The Social Challenge E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 377

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'What underlies the entire thrust and direction of these lectures is that we are not dealing with some arbitrary programme or scheme; we are not dealing with the intentions or opinions of this or that social class. Rather, it is a matter of tapping into what prompts the deepest, most realistic impetus for the coming decades in human evolution…' In the shadow of a war-torn Europe, philosopher and spiritual thinker Rudolf Steiner offered a radical and human-centered alternative to the political and economic upheaval of his time. In this seminal lecture series, Steiner introduces the concept of social threefolding – a visionary framework that perceives society as consisting of three interdependent realms, encompassing cultural freedom, legal equality and economic solidarity. With clear-eyed critiques of both capitalism and socialism, Steiner proposes a path that honours individual dignity, principled cooperation and true social renewal. From fair wages and educational reform to property ethics and global cooperation, his insights remain strikingly relevant to the modern world. Rooted in anthroposophy and born out of the post-World War I crisis, these lectures are a clarion call for a humane, just and spiritually conscious society – a contemporary guide for those seeking new answers to today's challenges. The first official publication of these lectures features Rudolf Steiner's preparatory notes for his lectures, an introduction by William Forward, extensive editorial notes and an index. Six lectures, Feb.–March 1919, Zurich, GA 328

Leseprobe

THE SOCIAL CHALLENGE

Six lectures held in Zurich between 3 February and 8 March 1919

TRANSLATED BY CHRISTIANA BRYAN

INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM FORWARD

RUDOLF STEINER

Rudolf Steiner Press

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

Originally published in German under the title Die soziale Frage (volume 328 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the first German edition (1977), edited by Paul G. Bellmann und Walter Kugler

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1977

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Rudolf Steiner Press expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 677 7

eISBN 978 1 85584 714 9

Cover by Morgan Creative

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Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

Introduction, by William Forward

LECTURE 1

ZURICH, 3 FEBRUARY 1919

The true dimensions of the social challenge, based on spiritual-scientific research into human needs

Unexpressed elements in the social will of the present. The origins of the proletarian movement. The problem of cause and effect. Proletarian class consciousness as a quest for universal consciousness. The ideological nature of science, art and religion for the proletariat. Paradoxes within the proletarian movement. Contributions to the tri-partitioning or threefolding of the social organism.

LECTURE 2

ZURICH, 5 FEBRUARY 1919

Attempts at solving social issues from a spiritual-scientific perspective aligned with life and congruent with reality

Comparing human and social organisms. A critique of analogies. Structural features of a threefold society. On the inherent lawfulness of spiritual, statelegal and economic spheres in life. Arguments against centralizing spheres of societal function. The significance of freedom, equality and fraternity for the social organism. Perspectives on social reform.

LECTURE 3

ZURICH, 10 FEBRUARY 1919

Zealotry and realism in social thinking and will

The nature and significance of a proletarian outlook in evolution. The significance of a spiritual-scientific perspective in shaping social reality. Social Utopias and zealotry. Critique of state monopoly in spiritual culture. Commodifying human labour—critical observations on Karl Marx.

LECTURE 4

ZURICH, 10 FEBRUARY 1919

Evolving social thinking and will in contemporary conditions—two streams

The political-economic thinking of The Physiocrats. The relationship between economy and legislature. Tasks of the law. Thoughts on fundamental social principles. Private- and criminal law as components of intellectual-spiritual culture. Contemporary questions from a perspective of social threefolding.

LECTURE 5

ZURICH STUDENT UNION, 25 FEBRUARY 1919

Social will as the basis for a new scientific order

The superstitious fallacy of creating life out of abstraction. Contemporary thinking and human dignity. Denationalization as a pivotal force for social change. The nature of human labour and the need to divest it of its commodity status. Social will and social reality.

LECTURE 6

PUBLIC LECTURE, ZURICH, 8 MARCH 1919

What is the significance of blue-collar labour?

The significance of contemporary civilization for human evolution. The function of the state from the perspective of pre-eminent echelons. The status of human labour in a healthy social organism. Science and proletariat. Associative networking as a timely economic model. The need to threefold society. Closing words after discussion.

Rudolf Steiner’s Notes for The Social Challenge

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

IN In addition to the self-contained lecture cycle—held by Rudolf Steiner between 3 and 12 February 1919 in the main hall of the Hirschengraben School in Zurich on the subject of ‘The Social Challenge’—the present volume contains two further lectures. In the first of these, also on a stand-alone topic, Steiner was speaking to Zurich students, while in the second lecture—that of 8 March, in the great hall of the Zurich Volkshaus—he was largely addressing workers.

