The first time that the idea of the threefold social organism in this form was presented in public by Rudolf Steiner was on November 14, 1917 in Zürich, but it was on February 1919 with his Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World, the subsequent founding of the Bond for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart on March 21 with a weekly journal and his publication The Threefold Social Order in April that the movement, propelled by a list of engaged speakers schooled by Rudolf Steiner, took off the ground. Literature about all these events is available in English (also online), so we can be brief about them.
Theoretically, the threefold idea of
the social organism was brought in connection with the three ideals of the
French revolution, i.e. freedom in
the cultural sphere, equality in the
political or rights sphere of the state and brotherhood
in the economic sphere.
Furthermore, a functional comparison
was made with the threefold physical
organism of the human being that Rudolf Steiner had already put forward in his
book Riddles of the Soul[1]
in 1917, in which the groundwork for the solution of the body-soul-and- mind or
spirit was laid. For the economic life, which is the basis for the production
of goods, can be functionally compared to the nervous-sense system of the human
organism centered in the human head, which is the basis of thinking
(representing). This is so because just as wares, goods are the result of
active human labor applied to nature which is a given, so are representations
or mental pictures the result of a concept through an act of thinking applied to
a percept which is also a given. Thus the process by which economic goods are
produced in the external world is similar to the process by which
representations are formed in the inner world of human consciousness. The
spiritual or cultural life, on the other hand, can be functionally compared to
the metabolic and limb system of the human organism, which is the basis of the
will, because just as a human being will normally become sick and eventually die
without being regularly fed with the necessary nutrients, so the social
organism will eventually wither away and be ruined without being constantly fed
practical ideas to insure its survival.
This is a corollary to the
afore-mentioned Fundamental Social Law, for if a state or any large group a
people working and living together do not receive such strong life-supporting
ideas raised to ideals to hold them together and give them viable perspectives
for the future, then by necessity the need will arise for a strong, powerful
personality or dictator to hold the state together at the expense of civil
liberties, if the state is not to disintegrate into political unrest, strife
and eventually total chaos.
And just as the political sphere of
rights ideally has the function of regulating and harmonizing the whole life of society, so
the circulatory and breathing system of the heart and lungs, which is the basis
for feeling, has the function of
regulating and harmonizing the vital processes of the human organism.
And moreover, just as a healthy
human organism consists of a proper interrelationship between its three
subsystem, and if not due to an unhealthy life-style and bad surroundings etc.
sickness will result, so a peaceful,
harmonious society can only come about when it is generally recognized that the three subsystems must to this end be brought
into the proper relationships to each other and that their improper
relationship is the root cause for unrest, strife and eventually war.
Alas, even though some success was
booked at the beginning, this recognition was not forthcoming and the
resistance to it from a variety of groups revolutionary communists, national-socialists,
social democrats and conservative capitalists, was too great – even including an
attempted attack on Rudolf Steiners life – and so at the beginning of 1922 the
Threefolding movement was disbanded and the title of its organ changed to Journal For Free Spiritual Life. Also
most economic associations based on the threefold idea were not able, due
especially to the horrific inflation, to survive and went bankrupt.
Now, most if not all books and
websites on the history of this movement end at this point in time. However,
this overlooks the fact that in the summer of 1922 Rudolf Steiner developed a
new way of thinking and speaking for the presentation of the idea at hand.
[1] Only
partially translated as Anthroposophy and
Anthropology and The Case for
Anthroposophy. See http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA021
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