Steiner's 1919 name for modern society's unrest, which he read as a crisis of consciousness rather than a quarrel over wages alone.
The Social Question is Rudolf Steiner's term for the convulsion that ran through Europe after the First World War, when workers, owners and states could no longer agree on how community life should be ordered. He argued in his Zurich lectures of February 1919 that the trouble was not merely economic. It was a question of how awareness had failed to keep pace with industry.
The Social Question in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to the deep unrest of modern society, set out in his 1919 Zurich lectures published as The Social Question (GA 328). He held that the conflict was not chiefly about wages or ownership but about consciousness: industrial labour, technology and capitalism had reshaped community life while human awareness lagged behind, leaving the economic sphere developed and the cultural and rights spheres neglected. The question, for Steiner, asks how a society can be ordered so that economic, political and spiritual life each follow their own healthy law instead of one absorbing the others. He insisted no single class or party demand could answer it; only an objective reading of humanity's developmental forces could. Today the term marks the entry point into Steiner's threefold social thinking and his proposed renewal of post-war Europe.
In Steiner's Own Words
One can now express the characteristic feature that has led to the particular form of the social question in modern times by saying that economic life, supported by technology, and modern capitalism have acted with a certain natural self-evidence and brought modern society into a certain internal order. In addition to the human attention being focused on what technology and capitalism have brought, attention has been diverted from other branches, other areas of the social organism, which must be just as effective if the social organism is to be as healthy as the economic sphere.
What it Means Today
To grasp why Steiner spoke of a social question at all, picture the moment he was speaking into. By February 1919 the war was three months over, the German Kaiser had abdicated, soviet councils had risen in Munich and Budapest, and the choice on most lips was a stark one: Bolshevik revolution on the left, or armed reaction on the right. Steiner stood before his Zurich audience and refused both poles. The unrest, he said, could not be settled by handing the whole of life to the proletariat as in Russia, nor by restoring the old imperial order. It pointed instead to something structural that no party slogan named.
His own answer took shape that same spring. In April 1919 he issued the Appeal to the German People and to the Civilized World, signed by figures including Hermann Hesse, and launched a public movement from Stuttgart around his book The Key Points of the Social Question. The proposal was that economic life, the life of rights, and cultural life should each become self-governing rather than fused inside one centralized state. The movement found little political purchase, yet one seed of it grew: the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart that September, the practical fruit of freeing cultural life from state and economy. Read this way, the social question is less a problem to be solved once than a standing demand. Whenever finance swallows politics, or the state dictates schooling and art, Steiner's 1919 diagnosis still asks whether each sphere is following its own law.
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