The first of these lecture cycles formed the basis for Rudolf Steiner’s essay ‘Key Points of the Social Challenge—Present and Future Life Needs’ (CW 23, Towards Social Renewal). Roman Bos, who was in the audience of these lectures and a leading light in the movement for Social Threefolding, wrote in this connection in Sozialwissenschaftlichen Texten (‘Social Science Texts’), (Dornach 1935, 2nd edition Freiburg 1961):

The lecture of 3 February basically appears as the first chapter of ‘Key Points’. Yet what was offered was a slightly different train of thought comprising a sequence of reflections around the idea of class consciousness. (2nd edition, p.64). While the second lecture, that of 5 February, largely encompasses the contents of Chapter 2 of ‘Key Points’, Chapter 3, the third Zurich lecture of 10 February, is ‘almost totally conceived afresh’. This treats largely of the governance and circulation of capital within a threefold social organism, whereas the lecture responding to the topic set by the audience was that of addressing threefolding once again, now from a new perspective, as the central impetus of social evolution (p.67). The content of the fourth Zurich lecture of 12 February 1919 is, in almost every detail, worked into the 3rd and 4th chapters of ‘Key Points’ (p.73).

These notebook entries, as well as the conceptual outline for the lecture of 8 March, provide additional insights into Rudolf Steiner’s working methods. They had already appeared in part in Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlaßverwaltung (‘News from Rudolf Steiner’s Estate’). See in this regard the special edition 50 Jahre ‘Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage’, April 1919–April 1969 (‘50 Years of Key Points of the Social Question: April 1919–April 1969’), Nos. 24/25, Dornach, Easter 1969, pp. 47–54 and No. 11, Dornach, Christmas 1963, pp. 16 and 17.

Translator’s note:

Throughout this volume the terms spiritual, intellectual, academic and cultural have been used interchangeably and in varied combination depending on context. Throughout Rudolf Steiner uses the terms proletarian and proletariat and this has largely been replicated for reasons of historical accuracy. ‘Workers’ and ‘blue collar’ have occasionally been substituted.

INTRODUCTION

THERE are books that arrive like messengers—quiet, unassuming, yet bearing truths that stir something deep within us. The Social Challenge, newly translated, and published for the first time in English, is one such volume. It gathers six lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Zurich between February and March of 1919, a time when Europe stood at the threshold of profound transformation. The war had ended, but the soul of society remained fractured. Steiner did not speak into this void with slogans or systems. He spoke with the voice of someone who has been listening to those who ‘cherish the hope among themselves and in others that opportunities might present themselves to counteract the anguish being so terribly visited upon humanity’.

To read these lectures is to encounter a thinker who understood that the social question is not merely economic or political—it is spiritual. Steiner’s voice is not that of a reformer in the conventional sense. He does not offer a programme to be implemented, but a perception to be cultivated. He invites us to see the social organism as a living whole, composed of three distinct yet interdependent spheres: spiritual-cultural life, rights life, and economic life. Each, he insists, must be governed by its own principle—freedom, equality, and brotherhood—not as ideals, but as functional realities.

The Zurich lectures unfold like a conversation with the future. Steiner begins by diagnosing the spiritual emptiness at the heart of modern social unrest. He sees the workers’ struggle not only in terms of wages and conditions, but as a cry for meaning—a longing to reconnect with the cultural and spiritual life from which they have been excluded. This insight alone sets Steiner apart from the ideologues of his time. He does not dismiss the proletarian movement; he listens to it, and hears in its depths a call for renewal. ‘Unlike perhaps any other movement in the world, the contemporary workers’ movement is one that has sprung from thinking. … For years I worked in a workers’ college, giving classes to working people from the most varied branches of industry. I became familiar with what animates workers’ psyches and motivates them. From this vantage point I learnt much about live issues among trades unions of various occupations and professions. In other words, what I say are not just theoretical musings or apercus but the result of real life experience.’

As the lectures progress, Steiner introduces the architecture of the threefold social organism. He is careful not to impose a rigid structure. Instead, he speaks of organic differentiation—of allowing each sphere to evolve according to its own nature. Spiritual life must be free from state control. Legal life must be grounded in equality before the law. Economic life must be shaped by cooperation and mutual responsibility. These are not abstractions. They are principles that arise from a deep understanding of human nature and social reality.

