GA 338 carries the title How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?, and it is not a public lecture cycle. It is a training course, twelve sessions in all, delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Stuttgart: two preparatory evenings at the start of January 1921, followed by ten numbered lectures given across 12 to 17 February 1921. The audience was small and had a deadline. These were members of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism who were about to travel into Upper Silesia and speak in public halls before the plebiscite that would decide whether that territory belonged to Germany or to Poland. The core subject is what happens between a social idea and the strangers who must hear it: how to speak, what to speak about, and what inner condition the speaker has to be in for the words to land at all.
Place in Steiner's Work
The threefolding years run roughly from 1919 to 1922, and they are the most publicly exposed stretch of Steiner's life. Towards Social Renewal appeared in 1919 and sold in numbers no other book of his reached. The first Waldorf school opened that same year in Stuttgart. An economic venture called The Coming Day was founded to test the ideas in actual businesses. Around all of this stood a movement, a federation, a newspaper, and a great deal of public speaking.
GA 338 sits at the practical end of that arc, and it sits there late. Steiner opens the course by admitting plainly that the movement had been designed to travel faster than it in fact travelled. The window was closing. What he offers in response is not fresh theory but craft: how a person who already understands threefolding can carry it into a hostile or indifferent room without deadening it. For that reason the volume occupies an unusual position in the collected works. Steiner rarely taught rhetoric. Here he does, and he treats speaking as a spiritual discipline rather than a technique, which makes the course readable long after the political occasion that produced it has passed.
The volume also functions as a bridge between the social writings and the later economics lectures. The theoretical apparatus of threefolding is assumed rather than built. What gets built instead is judgment: how to tell a real economic fact from a clever economic argument, how to reckon with historical causes that reach back two centuries, and how to speak about all of it to people who will vote next month.
Themes and Structure
The two January sessions set the ground. Steiner argues that the old style of political agitation is dying, that slogans dressed up as ideals no longer move anyone, and that a speaker who compromises with the existing habits of a party or a professional association has already lost. He then names the two soul forces without which nothing else works: love for the subject itself, and an informed love for the people being addressed. Ambition and vanity, he says, produce logically unimpeachable speeches that fail. The single line worth carrying away from the whole course is his statement that the speaker must learn
to speak out of a real love for the cause, and second, out of an insightful love for our fellow human beings.
The February lectures alternate between what Steiner calls formalities, meaning matters of delivery, and factual considerations, meaning the content itself.
The speaker's inner posture
Steiner warns against the memorised set piece. A speech given for the thirtieth time must still feel new to the one giving it, and he defends repetition by pointing to rhythm in nature and in religious practice: the body eats every day without boredom, prayers are repeated rather than replaced. The intellect wants everything once and then considers it possessed. Recovering rhythm is presented as part of the speaker's development, not a trick of preparation. He also insists on a sense of the historical moment, and on refusing to ignore organised opposition, which he considered better motivated and more energetic than the movement's own supporters.
Reality against theory
Several lectures test social theories against facts. Steiner takes apart the notion of surplus value by following it into absurdity: the bookkeeper in a village is judged unproductive and the cobbler productive, and by the same logic the teacher lives off deductions from other people's labour. He then makes the sharper point that in function and in nature, taxation does exactly what surplus value is accused of doing, and that socialist governments have not been notably militant against it. A second example returns repeatedly: the nineteenth century defence of the gold standard was genuinely intelligent, argued that free trade would follow, and was followed instead by protective tariffs everywhere. Cleverness, he concludes, is no help in economic judgment. Only reality refutes a theory, never logic.
Long causes and the shape of Europe
Steiner asks his speakers to think in centuries. Two treaties do the structural work in his account: the Peace of Nystad in 1721, which ended the Northern War and admitted Russia into the calculations of European spiritual, legal and economic life, and the Peace of Paris in 1763, which settled affairs between France, England and North America. Europeans, he argues, live daily on the consequences of both and have forgotten how to think about them, which is why contemporary political judgment keeps re-opening questions that were long ago decided.
East, middle and west
A characterology of civilisations runs through the middle lectures. Steiner describes an eastern tendency in which the head tyrannises the heart, which he calls barbarism, and a western tendency in which instinct tyrannises the head, which he calls savagery, applying the second term without softening to Anglo-American culture. He traces free spiritual life back to the old theocracies, notes that medieval universities grew directly out of church life and only later emancipated themselves, and argues that theological and legal faculties still carry the shape of their origin. The threefold division is presented as a description of an emancipation already underway rather than a scheme to be imposed.
Warnings and the associative principle
Two darker themes recur. Steiner claims that the conditions of modern civilisation systematically raise the unsuitable to the top, a selection of the unfit, and that the broad lower class after the war is no longer made up of the old proletariat alone but of members of every former class. He also states that western powers seeking to avert internal Bolshevism are working toward a second world war. Against this he sets the associative principle: since individual economic judgment reflects only individual need, it is structurally anti-social, and sound economic decisions can only arise where people from different branches pool what each of them knows. The late lectures work through the three factors of economic life, expertise in production, the circulation of goods through trade, and human labour, and note in passing that the medieval guilds, whatever they appeared to organise, functioned as protection for consumption.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Eight entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 338. Read together they form a fair map of the course.
- Surplus Value, and why Steiner treats taxation as its functional twin.
- The Prophesied Second World War, stated in February 1921 as a consequence of western policy toward the east.
- The Selection of the Unfit, the claim that modern institutions promote unsuitability by their own nature.
- The Treaties of Nystad and Paris, the 1721 and 1763 settlements Steiner treats as the hidden architecture of modern Europe.
- Barbarism and Savagery, his paired diagnosis of eastern and western one-sidedness.
- The Theocratic Origin of the State, on legal and political life emerging from religious authority.
- Guilds as Consumer Protection, a reading of the medieval trade guild that inverts the usual account.
- Love for the Cause and Love for Humanity, the two soul forces the whole course rests on.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, rsarchive.org, which hosts a complete English rendering of all twelve sessions alongside the German. For print editions and related titles from the threefolding period, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Readers coming to threefolding for the first time will do better starting with Towards Social Renewal and treating GA 338 as the working notes of someone already convinced.
Continue Your Study
- Follow the eight terms above into the wider Thalira glossary, where each entry links onward to the other volumes that use the same idea.
- Browse the GA Work Library for study guides to the other volumes of Steiner's collected works, including the social and economic lectures that surround this course.
- Take a structured route through the material with the Paths to Knowledge reading sequences, which set the social writings in relation to the spiritual-scientific foundations they assume.