Steiner's name for a transitional government whose proper work is to dissolve most of its own competence, releasing cultural life and economic life to administer themselves.
Liquidation Government in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a transitional state authority whose proper task is to wind down most of its own competence rather than extend it. Speaking in Stuttgart on 26 May 1919, in the closing words to a discussion later published as Freedom of Thought and Social Forces (GA 333), Steiner argued that the government of a threefold social organism should keep only initiative at the centre, supervision of the security service, hygiene and comparable duties. Everything beyond that it liquidates, in his phrase, on the left and on the right: spiritual and cultural life is released into independent self-administration, and economic life is set on its own feet. The German is Liquidationsregierung. It belongs to the rights sphere, the middle member of the threefold social organism, and it remains the sharpest practical test of whether Steiner's threefold idea is being applied or only admired.
Liquidation Government is the deliberately unflattering name Steiner gave to the only kind of state a threefold society can carry: one that shrinks. Where ordinary politics measures success by what a ministry gains, this one measures it by what it hands back. Its remaining work is small and specific, and its dignity lies in carrying out its own reduction honestly.
In Steiner's Own Words
One would like to ask: Has anyone already thought of this way, which makes it necessary for a kind of liquidation government to come into being? That is what is in fact very unusual for people, given their habits of thinking. The old governments, including the Socialist government, think of nothing but that they will be the beautiful, brave continuation of what the government used to be. What we need is for this government to keep only the initiative in the center, the supervision of the security service, hygiene and the like, and for it to become a liquidation government on the left and right: namely, by leaving intellectual life free, so that it passes into independent administration, and by putting economic life on its own feet.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern statement came from a tradition Steiner never joined. In the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931 and drafted in large part by the Jesuit economist Oswald von Nell-Breuning, paragraph 79 sets out what is now called subsidiarity: a larger and higher association commits an injustice when it takes over the functions that smaller and lower bodies are able to perform. Nell-Breuning was writing in Germany twelve years after Steiner spoke in Stuttgart, into the same wreckage of centralised wartime administration, and reaching a similar conclusion by a Thomist route rather than an Anthroposophical one. The principle travelled. It was written into European law by the Treaty on European Union signed at Maastricht on 7 February 1992, and it now stands in Article 5 of that treaty as a test any proposed Union action has to pass.
Thalira synthesis: subsidiarity tells a higher body what it should refrain from picking up, while Steiner's liquidation government makes the handing back of powers already held into the state's own defining act, which is the harder half and the one no treaty has yet asked of anybody.
The difference shows in practice. Subsidiarity is usually invoked defensively, by a region resisting a capital. Steiner put the initiative on the other side. He asked the government itself to name which functions belong to teachers, doctors and researchers as a self-administering cultural life, which belong to associations of producers and consumers, and which small residue is genuinely its own.
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