Past and Future Impulses in Society gathers the twelve lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered at Dornach between 21 March and 14 April 1919, published in the collected edition as Volume 190 (German: Vergangenheits- und Zukunftsimpulse im sozialen Geschehen). Spoken in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, these are working lectures given to members, not a finished treatise. Their governing subject is the social question read spiritually: Steiner argues that the upheavals of the age are the outward face of an inward event, the passage of humanity as a whole across the threshold into supersensible experience during what he calls the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 190 belongs to the intense social period of early 1919, the same weeks in which Steiner was preparing his book The Key Points of the Social Question (GA 23) and beginning to speak publicly about the threefold social organism. He names that forthcoming book in the final lecture, which fixes the volume firmly at the birth of his social-threefolding initiative. What sets these Dornach lectures apart from the public campaign is their frankly esoteric register. Where the public writings argue for a practical separation of cultural, political, and economic life, GA 190 supplies the spiritual reasoning behind that separation, drawing on the anthroposophy of the threefold human being (thinking, feeling, willing) and on the imagery of the Guardian of the Threshold familiar to readers of How to Know Higher Worlds.
The historical moment matters. Europe in the spring of 1919 was raw with defeat, revolution, and hunger; the old imperial order had collapsed and competing programmes for a new society were everywhere. Steiner spoke into that vacuum, and he did so as someone convinced that neither the inherited conservatism of the leading classes nor the doctrinaire socialism of the workers' movement reached the real question. Both, in his view, mistook an outer arrangement for an inner necessity. These lectures are his attempt to show members of the Anthroposophical Society why the crisis could not be solved by economics alone, and why a spiritual reading of history was not a retreat from practical life but the precondition for acting wisely within it.
The volume therefore sits at a hinge in Steiner's biography. It carries forward the meditative and initiatory concerns of his earlier esoteric teaching while turning them toward history, economics, and the shape of communal life. It also connects backward to his lectures on the nature of the human being and forward to the pedagogical and practical work that followed, since the first Waldorf school opened later that same year out of the same impulse. Anyone tracing how his spiritual science became a social science, and how the threefold human being became the model for a threefold society, will find the connecting tissue here.
Themes and Structure
The lectures fall into four movements, given under distinct headings but forming a single argument. The opening three lectures, grouped as Past and Future Impulses in Society, examine why modern people have grown so antisocial in their inner life that the very cry for socialization arises as a countercurrent from the subconscious. Steiner treats the antisocial and social forces as a rhythmic pair, each necessary, neither to be moralized away.
A second pair, presented under The Social Question as a Problem of Soul Life, turns to the inner experience of language. Steiner traces how speech has become abstract, how living in words has replaced living in reality, and how this loss quietly hollows out religious and cultural life until it too becomes materialistic. In the same breath he makes a striking claim about the young: that children born after 1912 arrive carrying a reluctance toward the inherited materialistic culture, a melancholy visible in their faces, and that this incoming disposition has itself helped drive the upheavals of the age. The single lecture Art as a Bridge Between the Sensible and the Supersensible then proposes that pictorial, imaginative culture once united people across every rank, from the highest noble to the poorest of the poor, because everyone could stand before the same images. As culture shifted from the picture to the printed word, an educated upper stratum split away from a proletarian one, and this soul-duality, Steiner argues, laid the ground for the social chasm more than any purely economic cause. A renewal of artistic, imaginative perception therefore belongs to any genuine answer to the social question.
The closing six lectures, The Spiritual Background of the Social Question, carry the central image of the volume. Steiner describes how the individual who enters the supersensible world must pass the Guardian of the Threshold, and how, in doing so, the ordinarily unified soul life separates into an independent thinking, feeling, and willing. On this side of the threshold these three activities are interwoven; beyond it they loosen and stand apart. He then makes the decisive move that gives the volume its name: what the individual undergoes consciously, all of humanity is now undergoing collectively behind the scenes of history, during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The crossing happens whether or not it reaches anyone's awareness. People can refuse spiritual knowledge and pass over the threshold in the dark, or they can meet it consciously, but they cannot avoid it.
From this Steiner derives the social conclusion. Because the community can no longer hold its soul life together as a simple unity, the outer social order must provide three supporting members that answer to the now-independent powers of the soul: a free spiritual and cultural life corresponding to thinking, a rights life resting on equality corresponding to feeling and the relations between person and person, and an associative economic life corresponding to willing. The threefold social organism, in this reading, is not a policy preference but the external scaffolding an age of soul-separation requires. Steiner warns sharply against the Ahrimanic confusion that fuses these members together, for instance the welding of socialism and democracy into a single social-democracy that quietly drops the individual, spiritual element altogether. Only knowledge drawn from spiritual science, he insists, lets a person read the signs of the times and cross the threshold with awareness rather than be dragged across it blind.
Read as a whole, the twelve lectures move from diagnosis to prescription without ever leaving their spiritual ground. The antisocial impulses of the opening, the decay of language and art in the middle, and the crossing of the threshold at the close are not separate topics but one continuous argument about a humanity whose inner constitution is changing and whose institutions have not yet caught up.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira Quantum Codex glossary draws on GA 190 for the following entry, which unfolds its ideas in depth and cites this volume as a primary source:
If you are approaching GA 190 for the first time, that entry is a useful doorway, since the crossing of the threshold is the spine on which the whole lecture cycle hangs.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English renderings of the individual Dornach lectures translated across several editions. For print copies and current scholarly editions, search the publisher catalogue through SteinerBooks. Because the twelve lectures reached English through more than one translator over many decades, wording varies between sources; reading two renderings side by side often sharpens a difficult passage.
Continue Your Study
To go further, follow these threads through the Codex:
- Begin with the linked entry above, then use its related terms to move outward into Steiner's picture of the threefold human being.
- Browse the full Thalira glossary for the wider vocabulary of anthroposophy, from the Guardian of the Threshold to the post-Atlantean epochs.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place GA 190 beside the neighbouring 1919 volumes and the social-threefolding writings that grew from them.