For Steiner, possession is not a thing you hold but the exclusive right of disposal over it, and a right can be re-determined.
Ownership as Right of Disposal in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's definition of possession for social life: not a thing held, but the exclusive right to dispose of a thing. He stated it in the second lecture of The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization (GA 329), given in Bern on 17 March 1919, during his threefold social campaign. The German is Verfügungsrecht, a right of disposal, and the whole argument turns on the word right. Because ownership of productive means, land above all, is a right rather than an object, it belongs to the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, where it can be re-determined and re-assigned to whoever has the ability to use it. Neither the abolition of property nor its transfer to the state follows. What changes is who holds the right, and on what grounds it continues to be held.
Ownership as right of disposal is the reason Steiner could argue for reforming property without abolishing it. If possession were a substance clinging to a person, only confiscation could move it. If possession is a right, then the same legal consciousness that granted the right can constitute it differently, passing the disposal of productive capital to whoever can actually carry it for the community.
In Steiner's Own Words
Possession in social life is not what these or those social economists so often dream of in a strange way; it can only be understood in this way for social life: Possession is the exclusive right of disposal over a thing; possession in the productive sense, in the sense of land, is a right. And this right can only be made into a right, instead of a privilege, which corresponds to the legal consciousness of all men, if the formation of judgement takes place on a ground where only the right is determined, if it becomes possible that that which has resulted as profit can be transferred through the rule of law into the disposal of the spiritual organization, so that the spiritual organization has to find the right individual abilities for that which is no longer used for production, that is, for human service, but becomes mere profit.
What it Means Today
Economics reached Steiner's distinction from the opposite direction, seventy-three years later. Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, spent a career dismantling the assumption that a resource must be either private property or state property. Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990) documented the huerta irrigation courts of Valencia, the alpine grazing commons of Törbel in the Swiss Valais, and Japanese village forest commons, all held for centuries under neither owner. In 1992 she and Edella Schlager published "Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis" in Land Economics, cutting ownership into five separable rights: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation. A fisher may hold the right to withdraw without the right to sell.
Thalira synthesis: what Ostrom established empirically in Törbel and Valencia, Steiner had already placed structurally, assigning the untying of that bundle to the rights sphere rather than the economic sphere, so that who may dispose is settled by legal consciousness and not by purchasing power. The practical consequence is where a reformer looks: if ownership is a substance, the argument is about seizing it; if ownership is a right, the argument is about how the right is constituted and when it lapses to the next capable holder.
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