationideology1
ideologylabor1
laborsocial change1
laborspiritual life1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)

    Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.

     EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft) you are here DEEN
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