Steiner’s critique of ideology is especially poignant. He warns against fanaticism—against the temptation to reduce complex human realities to simplistic formulas. He sees Marxist materialism not as evil, but as incomplete. It lacks the spiritual dimension without which no true social renewal is possible. Steiner’s call is for real social thinking—thinking that arises from life itself, from people engaging with each other in any given situation—not from dogma.

Throughout the lectures, Steiner returns again and again to the theme of inner development. He insists that outer reform must be grounded in inner transformation. The social will, he says, must be nourished by spiritual insight. Only a threefold social order can free labour from commodification. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Steiner’s vision. It asks us not only to change society, but to change ourselves, and it is realistic enough to see that this will not happen quickly—although step changes in human development, he insists, are possible.

The final lecture, delivered on 8 March, 1919, is a quiet crescendo. Taking us through each of the constituent parts of the social order in turn, he outlines the steps toward renewal—not as a blueprint, but as a living impulse. He speaks of civic courage, of spiritual education, of economic brotherhood. He does not promise utopia. He offers a path ‘which really has to escalate into becoming a vast world-historic transformation which will progress from present proletarian consciousness, advancing to become universal human consciousness. What others have hitherto been unable to establish will then, founded in the dignity of contemporary proletarians, be established as true human dignity for all humankind’.

This volume is not light reading. Nor should it be. It is a companion for those who sense that the social question is, at heart, a spiritual question.

In our own time, when society once again trembles at the edge of transformation, Steiner’s voice speaks with renewed relevance. He does not tell us what to do. He asks us to listen—to the world, to one another, and to the quiet stirrings of conscience. The Social Challenge is not a solution. It is a seed. And those who read it with care may find themselves called to cultivate something new.

William Forward

September 2025

LECTURE 1

ZURICH, 3 FEBRUARY 1919

The true dimensions of the social challenge, based on spiritual-scientific research into human needs

WHAT is entailed in the social challenge has been of intense concern to thoughtful humanity over recent decades. Concern because not only can this challenge be said to be crucial for humanity’s onward evolution but because it has become something of a burning issue. The horrific catastrophe of war, in particular, has broken over humanity in recent years and has thrown a bleak spotlight onto these societal issues and their associated pan-human movements.

Because I need to place the historic conundrum of society at the centre of recent times, I will over the course of coming lectures have to address various issues connected with the cause and course of that hideously disastrous war. In these introductory remarks I would just like to mention how—right from the outset of war—social questions were jostling among feelings of fear clearly discernible among those at the source of hostilities. Much would undoubtedly have gone differently in 1914 had decision makers not been operating under such fear as to what might transpire were social movements increasingly to assert themselves. Much of what has resulted from this so-called war came about due, on the one hand, to fear and, on the other, to a number of leading figures totally misconstruing social imperatives. Much would have turned out differently had fear and misunderstanding not been so prevalent. And yet we see how, over the course of the war, people active within the social movement cherish the hope among themselves and in others that opportunities might present themselves to counteract the anguish being so terribly visited upon humanity. Now that these tragic events have reached a certain crisis point, we see that, especially in defeated countries, these residual upshots persist: the most desperate need to take a stand on social issues and to intercede on behalf of present social needs.

On this basis alone, anyone surveying and reflecting on the present—anyone with the slightest inclination to inform themselves about present conditions—will see that what is emerging amid social life will concern every member of society for a very, very long time. At this moment when, as I said, subjugated countries need every effort to solve their social woes, something akin to tragedy has settled over vast swathes of the developed world.

If you survey spiritual-intellectual achievements, literature and related areas that have arisen from discussion, colloquia and efforts devoted to social issues, an immeasurable amount of work and thinking are involved. Yet never have we faced social problems of such urgency as now. Today, life itself shows us the scale of social challenges. Despite every endeavour, every effort of thinking and the best will in the world, it appears as though anything of consequence, any capabilities developed over past decades, have turned out to be totally inadequate in dealing with social issues when presented in their true form, that is, as wrought by life itself. This bears down oppressively onto present efforts as an immense tragedy. Something so long in preparation and involving precisely those people whom one would have liked to believe were crucial are seemingly quite unprepared.

Anyone genuinely grappling with social questions over these past decades—not just those acting from a perspective of theoretical science, dry abstraction or unilateral partiality—will have found that powerfully paradoxical inconsistencies have always cropped up in this area. Perhaps the following is one of the most striking of these social disparities to emerge. Much could be heard of discussions, much could be gleaned from written material by people placed by life in the contemporary social movement. Particularly from those at the centre of discussions, from those attuned to the will of a modern workforce, you could sense that, yes indeed, all sorts of issues were being mooted, all sorts of topics raised, including questions asked about life’s vital dynamics while attempts are being made to give direction to various initiatives. But within what we can call social will or willing lies something quite, quite different from what is being articulated. Faced with hardly any other phenomenon in life can the feeling be so clearly sensed that largely subconscious, unspoken elements are playing a greater part than what is being expressed in seemingly clear concepts and finding its way into sober discussion. This is the point at which you can find cause not to despair of attempts being made to tackle social problems, albeit from a specific perspective.

Here in Zurich, as in other Swiss cities, I have often been invited to speak about aspects of spiritual science. From a perspective of spiritual-scientific research, I have for decades sought to focus on the social conundrum. Today, hearing those deeming themselves to be practical people, you might well despair of anything constructive being contributed from a perspective of academic research. Yet the very contradictory nature of social life—this needs to be emphasized—will again dispel any such despair. You see how leading figures in the social movement smile when talk turns to some spiritually-aligned attempt or other aimed at resolving social problems. They deride this as ideology and questionable theory. They don’t think that something based purely in thinking or spiritual sources will be capable of contributing usefully to today’s burning issues. But if you look more closely, the thought occurs forcibly that the root nerve, the very underlying impetus of the modern working-class movement, lies not in what its members are talking about but rather in thinking.

Unlike perhaps any other movement in the world, the contemporary workers’ movement is one that has sprung from thinking, and on closer inspection this is patently apparent. I say this not just as a clever aside or aperçu. If I may be permitted a personal remark here. For years I worked in a workers’ college, giving classes to working people from the most varied branches of industry. I became familiar with what animates workers’ psyches and motivates them. From this vantage point I learnt much about live issues among trades unions of various occupations and professions. In other words, what I say are not just theoretical musings or aperçus but the result of real-life experience.1

Those who are familiar with the contemporary workers’ movement on the ground—and this is unfortunately rarely the case among leading intellectuals—where it is actually set up by working people themselves, will know what a wonderful phenomenon this is. How a particular direction in thinking—a remarkable stream of thought—has gripped and inspired these people in the most intensive ways. This is what makes it so difficult nowadays to take a position on societal enigmas and means that such meagre prospects for mutual understanding exist between classes. The middle classes find it very difficult to put themselves into the shoes of blue-collar workers and have such a problem understanding what I would like to call their uncorrupted intelligence, in which an elemental force, an intellectual challenge such as that found in the thought system of Karl Marx2 can take hold—regardless of how you may relate to its contents.

Undoubtedly, Karl Marx’s thought system is acceptable to some, rejected by others, for reasons perhaps as sound for one group as for the other. It could be highly regarded by those who continued to view societal life in the manner of Marx and his friend Engels3 after their deaths. I do not wish to comment on the content of this system, of this scheme of thought—it is of minimal interest, it seems to me. What strikes me as significant is this fact: within workforces, within proletarianism, the most powerful force at work is a system of thought. This can be expressed as follows. No other practical movement, no solely life-based movement espousing the most everyday of human demands has ever existed in such near-total isolation on a purely scientific, ideological basis as this workers’ movement. It is even in some respects the first such movement in the world to be founded on purely scientific bases. And yet—as I hinted earlier—if, on closer observation of life itself, you take all that the contemporary worker has to say about their own opinions, will and feelings, this turns out not to be the crucial factor.

Many have demonstrated most astutely how this working-class social movement arose from the evolution of the last centuries. It has been cleverly elaborated how proletarianism—particularly on account of developments in technology and mechanical advances—came about in its present form in the first place; how, due to the enormously fluctuating economic tides of recent times, any social query at all arose. I will not repeat here what others have so ingeniously expounded about the rise of societal issues. But it seems to me necessary to point in particular to what characterizes the inequities—the real-life inconsistencies—in this workers’ movement. It is true that this movement could not have come about without the recent gigantic upheavals and turmoil of the technical revolution and the form in which it has evolved. However heatedly it is claimed that what is now manifesting in social life is solely a result of commercial pressures or economic forces, class differences and class warfare, when you observe working life in more detail and at deeper levels, the claim that only economic disparities and forces play a role here does not stack up. It is precisely to those in the habit of looking more closely, spiritual-scientifically, at the subtleties and nature of human soul life—something about which even the bearer of that soul may not be conscious—that it is most obvious that the advances in technology and commerce are not the determining factors in today’s social challenges. Instead, the pivotal fact is that some people have been removed from quite different circumstances and consigned to the service of machinery due to the way in which big business is run; and that, through this trans- or dislocation, an element has been activated in them that is not directly connected with their economic environment but which entails them being economically ensnared. What has been activated is linked with recent humanity’s deepest habits.

Those who regard history exclusively in the way socialist science likes to do—continually reiterating the obstinately dry link between cause and effect—take no account of forces for change and transformation present in lived reality, which can at given points have revolutionary effects on that history.

Let’s look at the development of an individual human being. We can follow this in successive stages from birth to around age seven and the change of dentition. Here the developing human organism undergoes a mighty revolution4. You have to focus on what actually takes place: it is not a simple linear progression of cause and effect. From seven to approaching fourteen or fifteen, however, a linear sequence of cause and effect is indeed apparent. Then another revolutionary moment occurs in the body when sexual maturity is reached. Later such transformative points are less obvious, but do nevertheless exist. Just as in individual lives radical moments occur, giving the lie to the endlessly repeated but false refrain that nature never makes leaps, so likewise in the historical evolution of humanity. Colossal transformations have been playing out since around the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries into the present—and will continue to do so in the future—involving processes of change in consciousness itself.

Just as the human organism differs in some respects from its earlier condition once it is sexually mature, the social organism is similarly transformed once the basic underlying impetus—not merely linear in the sense of cause and effect—has made manifest its effects. Those able to observe history accurately are aware that, before the advent of the present age, much of an instinctive nature was at work which is emerging into awareness and which must now be grasped in full consciousness. That is why the social movement is now—at a time rather typical of it—assuming a form and emerging under a much-used label, a descriptor not as intensely descriptive as it ought to be: proletarian class consciousness. As regards the term ‘proletarian class consciousness’: you should take less notice of it being essentially indicative of warfare—something in which proletarians mire themselves, believing themselves to be at war with the other classes—than noticing that an element has come into proletarian awareness just when the social instincts of times gone by are being transformed into social consciousness. Once there were social instincts. Now what underlies the social movement is class consciousness.

This class consciousness, I should say, only applies superficially, if one is to take the idea of class consciousness seriously. What lies concealed behind this concept of class consciousness is something quite different. To briefly characterize a salient fact: within old professional groupings, as manifest for instance in associations or guilds of craftspeople or other trades, certain social instincts were active, radiating into human souls and fortifying them. These instincts were able to work in such a way that they created a certain personal bond between what people thought, felt and willed, what they felt essential to their honour, for their delight and aesthetic needs. Work itself provided for some of these needs.

Once human beings had been installed amongst machinery, once they had been inserted into the thoroughly impersonal business of modern capitalism, where the process through to remuneration for a manually-finished product was no longer clearly transparent, but where the main aim has become to increase capital through capital itself; in other words, once people had been installed, on the one hand, in mechanized industry, on the other, into capitalism and its economic system, they were torn from their previous working lives and contexts, which had rewarded them with something of personal value for their honour, for their joy, for their own willed initiatives. People at the zenith of their personal abilities were set alongside machinery and within the solely objective and impersonal circulation of goods and capital, things of no real personal concern to them. Yet people always long to be fully engaged, to unfold their full potential. This is how a working person, plucked out of their life’s context, as described, could be transposed into a context where, detached from the full vitality of their humanness, they could be directed to ponder their human dignity and to feel in retrospect that dignity.

This is how, concealed behind what is termed proletarian class consciousness, an ascendant gleam has dawned in modern historical evolution: the advent of a consciousness created from out of the human soul itself. By diverting consciousness towards the question: What am I as a human being? and: What do I signify as a person in the world? Workers, placed among humanity-negating machinery and capitalism, had occasion to ponder questions of this kind.

Yet I believe that the entire study of societal issues is put onto a different footing if you consider that, although other people, largely as a result of life circumstances that did not produce such revolutionary ferment, have been removed from their old instinctual parameters and driven towards modern consciousness, today’s workers have been radically propelled into conscious self-perception away from what was formerly an instinctive understanding of human dignity and the place of the individual in society.

