Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the Threefold Order of the Social organism, the Threefold Commonwealth or Triformation of the Social Organism as it has also been called, was preceded by three other basic constitutional elements of human society.
The first one he formulated in 1898
as The Fundamental Sociological Law: “During the earliest stages of civilization
humanity strove towards the development of social groupings. The interests of
the individual were sacrificed to the interests of the group; subsequent
development led to the liberation of the individual from the interests of the
groups and to the free unfolding of the needs and forces of the individual.”[1]
I.e. During the course of human evolution the relationship between the individual
and the collective was turned upside down; instead of sacrificing oneself to
the interests of the clan, the tribe, the nation etc., now it has become a
matter of liberating oneself from these bonds. This universally applicable rule
leads to the Right to Individuality[2]
and a such can serve as a criterion for determining whether a nation state or
union of states is either furthering or holding back the just course of human
evolution.
The second constitutional element of
human society that Rudolf Steiner formulated in an essay in 1906 is The Fundamental Social Law and reads as
follows: “The well-being of a community
of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims
for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes
over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of
his own work but out of the work done by others”.
His
commentary on it was (partially) as follows: “Every arrangement in a community that is contrary to this law will
inevitably engender somewhere after a while distress and want. It is a
fundamental law, which holds good for all social life with the same absoluteness
and necessity as any law of nature within a particular field of natural
causation. It must not be supposed, however, that it is sufficient to
acknowledge this law as one for general moral conduct, or to try to interpret
it into the sentiment that everyone should work in the service of his fellow
men. No, this law only lives in reality as it should when a community of people
succeeds in creating arrangements such that no one can ever claim the fruits of
his own labor for himself, but that these go wholly to the benefit of the
community. And he must himself be supported in return by the labors of his
fellow men. The important point is, therefore, that working for one's fellow
men and obtaining an income must be kept apart, as two separate things.”[3]
This dynamic reciprocal law has been
realized to a great extent in the world-wide division of labour, where in
contradiction to the middle ages, practically no one, except the farmers, works
for himself anymore. It postulates in short: the more altruism, the more
well-being; the more selfishness the more suffering, need and ultimately war.
It is the exact counterpoint to the liberal or neo-liberal creed based on the
false assumption that unbridled egoism leads to societal well-being.
The third constitutional element of
human society Rudolf Steiner called in his lecture ”Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being” in 1918 The Archetypal Social Phenomenon: “If one human being faces another, then one person is
always trying to put the other one to sleep and the other one is constantly
trying to stay awake. Yet, to speak in Goethe’s sense, this is the archetypal
social phenomenon of social science.”[4]
On the basis of this archetypal
social phenomenon the groundwork for a new science and art of communication has
been laid by anthroposophical researchers in the field of human dialogue and
discourse that can lead to a veritable spiritual union, an exchange–of–being between
the participants involved in which the
one can experience and relate to the other
“I am who you are” and the other replying “You are who I am”.[5]
The final and fourth element in this domain is the idea of the threefold order of the social organism, which is here abbreviated with the term social organics. This term was never actually used by Rudolf Steiner, but was coined by Herbert Witzenmann, the former leader of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum, School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, Switzerland originally founded by Rudolf Steiner as the R&D Center of the Anthroposophical Society, to denote the macro- as well as the meso-social form of the threefold social order. This unifying theory of social organics will now be further elaborated.
[1] Published
in the article “Freiheit und Gesellschaft“ (Freedom and Society) in Magazin
für Literatur 1898, Vol. 67, Nr. 29 and 30. Not translated. See The Mysteries of Social Encounters – The
Anthroposophical Impulse. In
this book, first published in German in 1984 by Dutch Prof. Dr. Dieter Brüll,
all four laws constituting this impulse, i.e. the Fundamental Sociological Law,
the Fundamental Social Law, the Archetypal Social Phenomenon and the Idea of
the Threefold Social Organism, were for the first time compiled and elaborated.
Not covered in this overview by the author’s own admission, however, is the
concept social organism and the new way of thinking and language that Rudolf
Steiner developed in his Course on World Economy in 1922 for henceforth
presenting the idea of the threefold organism nor is the meso-social form dealt
with that it took in the constitution of the newly founded Anthroposophical
Society during the so-called Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland in
1923/24. These missing elements were subsequently published in the publications
by Herbert Witzenmann mentioned in the Introduction. See also his book The Virtues – Seasons of the Soul, especially its preface “On the Origin of The
Virtues”, which is, even though it is nowhere mentioned as such by name, a masterly exposition of the archetypal
social phenomenon.
[2] See
Herbert Witzenmann, Das Recht auf
Individualtät – Weltpolitisische Ausblicke
(The Right To Individuality – Global Political Perspectives) an essay
from Verzweifelung und Zuversicht – Zur
sozialen un kulturellen Lage der Zeit (Despair and Trust – On the Social
and Cultural Situation of Out Times), Dornach 1982, not translated.
[3] This is
because human labor cannot be paid, it is as such not aware that can be bought
or sold; only the product made by labor has economic value and can be
remunerated. See http://wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/FuSoLa_index.html
[4] See http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0186/19181212p01.html
[5] See Brüll, D. The Mysteries of Social Encounters: The Anthroposophical Social Impulse. AWSNA Publications, Chatham, NY 12037, 2002
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