Steiner's name for three coercive residues of history, priestly, political, and economic, that survive today in disguise and must be recognised before they can be outgrown.
The Three Compulsions in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for three compelling impulses left over from earlier stages of human evolution, out of which humanity has to work its way in the present. He named them in the lecture of 18 May 1919 in Stuttgart, given within the cycle published as the social basis for primary and secondary education and gathered in GA 192. The first and oldest is the compulsion of the priesthood; the second, arriving later in history, is political compulsion, the coercion exercised by the State; the third and most recent is economic compulsion. None of the three appears today under its own name. Each survives in a mask, lodged inside some contemporary fact, which is why Steiner asks the teacher above all to learn to read those masks. The practical work is recognition first, then the release of spiritual, legal, and economic life onto their own ground.
The Three Compulsions are not three institutions but three habits of coercion that outlived the ages which produced them. Steiner set them out for teachers rather than for political theorists, because he held that whoever forms children will either pass the compulsions on unexamined or teach the next generation to see through them. Recognition is the whole of the first step.
In Steiner's Own Words
And thirdly, coming comparatively late, there is the economic compulsion. Out of these three compelling impulses men have to work their way; this is their task for the immediate present. They can get free today only if, to begin with, they clearly perceive the masks which in various ways disguise what is living in our midst, the masks which conceal the three compelling impulses among us. Above all today the teacher must look to the level on which these things can be discussed, where, by means of the light gained from these things, we can illuminate contemporary evolution and thus become aware how one or other of these compulsions is lurking in some contemporary fact.
What it Means Today
Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society with Harper and Row in 1971, fifty-two years after the Stuttgart lecture, and reached the first compulsion by an entirely different road. Illich was a Roman Catholic priest who had founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación at Cuernavaca in Mexico, and he argued that compulsory schooling had become the established church of a secular age. It holds the monopoly on certification, it draws its authority from ritual rather than from evidence, and it teaches beneath every lesson that learning is something only credentialled officials can confer. That is Steiner's priestly compulsion described from inside the vestry, by a man who had worn the older robes and then recognised the newer ones.
Illich took the other two masks up in Tools for Conviviality (Harper and Row, 1973) under the heading of radical monopoly: the licensed profession that decides who may practise, and the industrial economy that manufactures the need it then sells back. Read beside the 1919 lecture, the two writers hand over a method rather than a grievance. Take any institution in front of you and ask which of the three claims it is quietly making: that it alone may interpret, that it alone may permit, or that it alone may supply.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner gave the compulsions to teachers first because a school is the one building where all three masks are worn at once, and the child cannot yet tell which face is speaking.
Where to Read More
- Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education, GA 192
- Find Education as a Force for Social Change at SteinerBooks
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