Now, this consciousness of humanity dawned among proletarians together with much else taking place in human progress. It coincided with a specific phase in evolution and thinking. Today, humanity’s historical evolution is very poorly understood because various factions portray it in biased, partisan ways. If you look at human evolution impartially, quite different features often emerge from those traditionally discussed. It can also be said that anyone seeing what enjoys the most powerful authority these days—that is, science—knows that even what is now broadly endowed with absolute objectivity clearly bears the hallmarks of having evolved out of something preceding it and will again take on different forms in future. If you look at science with its shiny methods, its endlessly conscientious research techniques, at the science so well suited to penetrating nature’s manifest phenomena, you notice that the most perceptive thing it can express is that, basically, it is ill-equipped to grasp the deepest inward human feeling and intuiting, that it has precious little to say about what people want to know when turning their attention to self-knowledge and conceptions of themselves. Science has also in some respects severed itself from the human being. It no longer bears personal features nor does it speak of any spiritual, supra-sensible or eternal element in the human being. If it mentions any of these at all, it makes fashionably clear that it possesses no corresponding methodology nor compatible research tools.

You can look back from this form of science to times in human evolution when life was fully embedded in a religious conception of the world, in religious sentience and scientific observing. These moved apart. What had been unified diverged at around the same time as the revolution in objectivity that found expression in the machine age when the emergence of capitalism was taking place. While this economic cataclysm was in process, it was as if religious growth largely wished to stand still, did not want to participate in, nor accompany, all that stemmed from scientific development. Then, at a time when such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno were being condemned5, those most inward human feelings and sensitivities remained, in one sense, behind in the face of what people would voluntarily say about nature and the world. People lost their belief that they could still suffuse their knowledge with a religious glow, with any religious warmth. Nowadays people are immensely proud that science can be maintained free of elements they wish to ascribe to religion alone. It is into this timeframe, when science is increasingly aiming to be totally religion- and spirit-free, that proletarians’ evolving consciousness and dawning pan-human awareness falls.

The proletariat forged ahead to modern thinking, to modern intelligence, to a grasp of what can be understood through force of spiritual intellect. It encountered a science which no longer contained the momentum to encompass and fulfil human beings in their entirety. And it is this that has given the modern proletarian psyche its distinctive configuration. Humanity’s spiritual consciousness, spiritual awareness among leading classes, as it had been in times gone by, had also lost its momentum, had delivered a science that was largely remote and abstracted from human conditions. This is what proletarians experienced at a soul level when faced with a science that could inspire no trust that it could provide the most truthful, inward spirit reality amid external sense- and economic activity. This is the science they saw they faced and for which they had to settle. This is how something entered their psyches from purely spiritual-evolutionary substrata, something which today manifests as a sort of irrefutable certainty, accepted as absolute truth, whose true nature is only identifiable in terms of soul processes. What moves the closer observer most is the way in which workers will speak about actual issues of spirit, convention, morality, art, religion, evolution, even of science, incorporating all this under a heading of ideology. This is very moving, and never more so than when you see how sure they believe themselves to be that everything humans think, all that they create artistically, all religious feeling, is just a soul-generated simulacrum, is just ideology. However, it is economic struggle and commercial processes that constitute real actuality for them. Humankind’s spiritual evolution is pitched into their soul mix as a sort of reflected gleam. It is ideology. At best it deflects a few impulses back into the purely material reality of economic proceedings. Rebounding into economic practices, this view is itself a product of those self-same economic processes.

This position on spirituality exists in proletarianism as something far more fundamental than one might think. Why, oh why, have art, tradition, morality, religion and sundry other intangible spiritual attributes become ideology for modern working people? Because they have inherited from previously leading echelons a science that no longer wants to support a living connection with the genuine world of spirit, a science that shows not the slightest impetus towards real spirituality. Science of this sort is at best capable of leading to abstract concepts in the form of natural laws. It can lead nowhere else than to a view of spirituality as an ideology. It yields methodologies suited, on the one hand, to purely objective, non-human nature and, within human life on the other, to economic proceedings. When proletarians were obliged to take on this scientific bias, their outlook became focused as if by a powerfully suggestive force on the sole area science of this sort is capable of focusing: on economic life. And they started to believe this economic existence to be their only reality, whereas in truth the science bequeathed them by bourgeois echelons could lead only to economic life.

