The representative gathering through which the Anthroposophical Society sought its renewal in 1923, meeting at Stuttgart in February and internationally at Dornach in July.
Assembly of Delegates in Anthroposophy is the representative gathering (German: Delegiertenversammlung) through which the Anthroposophical Society attempted to renew its own form during the crisis year of 1923, documented in the protocols of GA 259, The Fateful Year of 1923 in the History of the Anthroposophical Society. Two assemblies carried the year. At Stuttgart, from February 25 to 28, delegates from the German branches confronted the failures of the old central committee, and the meeting ended with the German membership dividing into the Anthroposophical Society in Germany and the Free Anthroposophical Society. At Dornach, from July 20 to 23, an international assembly of delegates resolved to rebuild the burned Goetheanum and prepared the ground for the Christmas Conference, asking that newly founded national societies send delegates who carry the will of the whole membership. The pattern survives today wherever federated bodies govern through mandated representatives.
The Assembly of Delegates stands at the hinge of Anthroposophical history. After fire destroyed the first Goetheanum on 31 December 1922, and after the Stuttgart leadership faltered, Rudolf Steiner asked the branches to send representatives who could speak and decide for the whole membership. What those delegates did in Stuttgart and Dornach across 1923 determined whether the Society would dissolve or find a new form.
In Steiner's Own Words
From February 25 to 28, a meeting of delegates will take place in that the individual branches and groups that consider themselves to belong together will send their delegates here, so that a kind of general assembly will take place. This will provide an opportunity to present all views on the development. Until now, we were faced with the alternative of doing it this way or allowing the Anthroposophical Society, as it was, to come to an end and founding something completely new. In 1918, it would have been easier to found something new; now we are faced with positive institutions with which we are committed to the world and from which we cannot get out, so everything must arise out of the Society. Society itself must be more freely formed within itself, and it must be impossible to feel constrained in it.
What it Means Today
The question the 1923 assemblies wrestled with, how a federation of free groups can act as one body without coercing anyone inside it, resurfaced a generation later in the Netherlands as a formal governance method. The Quaker educator Kees Boeke sketched consent-based self-rule in his 1945 essay Sociocracy: Democracy as It Might Be, and his former pupil Gerard Endenburg engineered the idea into working procedure in the 1970s at Endenburg Elektrotechniek, his family's electrical firm in Rotterdam, as the Sociocratic Circle Method. Endenburg's central device is the double link: every circle elects a delegate who sits with full voice in the next-higher circle, so authority descends by consent and information rises with a mandate. The resemblance to Dornach in July 1923 is close in spirit. The international assembly asked that newly founded national societies send delegates carrying the will of their whole membership, not messengers reciting fixed instructions, and the delegates who reconvened after the July meeting drew up twelve preparation points so that every branch could deliberate before Christmas.
Thalira synthesis: the Assembly of Delegates is representative conscience at work, the test of whether a movement can concentrate its scattered will into a few trusted persons without that will going dead in their hands. Anyone who has sat in a sociocratic circle election, naming aloud whom they trust and why, has touched the mood Steiner asked of the branches in February 1923.
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