The democratic middle sphere of Steiner's threefold social order, where every adult stands equal before the law and human relations are settled by right.
The Rights Life is the sphere of a healthy society in which people meet purely as equals and agree the rules that govern their dealings as person to person. Rudolf Steiner placed it between the free life of culture and the practical life of the economy. Its concern is neither knowledge nor goods but the equal standing of every adult, the consent that turns force into law.
The Definition
The Rights Life in Anthroposophy is the middle member of Rudolf Steiner's threefold social organism: the democratic sphere where adults meet as legal equals and settle, by agreement, the relations that belong neither to culture nor to production. Steiner set it out in the 1919 Dornach lectures gathered as The Social Question as a Question of Consciousness (GA 189), where he placed it between the free spiritual life and the economic life. Its governing principle is equality, for it concerns only what holds between people purely as people, regardless of talent or trade. Here labour law, working hours, contracts and the protection of persons are decided, lifting the worker-employer bond out of the market and into a relation of right. Today it underwrites the case for an autonomous democratic state, neither owned by capital nor administering schools and faith.
In Steiner's Own Words
The correct relation between contractor or employer and the worker cannot be brought about in the sphere of economic processes, but only in the sphere of the political State as a relation of rights. That is what it really comes to. If on the one side man stands on the ground of economic life, on the other side on the ground of an independent life of rights, then the economic life will be determined by the two sides; on the one hand by the life of rights, on the other hand it will depend on the natural independent factors of human activity.
What it Means Today
When Steiner spoke these words in Dornach in the spring of 1919, the practical campaign had already begun. That April he published Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in Stuttgart, and the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, the League for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, was founded the same month to carry the idea into Württemberg's factories. The rights life was the part that ordinary workers grasped first. Their grievance was never only about wages; it was the feeling, as Steiner put it, that bartering a man's labour for goods was beneath his dignity. The remedy he proposed was to take the worker-employer relation out of the marketplace, where one party simply held the stronger hand, and settle it instead in a forum where each counted for one.
That forum is the rights life, and its single rule is equality. A person's gifts belong to culture and a person's products belong to the economy, but the protection of the person belongs here, where talent and trade are set aside and only the human being remains. Read in this light, the rights life is an early and exacting case for the democratic state as a body owned by no class: it neither runs the schools nor manages the factories, but guards the floor of dignity beneath both, fixing the limits of the working day and the terms of every contract. A century on, the proposal still cuts against the grain of a politics that treats the state as either an arm of capital or the proprietor of culture. Steiner's answer was to give it one task only, and to make equality the whole of its law.
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