THE NEW YORK
TIMES BOOK REVIEW. JANUARY 14,
1923
New Scheme of
Social Organization
A Review by
RAYMOND G. FULLER1
THE THREEFOLD COMMONWEALTH. By Rudolph Steiner. Authorized
translation by S. Bowen-Wedgwood. Pp. 206. New York: Threefold Commonwealth Publishing
Association.
HERE is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Rudolph Steiner Ph. D., of
Vienna, mystic and occultist, theosophist, until the break with Mrs. Besant,
anthroposophist now on his own account, a man who has
experimented and published strikingly in the fields of education, medicine, and
art, in accordance with his esoteric philosophy and yet in a manner not without
results and suggestions of value to traditional thinkers and regular
practitioners in these fields, appears as a sociologist in "The Threefold
Commonwealth." The book was written in German several years ago
and was first translated Into English by O. Henry Frederick under the title, "The Tri-organic Social
Organism" (Detroit: the Goetheanum Press). The earlier translation was not regarded
as satisfactory by the followers, or admirers, of Dr. Steiner, and
wider publicity for his ideas was desired; hence the present volume.
But the book in not merely part of the literature of a religious or
semi-religious cult; it has novelty and bigness as a contribution to
sociological literature–the most original contribution in a generation. The
author is a German thinker
as well as a Rosicrucian
esotericist, and has addressed himself to social problems from an unusual point
of view, producing the highly interesting conception of the Threefold Commonwealth.
"Interesting" is used as a word of praise, not of disparagement. Most
of our books on social maladjustment and the future of civilization are based
on either an economic or a psychological interpretation of society; Dr. Steiner
has what may be called a spiritual interpretation, and he would reorganize
society in such a way as to bring it into conformity with the spiritual
realities.
"What ails the body social," says Dr. Steiner, "is the
impotence of the spiritual life."
It devolves upon
this book–an unpopular task today–to show that the chaotic condition of our
public life comes from the spiritual life's dependence on the state and on
industrial economy, and to show further that one part of the burning social
question is the emancipation of the spiritual life from this dependence.
The spiritual life, as Dr. Steiner sees it, is neither a collection of
instincts nor a collection of ideas and ideals, but an entity that transcends
the life of man and yet works in and through man and gives life all the reality
it has. It is life itself. The comparative impotence of this spiritual life,
its relative frustration, is the fundamental cause of the working class
movement. Let the author (through his translator) speak:
The man of today
who is obliged to live the life of the worker * * *—needs a spiritual life from which
power can come—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when
the capitalistic economic order of recent times caught him up into its
machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven
for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which
the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running
through all the demands of the modern working class is this longing for some
link with the spiritual life other than the present form of society can give;
and this is what gives the directing impulse to the social movement today. * *
*At present, the worker thinks that he has struck the main force in his soul
when he talks about his "class consciousness." But the truth is, that
ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been
searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a
"human consciousness"—a consciousness of his worth as a man–which
there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as
ideology. This "human consciousness" was what he was seeking. He
could not find it; and so he replaced it with "class consciousness"
born of the economic life. His eyes are riveted upon the economic life alone,
as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no
longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be
anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in
the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic
life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of
things which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to
seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced
to the conviction that with the transformation of economic life all those ills
would disappear that have been brought on through private enterprise, through
the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s
powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the
employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe that the only welfare
for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of
production into a communal concern or into actual communal property. This
conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from
everything belonging to the soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on economic
processes.
Society and social institutions–the state and the school in particular–
are dominated by the economic life, with consequences many and various. The
economic life extends its influence far beyond its own proper sphere. The
modern capitalist system of economy, says Dr. Steiner, recognizes nothing but
commodities, and in the capitalistic process something has been turned into a
commodity which the worker feels must not and can not be a commodity–namely,
his labor power. He has much to say about the loathing which the worker feels
at being obliged to barter his labor-power to the employer, as goods are
bartered in the market; his loathing at seeing his personal labor-power play
part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labor market, just as goods in
the market are subject to supply and demand. We have had from other writers
much criticism of the capitalistic system as affecting legislation and education,
to the neglect or subordination of human values and as outraging the worker's
sense of personality; but Dr. Steiner does not blame capitalism, he believes
that any social system based primarily on economics must necessarily produce
similar results. It is not reform of the economic system that the advocates; it
is reform of the whole social system. Liberty is not to be found by changing to
some other form of industrial economy than capitalism. It is not to be found in
Marxism or neo-Marxism.
