Two modern impulses: democracy belongs to rights life, where all count equally; the social impulse belongs to economic life, which cannot vote.
Democracy and the Social Impulse in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's distinction between two drives pressing for realisation in modern humanity, each needing its own institutions. The democratic impulse holds that every person of age counts as the equal of every other, and Steiner places it in the rights member of the threefold social organism, where law is made by direct or representative agreement among equals. The social impulse asks that those who produce attend to the legitimate needs of their fellows, and by its own nature it cannot be realised democratically, because economic questions are settled by competence and by the language of real needs rather than by counting votes. Steiner set out the distinction in an essay on the German works councils, or Betriebsräte, collected in The Renewal of the Social Organism (GA 24), and proposed associations of producers and consumer cooperatives as the economic form.
Democracy and the social impulse name the two demands Steiner saw pulling at modern public life from opposite directions. One asks for equality of voice, the other for attentiveness to need. Steiner's claim is that they are not the same demand wearing two coats, and that forcing economic life to answer by ballot deforms it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Judging from the fruitless discussions now going on in many circles over the Works Councils [Betriebsräte], it is plain to see how very little understanding there is of the demands that the historical evolution of humanity has created for the present age and the near future. That democracy and a social form of life represent two impulses struggling to realize themselves within present-day human nature is an insight that has escaped entirely the vast majority of participants in such discussions. Both impulses will continue to cause unrest and destruction in public life until institutions are provided within which they can unfold themselves; but the social impulse that must live in the economic process cannot, because of its essential nature, manifest itself democratically. The aim of this social impulse is that people engaged in economic production should pay attention to the legitimate needs of their fellows.
What it Means Today
Elinor Ostrom spent three decades gathering evidence for what Steiner asserted in a single paragraph. In Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ostrom examined the huerta irrigation systems of Valencia, the zanjera associations of the Philippines, the alpine grazing commons of Törbel in Switzerland, and Japanese village forest commons. The durable ones were governed neither by state decree nor by market price. They ran on rules the users wrote themselves, monitoring the users carried out themselves, and, in the larger cases, the layered federation she named as her eighth design principle: nested enterprises. Ostrom took the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, the first woman to do so.
Her cases share one feature: the governing rules were never put to a general vote of the wider public. They were negotiated by the people who irrigate, graze, and cut, in agreements fitted to one valley rather than to a nation. That is Steiner's point about contracts growing out of real economic positions.
Thalira synthesis: Ostrom's commons and Steiner's associations hold together because the deciding body is drawn from those who bear the consequences of the decision, which is exactly the qualification a ballot is built to ignore.
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