Yet this was enormously pivotal because it gave the working-class movement its actual, characteristic impetus. You can see how old instinctual elements still lingered in this movement right into the last decades of the nineteenth century. You can still find in some old programmes and courses6 points at which the concept of human dignity and the exercise of rights that result in true dignity were discussed. Since the 1890s we have been seeing—under influences just described—how proletarians’ focus and that of their learned champions has been bent as if by a powerful force of suggestion solely towards the economy. Now they no longer believe that anywhere other than in an economy can a spiritual or soulful incentive exist of the kind that is so fundamental to any social movement. They believed that only via the un-spiritual, un-soulful economy could conditions they deemed worthy of humankind be achieved. So they turned their attention to transforming economic life itself so as to rid it of all the harm caused by individual employers’ egotism in private enterprise, and to be shielded from the failure of those employers to honour employees’ demands relating to human dignity. This is how workers started to enact the only possible means they could see of transferring private property and the means of production into communal control or even communal ownership. Underlying this—and its only outcome—is what happens when attention is diverted away from anything of a soul-spiritual nature, when spirit becomes ideology; when everything is based on quasi-scientific methodology only capable of resulting in economic considerations.

A remarkable fact now emerged, one that demonstrates just how many inconsistencies exist in the proletarian movement. The modern worker believes that the economy and all economic life ought to evolve in such a way that it ultimately embodies all their human rights. As they see it, they are fighting for full human rights. Even within this aspiration, a fact emerges which cannot possibly arise as a result of economics alone. This important fact is tellingly insistent and lies at the core of all aspects of the societal challenge, proceeding as it does from vital human imperatives. It is something they believe to have arisen from the economy itself—something it could never have been—but which is a result, rather, of the direct linear evolution from ancient slavery, via feudal times, to present-day working proletarians. In whichever form the circulation of goods and money, the essentials of capitalism, ownership, the nature of land and property ownership and so on may have developed, within modern life an element has emerged that is not clearly articulated by proletarians, yet which is all too unmistakably felt to be the actual, underlying impetus of their social will. It is like this. Basically, the modern capitalist economic system only recognizes goods, products, commodities, within its sphere of circulation. It knows how these create value within the economy. And it is within the capitalist edifice of recent times that one component has become a commodity and workers feel that it cannot be allowed to be commodified. Yet, scientifically speaking, it cannot be expressed in any other way because their focus has been directed solely towards an economy where everything is commodifiable: their own labour has become a commodity.

If only there were some measure of understanding that herein lies one of the most fundamental aspects of the entire workers’ movement and that, at an instinctive and subconscious level, working people feel that selling their labour to an employer in the same way as goods are sold in the market place under conditions of supply and demand is abhorrent. They detest the role their work plays in a labour market subject to supply and demand. If only it could be understood and viewed without bias that an abhorrence of these trading terms—terms not even examined radically and incisively in socialist theory—underpin the social movement of today, the very point of origin would have been identified from which all that is so pressingly and searingly manifest in the social movement ensues.

In times gone by, slavery existed. Human beings in their entirety—perhaps slightly less than their entirety, but not far off—were sold as tradeable objects into serfdom and bondage. Capitalism has become the power which still retains the subtext that people can be claimed to be goods in the form of their labour. The means need to be sought by which human labour can be disconnected, severed from other commodities in circulation. What lies behind this fact will only be grasped once the economy has shed all implication of slavery and is understood in terms that differentiate between trade and human being. Then it will become clear how the nature of human labour originates in—and must flow from—a completely different experience of society, one devoid of commercial correlation. It is essential to see—and spiritual science will supply the foundations so to do—that it is misguided to believe that just by observing the economy—to which only natural-scientific parameters apply—a way will be found to integrate an individual’s labour into the social organism. People will only be on the right track once they appreciate that believing labour to belong to the economic system is tantamount to believing heart-lung-and-circulation to be processes identical with those of head and nervous system. The nerve-sense system, centred as it is in the head, is an independent, self-sufficient entity, heart-lung-circulatory system likewise, metabolism similarly. This can be found in more detail in my book Riddles of the Soul.7 It is characteristic of the human organism that its systems develop and function correctly precisely in not being centralized but in coexisting freely and functioning in parallel with each other. If today it is barely possible to think of the human body with keen synthesis, even less is it possible to understand the social organism via an unreconstructed science in dire need of spiritual-scientific reform. The human body is thought today to be a single centralized unit when in fact it is threefold in structure.

The societal organism is also threefold in structure. Viewed under great power of suggestion as a single entity, the economy is in fact just one element of society. A further element is what must ensue from an understanding of the function of human labour within the overall structure of society. Both systems have to exist alongside one another. Then labour will be defined as a commodity only in the deceptive thinking of recent times.

