Threefold Social Order
= proposal for societal organization by Rudolf Steiner
Description
Stephen E. Usher:
"Rudolf Steiner developed the idea between 1917 and 1922. The core concept recognizes three domains of human social activity: economic, legal, and cultural. Steiner maintained that the health of human society depended on an adult population that understood the characteristics of each domain and could thereby organize society so that each domain enjoyed independence and autonomy. In an early characterization Steiner said the three domains should be as independent from one another as national states interacting by way of treaties.
Economic life concerns transforming what nature provides in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms into commodities that meet human needs. From the threefold perspective, economic activity should be organized and carried out in the spirit of brotherhood with the objective of meeting the needs of all human beings on the planet.
Rudolf Steiner maintained that the entire economic life was encompassed by what he called the “Law of True Price.” He formulated the law in these words: “A true price is forthcoming when a man receives, as counter-value for the product he has made, an amount sufficient to enable him to satisfy the whole of his needs, including of course the needs of his dependents, until he will again have completed a like product.”
To understand the law requires serious study. In this introduction only a few pointers can be offered. First, it is essential to remove an error in economic thinking -- the concept of “wages.” Steiner maintained the idea of wages, i.e. paying people for their labor, is an illusion. In reality all real labor produces something of value, and the worker is paid for this value. Consequently, to properly perceive the economic life, it is necessary to picture each wage earner as actually running a little business that creates value and to interpret the wage as the price paid for the value. When wages are included among other prices then it is possible to apply the Law of True Price.
A second pointer is to observe that the formula speaks of the future, and states that true price allows the participants in the economic life to meet their needs for the time required to reproduce the value. It seems evident that if this is not the case, if people could not meet their needs for a sufficient time to reproduce the value, then eventually the economic process would beak down.
The formula also includes the challenging term “needs” which leads to the obvious question of determining them. It should be noted that the idea of needs was far more transparent in 1922 when Steiner formulated the law. Since then the enormous forces of commercial psychology and advertising have conspired to manipulate needs and transform them into desires. For a good discussion of this very significant and sinister transformation of civilization see the film Century of the Self by Adam Curtis which describes, in particular, the work of Freud’s nephew, Bernays, who was the father of public relations and manipulative advertising. The basic point is there are real needs that can be made visible when the impact of powerful subliminal manipulation is weeded out of the soul.
In Steiner’s picture of the economic domain, associations of the economic life collect price data and use a combination of market forces and other policy tools to keep prices true.
The middle realm of the threefold social organism is the legal domain (also called the political or rights domain). Its role is to establish laws that govern the behavior of all adults equally. From the threefold perspective this domain is exclusively about human rights and, in particular, there is no room here for business entities. From this it follows that there is no place in the legal domain for corporations as legal persons. Regulation of business life is a matter for associations of the economic life. Political questions concerning human rights and obligations are the sole subject matter of the political\rights domain. The laws formulated in this domain should be formulated independent of economic concerns and power. This means that economic resources should play no role in deciding the rights, laws and obligations of human beings. Once rights and laws have been established society must have the power to enforce them and, consequently, police power belongs to the legal domain. To the extent that it is necessary to defend the rights from foreign intrusion, military power also belongs here.
Culture, in the widest sense, is about the cultivation and recognition of human capacities. Human capacities are the spiritual endowments that rain in upon the earth with the births of new human beings. Finding the best way of unfolding these capacities is the task of the cultural domain. The key ingredient for this is freedom. The archetypal picture of this freedom-in-operation is the teacher with his students. In unfolding this relationship only the spiritual/mental faculties, feelings and insights of the teacher and students should come into play. Steiner described this freedom in a newspaper article:
“[The cultural life] aims at a form of cooperation among men to be based entirely on the free intercourse and free association of individuality with individuality. Here human individuality will not be forced into an institutional mold. How one person assists another, how one helps another advance will simply arise from what one, through his own abilities and accomplishments, is able to be for the other. It is no great wonder that presently many people are still able to imagine nothing but a state of anarchy as a result of such a free form of human relations in the social order’s spiritual-cultural branch. Those who think so simply do not know what powers of man’s innermost nature are hindered from expanding when man is forced to develop in the pattern into which the state and economic system mold him. Such powers, deep within human nature, cannot be developed by institutions, but only through what one being calls forth in perfect freedom from another being.”
This passage makes clear that no laws or regulations should be formulated about how or what a teacher should teach. The how and what of teaching is a purely cultural matter and is the providence of colleges of teachers interacting on the basis of freedom in the cultural domain. Similarly, economic power should in no way be allowed to determine how cultural life is conducted.
In addition to education the cultural life encompasses all of science, art, religion, medicine, and the working of judges. Each of these areas is about human capacity. Artistic endeavor concerns the capacity to transform nature into sensory experiences that awaken spiritual ideals, even beauty; religion concerns – among other capacities - the capacity of reverence; medicine the capacity for recognizing and tending illness; the work of judges deals with the capacity for weighing truth with criminality. Inventing and innovation are actually part of cultural life too. The aspect of banking and finance concerned with recognizing individuals whose developed capacities make them able to manage capital is likewise part of cultural life.
All of these activities require freedom and competition among human beings of capacity, allowing the most talented to rise to the top. The notion that competition belongs in economic life is a confusion that arises because part of cultural life is mistakenly viewed by our civilization as economic. What our civilization views as business competition in product development and innovation is the same sort of activity that takes place in a competition for the first chair violin in an orchestra. In other words, it is an activity of the free cultural life. It is this confusion that has led to the erroneous idea that economic life is about competition.
Equally erroneous is the association of freedom with the economic life. In reality a deep and dense network of dependencies characterizes economic life. These become particularly visible when disaster strikes. For example, the bankruptcy of a large automobile manufacturer spreads a wave of damage and hurt in ever widening circles. First to loose their livelihoods are those who work for the manufacturer. As the wave expands the suppliers to the automobile manufacturer and the car dealerships feel the pain of reduced income or bankruptcy. The circle of people who have lost their jobs or who have significantly lower incomes, of course, spends less as consumers, and this affects all the people whose activity was supplying these consumer needs, e.g. town merchants in the affected area, etc. It was Steiner’s insight that brotherly cooperation and interdependence was the true quality that should rule these densely interdependent networks in order that everyone’s needs might be met. The notion that people are free agents in this realm belies the fact that each person is tied by innumerable threads into a complex network that demands he perform the tasks required by the needs of others. Brotherhood is about brotherly interdependence. That characterizes economic life."
(http://www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Threefold_Social_Order.php)
More information
* Article: THE URGENCY OF SOCIAL THREEFOLDING IN A WORLD STILL AT WAR WITH ITSELF. By Matthew David Segall. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2023
URL = https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1069/1723
"Rudolf Steiner’s proposal for the threefolding of society is introduced and applied to the present. It is argued that a conscious differentiation (not division) of economic, political, and cultural domains brings clarity to the healthy impulses seeking expression in each domain. The hope is that such a clarification facilitates the cultivation of the collective will and moral imagination required for addressing the thicket of social conflicts dividing humanity at both local and planetary scales."