The estate-based voting blocs of Austria's Reichsrat, elected by economic class, which Steiner used as his clearest case of law manufactured out of economic interest.
The Austrian Electoral Curiae in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's demonstration case for what happens when economic interest is permitted to write law. The curiae, in Steiner's German the Wirtschaftskurien and in constitutional usage the Kurienwahlrecht, were the estate-based voting blocs of the Austrian Reichsrat established under the February Patent of 1861: a curia of large landowners, a curia of chambers of commerce, a curia of markets, towns and industrial places, and a curia of rural communities. Each returned members whose seats existed to carry an economic interest into a legislature. Steiner, who spent his first three decades in Austria, described the result in his Bern lecture of 17 March 1919 (GA 329): rights and laws were produced as a straight transformation of economic interests, and he named that coupling of the economic curia with legal life a cancer eating away at the Austrian state. It is the negative proof standing behind his threefold social argument.
The Austrian Electoral Curiae were the voting blocs through which the Reichsrat was elected from 1861 until the franchise reform of 1907, each one an economic estate rather than a body of equal citizens. Steiner returns to them whenever he wants a concrete instance of a parliament legislating out of its own balance sheet, which is why they sit at the root of his case for separating rights-life from economic life.
In Steiner's Own Words
Why? Well, at that time an Austrian Imperial Council was founded. Initially, the purely economic curia, the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the markets, the cities and industrial towns, the curia of the rural communities were elected to this Austrian Imperial Council. They had to represent their economic interests in the state parliament. And they made rights, they made laws out of their economic life. Only rights that were a transformation of economic interests were created. With regard to the law, however, we are not dealing with the same thing that we are dealing with on the ground of economic life.
What it Means Today
Austria never dismantled the curia so much as relocate it, out of the ballot box and into the consultation file. The curial franchise ended with the universal male suffrage reform of 1907, yet organised economic interest was rebuilt as a permanent estate through the chambers: the Wirtschaftskammer Österreich, which every business must join, and the Arbeiterkammer, which every private-sector employee must join. Since 1957, when the Parity Commission for Wages and Prices was agreed between the federal government and the peak associations, those chambers have been standing partners in Austrian economic governance, and through the Begutachtungsverfahren, the formal review stage of Austrian law-making, they comment on draft bills as a matter of settled right. Defenders credit the arrangement with decades of low strike rates and steady wage bargaining.
Steiner would not have objected to the existence of such bodies. He wanted economic life organised by people who actually know production, circulation and consumption. His objection is to the short circuit: when the body representing an interest also shapes the rule that governs it, the question "what is right?" gets answered with the reasoning proper to "what sells?"
Thalira synthesis: the curia is not a nineteenth-century curiosity but a standing temptation of every legislature, and Steiner's remedy was never to silence economic interest, only to give it its own house so that rights-life could answer from its own source.
Where to Read More
- The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization, GA 329
- Find Steiner's social lectures at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo