The volume catalogued as GA 329 in Rudolf Steiner's collected works carries the title The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization, published in German under the running subtitle Altes Denken und neues soziales Wollen, or old thinking and new social willing. It gathers nine public lectures given in Switzerland during 1919, in Bern, Basel and Winterthur, running from 11 March to 10 November of that year. The subject is the social question: what the industrial order had done to work, to law and to cultural life, and what a healthy alternative would have to look like. This page is a study guide to the volume. It is not the text itself, and it does not stand in for reading Steiner directly.
Place in Steiner's Work
1919 is the year Steiner turned outward. He had spent two decades building an esoteric school and a philosophy of knowledge, and in the months after the armistice he began speaking to audiences who had never heard of anthroposophy and had no reason to care about it. GA 329 belongs to the run of volumes the archive files under lectures on the social question, numbered roughly 328 through 341, and it sits alongside his book of the same year, Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, known in English as Towards Social Renewal. Those volumes together carry what became known as the threefold social order.
What distinguishes GA 329 within that group is the audience and the country. Germany and Austria in 1919 were countries where the old order had visibly collapsed. Switzerland had been spared the war, and the lectures were given to a public that had watched the catastrophe from outside it. Steiner presents the threefold idea to that public differently than he did to a defeated Germany: less as emergency repair, more as an argument about what had been structurally wrong for three or four centuries and was now merely becoming visible.
The timing also matters for a second reason. Several of the early lectures were given in Bern while the conference that produced the League of Nations was meeting in that same city, and Steiner refers to having sat in on some of it. The first lecture of the volume takes up the question of what a genuine league of peoples would actually require. His verdict on the speeches he heard there is unsparing: they addressed everything except the social question underneath the war.
The later lectures, from October and November 1919, turn toward the spiritual-scientific ground of the social question and toward spirit as a guide through the sensory and supersensible worlds. The volume therefore has an arc. It opens on the political and economic emergency and closes on the cognitive question of what kind of knowledge a person would need in order to think socially at all.
Themes and Structure
The nine lectures fall into three groups. The spring lectures of March and April 1919 address proletarian demands and their practical realisation, given in Bern, Winterthur and Basel. The autumn lectures of October take up the spiritual-scientific foundation of the social question and the conditions of culture. The two November lectures, given in Bern and Basel under the same title, treat the spirit as a guide through the world of the senses and beyond it.
Criticism has become a question of what to do
The organising claim of the spring lectures is that the workers' movement had reached a turning point. For decades it had functioned as a critique, and Steiner credits that critique generously: he describes the workers' assemblies, held in hours taken from exhausting days, as the place where the serious questions of human development were actually being thought about, while the educated classes sat in theatres. But criticism, he argues, has now been handed the initiative by history itself, and the question has changed from what is wrong to what must be done. Each of the three great Marxian theses is accordingly turned from a diagnosis into a task. The materialist conception of history becomes the question of how to reach a cultural life that satisfies people. The theory of surplus value becomes the question of how labour is freed from the character of a commodity. The theory of class struggle becomes the question of how such struggles are ended.
Labour is not a commodity
The most sustained argument in the Bern lecture of 17 March concerns wage labour. Steiner accepts the observation that the worker carries his labour power to market and has it priced by supply and demand like any other good. His objection is that this is a real arrangement which is nevertheless not a true one. Labour power cannot enter into price comparison with commodities, because it is not one, and an arrangement that treats it as one is a lie built into the structure of daily life. His proposed remedy is technical rather than rhetorical: replace the labour contract, which purchases work, with a contract governing the distribution of what employer and worker have jointly produced.
Law manufactured out of economic interest
Steiner then offers a historical case, drawn from the three decades he spent in Austria. When the Austrian Reichsrat was constituted, its members were elected in blocs defined by economic position: large landowners, cities and industrial towns, rural communities. Those blocs then made law. The result, he argues, was not law at all but economic interest wearing the form of law, and he treats the eventual fate of the Austrian state as the bill for it. The point generalises. Wherever economic life, legal life and cultural life have been fused into a single administration, each corrupts the others.
The three members and the ownership question
From this the constructive proposal follows. Economic life, legal life and cultural life should each have their own legislature and administration, independent of one another and cooperating precisely because none is subordinate to a common centre. Economic life would be governed by the conditions of production, circulation and consumption. Legal life would be governed by what all people can recognise as equally theirs. Cultural life, from the village school to the university, would answer only to its own capacities, which is Steiner's extension of the principle that religion is a private matter to every other branch of intellectual life.
Ownership is redefined to make this workable. Steiner's formulation is compact:
Possession is the exclusive right of disposal over a thing
If ownership is a right rather than a substance, it can be re-determined by the body that determines rights, and productive property can be passed on to whoever can best administer it rather than held permanently. The state supervises the right of property without becoming the owner. This is what allows Steiner to reject both private monopoly and state ownership, which is the move that separates his proposal from the socialisms of his moment.
An impulse rather than a programme
The closing pages of the March lecture contain an unusual disclaimer. Steiner states that what he has developed is not a programme and not a social theory, and that no individual could draw one up, for the same reason no individual invents a language. What he offers is an arrangement that puts people into a right relationship with one another, so that they can then determine the content themselves. This should be read as a methodological commitment rather than modesty, and it explains why the volume is thin on prescriptions and dense on structure.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Six entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 329. Together they cover the volume's main argumentative moves, from its diagnosis of false social arrangements to its redefinition of property.
- The Life-Lie: an arrangement that genuinely operates in social life while contradicting the nature of the thing it governs, real without being true. This is the logical form of the wage-labour argument.
- Spiritual Luxury: culture kept as an ornament by the classes the economy carries, and closed to the people whose labour pays for it.
- The Austrian Electoral Curiae: the estate-based voting blocs of Austria's Reichsrat, Steiner's clearest worked example of law manufactured out of economic interest.
- Ownership as Right of Disposal: possession understood not as a thing held but as an exclusive right, and therefore as something a legal order can re-determine.
- The Overcoming of Class Struggle: the shift from asking whether class struggle is necessary to asking how it is ended, by separating the three spheres.
- Impulse, Not Programme: Steiner's refusal to issue a social blueprint, and the reasoning behind that refusal.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts GA 329 in English translation alongside the German original, with the two shown in parallel. Use the archive's volume index to reach GA 329 and its table of contents. Note that the English rendering there is a recent translation prepared by the Steiner Online Library rather than a long-established published edition, so it is worth consulting the German alongside it where a passage turns on a single term.
For print editions and any English volumes covering the same 1919 social lectures, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Readers who want the argument in book form rather than lecture form should start with Towards Social Renewal, which Steiner wrote in the same year and which covers the threefold proposal systematically.
Continue Your Study
- Begin with the terms above if you want the argument in small pieces. Each glossary entry works as a short reading of one move in the volume, and each cites the passage it rests on.
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the social lectures connect to Steiner's epistemology and his account of the human being, which is where the phrase liberation of the human being in the title actually points.
- Read GA 329 next to Towards Social Renewal. The lectures show Steiner arguing the case in front of sceptical audiences; the book shows him building it. The differences between the two are instructive.
- If the Austrian material interests you, follow it into Steiner's autobiographical writing on his Vienna decades, which supplies the political background he compresses into a paragraph here.