Steiner's name for the condition in which a state stops serving the human beings who compose it and begins treating its own existence as the purpose.
The state as an end in itself is what Steiner called the habit of regarding government as its own reason for existing. He set it against the plain fact that the state exists for the sake of human beings. The symptom is never a single policy: it is the steady swelling of state competence into education, spiritual life, and economic judgement, each expansion paid for out of the individual.
In Steiner's Own Words
The exhaustion of the impulses that had kept together the nexus of the state was shown by the fact that in recent times many people have come almost as a matter of course to regard the state as an end in itself, and to forget that the state exists for the sake of human beings. To regard the state as an end in itself is possible only when one has so much lost the ability to assert one's inner, human individuality that one no longer expects from the state the kind of institutions this self-assertion would demand. Then one is indeed obliged to look for the essence of the state in all sorts of institutions that are quite contrary to its proper task. One will become determined to put more into the institutions of the state than is needed for the self-assertion of the human beings who compose it.
What it Means Today
Michael Oakeshott set the same fork at the centre of On Human Conduct (Clarendon Press, 1975), written half a century after Steiner's article and out of an entirely different lineage. Oakeshott separated two readings of political association. In societas, or civil association, people are joined only by the authority of common rules, and those rules prescribe conditions of conduct rather than a shared destination. In universitas, or enterprise association, people are joined in the pursuit of one substantive purpose, and government becomes the manager of that purpose. Oakeshott read the modern European state as an unresolved tension between the two, with the enterprise reading gaining ground every time a government took on a mission: national efficiency, moral improvement, economic planning.
Steiner arrived at the same fork by another road, and answered it structurally rather than descriptively. His threefold order hands the enterprise ambitions to the two neighbouring members, cultural life and economic life, leaving the rights life the one task it can actually perform, the standing of each person as equal to every other. Thalira synthesis: Oakeshott shows the enterprise state as a category confusion, while Steiner shows it as a compensation, the outer institution taking up weight that inner self-assertion has set down. Read together they yield a working test for any proposed state competence: ask whether it answers a right that every person holds equally, or a purpose that some people happen to hold strongly.
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