The rise and fall of trade, which Steiner refused to read as natural law: a crisis is made by identifiable human wills.
Economic Conjuncture and Crisis in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's treatment of boom and slump as products of human will rather than of natural necessity. In the lecture of 15 September 1920 in Stuttgart, printed in The Threefold Order of the Body Social, Study Series II (GA 337a), Steiner rejected the political economists' habit of reading a favourable conjuncture and the crisis that follows it as links in a chain of external cause and effect. He answered the theory with a case: the American combine that quietly cornered speculative stock, drew European banks into purchases for future delivery, then drove the price up until the European money market drained and the bank discount rose to 7 per cent in England and 8 per cent in Germany. The crisis of 1907 was made, and named individuals made it. Steiner's remedy was the Association, economic decisions taken by the people actually engaged in production, distribution, and consumption, a form still worked with in social banking today.
An economic conjuncture is the state of trade a person steps into when starting an undertaking, and a crisis is the break in that state. Steiner held that neither is weather. Both are the residue of decisions, made by people who can be named, dated, and held to account. Reading them otherwise, he said, teaches a person to stop looking at facts.
In Steiner's Own Words
The business undertakings in Europe were to a very wide extent under obligations to deliver stock of this kind; but now, in the meantime, during the period which had elapsed between the speculative purchase and the term of delivery, they had succeeded on the American side in screwing up the value of this stock enormously high; and the consequence was an extraordinary drain upon the European money-market; of which the result was this crisis: The crisis, that is, was created by a purely financial speculation brought about by a small number of definite individuals.
What it Means Today
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, established by the United States Congress in 2009 and chaired by Phil Angelides, delivered its final report on 27 January 2011 with a conclusion that reads like a gloss on this Stuttgart lecture: the crisis was avoidable, and it came about through human action and inaction, not through anything resembling a natural event. The commission named the firms, the executives, and the regulators who chose not to look closely. Where the political economists Steiner argued against would have read 2008 as the necessary consequence of the boom before it, the Commission did the thing he asked for, which is to establish who did what, and when.
The practical edge of this is the question of who decides. GLS Bank, founded in Bochum in 1974 by the lawyer Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff out of the anthroposophical social-banking impulse, publishes what it lends against, so a depositor can see which human decisions their money is underwriting. That is the associative principle in one working form: not a rule imposed on the money market from outside, but a market in which the wills at work are visible to the people carrying the risk.
Thalira synthesis: a crisis becomes readable at the moment you stop asking what caused it and start asking who was awake inside it, and Steiner's sharper warning is the one attached to that question, that the more predictable a population's economic behaviour becomes, the less of that waking there is left to find.
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