So long as the
economic system has the regulating of labor-power, it will go on consuming
labor-power just as it consumes commodities–in a manner that is most useful to
its purposes—* * * One cannot divest human labor-power of its commodity
character unless one can find a way of separating it from the economic process.
It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape
in which human labor may come by its rights inside that process itself.
At times Dr. Steiner sounds like many another critic of capitalism, at
times like many another critic of socialism. He does not want capitalism. He wants
the social order completely revised and changed, and that, as he carefully
explains, is precisely why socialism will not answer; for socialism is an
economic remedy. He does not want anything between capitalism and socialism. He
does not want social legislation or Government ownership, or, as solutions,
such things as profit-sharing and employee representation. Least of all does he
want anarchism. All talk of socialization he regards is futile, in whatever
sense the term "socialization" may be used–whether as meaning the
common ownership of property or the triumph of humanitarianism. Futile so far as
a solution of the social problem is concerned, socialization will prove no
cure, but only a quack remedy, possibly even a fatal one for social life; that
is, "unless in men's hearts, in men's souls, there dawns at least an
instinctive perception of the necessity for a threefold division of the body
social." If the body social is to function healthily, it must develop
three organic divisions; must become triorganic. The economic life must have
its separate division; so must "the life of rights," and so must the
spiritual life–three autonomous divisions, functioning apart, yet bound
together. Hard to conceive? But that is the conception of the Threefold
Commonwealth.
One of the three divisions is that which belongs to the economic life–or
in which the economic life belongs. Its concern is with everything in the
nature of production of commodities, circulation of commodities, and the
consumption of commodities. The production, circulation and consumption of
goods is to be regulated, not by laws, but by people themselves, from their own
direct insight and interests. (If this is not clear, the reviewer suggests
going to Dr. Steiner's book for possible enlightenment. There will be
associations, having their rise in purely economic considerations and drawn
jointly from circles of consumers, traders and producers. The actual conditions
of life will of themselves determine the size and scope of the associations.
In these
associations it will not be "wage-workers" sitting, using their power
to get the highest possible wages out of the "work-employer"; it will
be the hand-workers, co-operating with the spiritual workers, who direct
production, and with those interested in consuming the product, to effect a balance
between one form of service and another, through an adjustment of prices. * * *
Everything will take place by agreement between man and man, and between one association
and another.
The second branch of the Threefold Commonwealth is the "rights-state,"
with legislative and administrative machinery for the expression and
effectualization of the "life of rights." Here is the sphere of
politics, but politics divorced from economics. Here is the realm of social
ethics, of human relationships. In the rights-state, "built up on those
impulses in human consciousness which go by the name of 'democratic,'"
men's rights and duties are adjusted. Hours of labor and modes of labor are
regulated independently of economic considerations. Every man meets his fellow
on an equal footing, because all transactions and all control are confined to
those fields of life in which all men are competent to form an opinion. Such
transactions as are necessary between the executive heads of the rights-state
and the economic organization are to be carried on pretty much as between the Governments
of sovereign States today. Dr. Steiner does not elucidate; throughout his book
he leaves a good deal to the imagination of the reader, and that, no doubt, is
the method of true art.
The third division of "the body social" under the threefold
plan has to do with "all those things which are connected with mental and
spiritual life." But that phrase is not very clear, Dr. Steiner admits,
and "spiritual culture" is not satisfactory, either. Perhaps, he
says, one might more accurately express it as "everything that rests on
the natural endowments of each single human being–everything that plays a part
in the body social on the ground of the natural endowments, both spiritual and
physical, of the individual." Definitions and descriptions of the
spiritual life are difficult, partly because language itself is under the
domination of forces and influences, habits and modes of thought that are
primarily economic; the bondage of the spiritual life is shown in the limitations
of language.
