Steiner's name for capitalism's decisive deed: production, once bound to personal skill and honour, detached itself from the individual human being and became an impersonal, self-increasing process.
Definition
The Emancipation of the Economic Process from the Personal in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for what capitalism actually accomplished across the past three to four centuries: it detached economic production from the individual human being. In the Dornach lecture of 1 February 1919, printed in GA 188 (Goetheanism as an Impulse for Man's Transformation, 1919), Steiner contrasts the old craft economy, in which a locksmith took a point of honour in every key made by his own hands, with capitalistic industry, in which capital exists to increase itself and the worker never meets the finished product. Significant moral impulses once lived inside economic life itself; the emancipated process expelled them, and the moral-spiritual life drifted into abstraction, separated from the external realities of existence. Steiner treats this severance as the ground fact of the social question, the fact his threefold social organism answers, and writers on craftsmanship such as Matthew B. Crawford document its human cost today.
Every age before ours bound production to a person. Steiner called the break the emancipation of the economic process from the personal: once capital began to exist for its own increase, the skill, diligence, and honour that had lived inside work were pushed out of it. He asked his Dornach listeners in 1919 to see this severance, not machinery itself, as the true root of the social question.
In Steiner's Own Words
When the process of production or the industrial process grows in the course of the years through the accumulation of capital, when this industrial process grows and forms the incentive of accumulating capital, then the chief element in this economic process really becomes separated from the individual human being from every personal element. If we wish to understand the social question, we must bear in mind above all the following standpoint: that the economic process becomes emancipated from the personal element, from the individual human being.
What it Means Today
In 2009 Matthew B. Crawford, a University of Chicago trained philosopher who left a Washington think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop, published Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin Press). The book runs strangely parallel to the Dornach lecture delivered ninety years before it. Crawford describes how the assembly line, and later the scripted office job, stripped work of individual judgment, and how a mechanic diagnosing a failing clutch still meets his own competence face to face, the way Steiner's locksmith once met his key. What Crawford calls the mechanic's direct answerability to the thing itself is close kin to the personal element Steiner watched the economic process expel.
The two part company over the cure. Crawford points readers back toward the trades, a real but individual remedy. Steiner refused nostalgia: by 1919 he judged the emancipation irreversible and asked what a society must build once its economy has genuinely become impersonal. His answer was the threefold social organism, in which the moral forces expelled from production re-enter through a free spiritual life standing beside the economy rather than inside it. Thalira synthesis: the emancipation of the economic process is a threshold deed of the consciousness soul epoch; what capital pushed out of the workshop does not come back through the workshop, it returns through the free spiritual life, or the personality withers exactly as Steiner described.
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