The tight-fisted, hard-hearted thinking of recent times has made mere ideology of the third element belonging to the social organism: spiritual-intellectual culture. The theoretical view that spiritual culture is mere ideology is the least dangerous. The most critical aspect of this is when the idea takes root that spirituality is mere ideology and that no genuine impetus can exist in the spirit underlying all manifestation. People in this mould have no interest in attributing to spiritual processes their rightful role in the world.

If you observe what constitutes life’s vital needs, as played out in the arena of proletarian consciousness, you find that no insight into the three spheres of the social organism can be found. It is lost to view. There is a determination to nationalize because the belief persists that a single unitary social organism can shoulder responsibility for everything.

In these burningly intense times, spiritual science needs to open up broader horizons on the societal conundrum than those generally proffered by its appointed leaders. It needs mentioning that we ought not to want innovation for its own sake, but that we need to think innovatively, that we need not only a scientific view of social living—a view adopted by traditional science—but rather to establish anew a science that brings to human consciousness new thinking about society, thinking that is grounded in reality.

That has to lead to the source of so much recent adversity being remedied by consciousness of humanity as a whole. Those who do not work theoretically but on a basis of real-life experience—as I believe I, too, have been able to do throughout this hour—are likely to be dismissed and rendered innocuous primarily by those who consider themselves to be the really practical people: the ones who say: ‘We know nothing productive will come of their theorizing. Those “practical lifers” are the abstractionists here, those “practical-experiencers” who restrict their senses to the narrowest tram-tracks, it is those “experientialists” who have added to the woes of these awful times. If they carry on their economic meddling, our woes will never end but grow exponentially.’

Yet people genuinely grounded in practical life, those who speak of developmental potential, those embedded in spatial and temporal societal evolution must—in parallel with individuals’ evolution—maintain their due positions in public activity, as befits them. Today, genuinely practical people who speak out of a deeper reality are the very ones with whom we ought to be reckoning. They are the ones who need not despair of their experience and knowledge. They see where the trouble lies and regret that ‘practical-lifers’—whether socialist or not—believe they have to single-handedly carry out what can only lead to ruthless exploitation in real life. Anyone wanting to work truly practically from out of the spirit will work towards a reality that is compatible with—and suited to—that real life.

The day after tomorrow I aim to address the extent to which attempts can succeed in resolving the questions I have sought to raise in their true form—based as they are on research into the social realities of habitual modes of living, and how humanity’s social structures can be transformed.

LECTURE 2

ZURICH, 5 FEBRUARY 1919

Attempts at solving social issues from a spiritual-scientific perspective aligned with life and congruent with reality

A propos the themes I am developing, I would like to express the plea that you regard these four lectures as an integrated whole, so that what is presented in any one lecture is not taken in isolation and judged out of context. The subject under consideration is so extensive that it can only be tackled over the course of several lectures.

In today’s lecture I would initially like to speak in sketch form about such attempts at resolution as are based on genuine knowledge of the social organism’s nature, such attempts at solving social issues as do not originate unilaterally in the demands of any one societal echelon, class, rank or position, but which proceed from suitably life-congruent studies of evolutionary forces, particularly those presently evolving and affecting the near future. If seeking to offer a solution to social problems based on the aspirations and demands of one echelon or class of society—indeed of any one sector—it cannot be otherwise than what is achieved for one sector will have consequences for other social groupings that may in some way be inimical to their progress or the welfare of their living conditions.

The truth to which I refer, and which I will substantiate over the course of these lectures, applies to all modern life—you could say to the entire social organism—which has taken on a specific configuration due to what I described as a decisive recent factor, attributable to technology and everything involved in the technical operation of the economy and the capitalist practices that govern economic life. What modern technology and capitalism have introduced into life has necessarily attracted not only keen attention to society’s social structures but also largely unconscious, yet determinative, powers of instinct.

What has produced this particular social configuration can be expressed as follows. The economy, underpinned by technology and capitalism, has had an idiosyncratic effect and has conferred on modern society a definite internal configuration. In addition to the focus on what technology and capitalism have brought to humanity, attention has been deflected away from other sectors of society which need to be activated if the social organism is to become as robust as the economy.

In order to enlarge on what I believe I have identified as the central nexus of a wide-ranging, far-reaching study of the social challenge, I’d like to begin with a comparison. But I ask you to bear in mind that I intend only to make this comparison for the purpose of lending to your understanding the wherewithal to envision the healing of society. Those used to attending to the most complex of organisms—the human body—will need to focus on the fact that it is naturally dependent on three systems working alongside each other in mutual harmony. These three interdependent systems can be outlined as follows.