The educational
and teaching system, lying as it does at the root of all spiritual life, must
be put under the management of those people who are educating and teaching, and
none of the influences at work in State or industry should have any say or
interference in this management. No teacher should spend more time on teaching than
will allow of his also being a manager in his own sphere of activity. And in
the way that he himself conducts the teaching and education, so too he will conduct
the management. Nobody will issue instructions who is not at the same time
actively engaged in teaching and educating. No parliament has any voice in it,
nor any individual who once on a time may have taught but is no longer personally
teaching. The experience learned at first hand in actual teaching passes direct
into the management.
Quite different, you see, is Dr. Steiner's belief from the usual notion
that the conduct of education is the business of the State; and most persons,
including socialists, "find it difficult to conceive of anything else than
that society should educate the individual to its service according to its own
standards." The state of the present day establishes law schools, or at
least requires that the jurisprudence taught in them shall be the same as the
state has fixed for its own constitution and administration; but when the law
schools proceed wholly from a free spiritual life, this free spiritual life
will itself supply the substance of the jurisprudence taught. "The state
will wait to take its mandate from the spiritual life." "It will be
fertilized by the reception of living ideas such as can issue only from a
spiritual life that is free."
The author denies that his triorganic plan is an attempt to revive the
three old estates of the Plow, the Sword and the Book. In the Threefold
Commonwealth men will not be divided into grades, classes or estates. It is the
body social itself that will be divided, functionally, and thereby man for the
first time will be able to be truly man. The three social divisions will be
such that every man will have his own life's roots in each of the three. His
calling will give him footing in one of them, and to this he will belong by
virtue of his practical interests. His relation to the other two will be a very
close and vital one, for his connection with their institutions will be of a
kind to create such a relation. Threefold, then, will be the body social, apart
from man, but forming the groundwork of his life, and each man will unite its
three divisions within himself.
A healthy social organism (namely, what Dr. Steiner describes) will have
international relations, and these will be threefold. Each of its three
branches will have its independent connection with the corresponding branch of
every other threefold organism. (" Organism " he says, not "nation,"
though he does use the word "international.") All manner of
interconnections will spring up between the economic network of one district
and that of another, without being directly influenced by the connections
between their "rights-States." And the relations between their
"rights-States" will develop independently of their economic
connections. "This independence of origin will enable these two sets of
relations to act as a check upon each other in cases of dispute." "Such a close interweaving of interests
will grow up as will make territorial frontiers seem negligible in the life of
mankind." A virtual League of Nations will be the outcome; there will be
no need to institute one.
In this book, in the picture of the Threefold Commonwealth, there is much
vagueness, a plentiful lack of detail, But Dr. Steiner says that he is not
trying to describe a Utopia, a task of particularization; he is merely setting
forth principles and presenting a general outline. Details and particulars will
take care of themselves when the time arrives. It is worth noting, perhaps,
that since the original publication of the book Dr. Steiner has written a
series of explanatory and supplementary articles which have appeared as a
separate volume soon to be translated into English. * * * How is the Threefold
Commonwealth coming to pass? On one page Dr. Steiner hopes for "at least
an instinctive sense" of its necessity, and on another says that "a
reasoning will and purpose are needed to make a new social order, and are
imperatively demanded by the forces at work in mankind's historic
evolution."
The book contains much analysis and characterization of modern society
that is shrewd, pungent and just. The conception of the Threefold Commonwealth
is noble–a little aloof in its mighty grandeur. It is almost presumptuous in
its scope and magnitude. It is a conception, nevertheless, worthy of man. It is
a splendid piece of creation. Merely as a conception it has intrinsic value.
1. Raymond G. Fuller, pseudonym of Genevieve May Fox (1888-1959), was born in Southampton, MA, and was an author and social activist. In 1922 she wrote "The Meaning of Child Labor" (Chicago, A. C. McClung & co) and in 1923 "Child Labor and the Constitution" (New York: Thomas Y Crowell). She was director of the National Child Labor Committee, and considered a moderate. In 1929 she published a book of case studies on community conflict (New York City, The Inquiry).