Two eighteenth-century peace settlements, Nystad in 1721 and Paris in 1763, which Steiner treated as the buried foundations of modern European and American life.
The Treaties of Nystad and Paris in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's paired historical anchor for the modern social question, set out in the speakers' course published as GA 338, How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order? (Stuttgart, February 1921). The Peace of Nystad, signed in 1721 at the close of the Northern War, admitted Russia into the spiritual, legal and economic life of Europe, and with Russia an oriental soul-constitution that Steiner described as agrarian, image-based and indifferent to economic thinking. The Peace of Paris, signed in 1763, moved French territory to England and settled that North America would be Anglo-Saxon rather than Romance, steering the economic question westward into a life fed by colonial inexhaustibility. Steiner held that Europe went on building nineteenth-century arguments on a ground floor already laid by these two settlements, and so kept debating questions history had closed.
The Treaties of Nystad and Paris appear in Steiner's social lectures not as diplomacy but as fact. He asked the speakers he was training in Stuttgart to stop arguing from theory and to look at what 1721 and 1763 had already decided: a European border opened to an Asian soul-life in the east, and a western continent handed to an economy that fed itself endlessly from colonies.
In Steiner's Own Words
Since 1763, when France had to cede important territories to England and thus the decision was made that America would not be Romance in its north, but Anglo-Saxon, the economic-social question was steered into a very specific channel. In the eighteenth century, important decisions were already in place: in the east, the one of 1721 with the Peace of Nystad, and in the west, the one of 1763 with the Peace of Paris. These two important decisions, which are embedded in the entire intellectual and economic life of Europe, must be considered, because one cannot arrive at a judgment without considering them.
What it Means Today
Immanuel Wallerstein reached the same two hinges from the opposite direction. In The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s (Academic Press, 1989), he treats the incorporation of the Russian Empire into the European world-economy as an eighteenth-century process rather than a nineteenth-century one, and he reads the settlement of 1763 as the point where the long Anglo-French contest tipped decisively to Britain. Wallerstein worked this out at the Fernand Braudel Center, which he founded at Binghamton University in 1976, and his method was deliberately anti-national: read the world as one unit, not as a shelf of separate countries. Steiner is refusing that same national frame in 1921, telling his Stuttgart speakers that Swiss conditions cannot be thought about apart from the whole. Where the two accounts part company is in what they say was incorporated. Wallerstein tracks commodity chains, labour control and the relative strength of states. Steiner tracks a soul-constitution: an agrarian Russia that never had to think economically, an Anglo-Saxon America whose thinking he called instinct raised into the head.
Thalira synthesis: world-systems analysis gives the outside of these two events and Steiner gives the inside, and holding both is how a student of the threefold social organism can put a date on the moment spiritual life drifted east and economic life drifted west, leaving the rights life in the middle with little of its own.
Where to Read More
- How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?, GA 338
- Find the threefold social writings at SteinerBooks
- Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics by Manly P. Hall
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos