The inner motive that carries a person into labour, distinct from the ability to work and never producible by economic administration alone.
The Will to Work in Anthroposophy is the motive force that actually carries a human being into productive labour, which Rudolf Steiner separates sharply from the ability to work. Ability is cultivated capacity; will is why anyone brings that capacity to the bench. Steiner sets out the distinction in The Renewal of the Social Organism (GA 24), in an article titled Ability for Work, Will to Work and the Threefold Social Order, written for the Stuttgart newspaper Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus during the threefold movement of 1919 to 1921. His argument is economic and precise: once the old incentive of personal profit is removed, no economic administration can generate the will to work out of itself, because an economy restricted to the circulation and management of goods has no organ for touching human motivation. In German the term is Arbeitswille, paired with Arbeitsfähigkeit, the ability to work. Steiner assigns the will to the rights sphere and the ability to the free spiritual life.
The will to work answers a question the socialist planners of 1919 had not asked: what moves a person to labour once profit is gone. Steiner treats it as a real force with its own source, not a byproduct of wage schedules, and he locates that source outside the economy entirely, in the life of rights and in a free spiritual life.
In Steiner’s Own Words
If the economic system is to be organized in a way that can have no effect on our will to work, then our will to work must be stimulated in some other way. The threefold social order recognizes that at the present stage of human evolution, the economic sphere must limit itself exclusively to economic processes. The administration of such an economic order will be able, through its various organs, to determine the extent of consumers’ needs, how the produce may best be brought to the consumers and the extent to which various articles should be produced. However, it will have no way of calling forth the will to produce; neither will it be in a position to cultivate the individual abilities that are the vital source of the entire economic process.
What it Means Today
Steiner’s claim that a body administering only the economy cannot arouse the will to work was tested, half a century later, in a psychology laboratory. Edward L. Deci ran experiments in the late 1960s in which students solved Soma puzzle cubes, half of them paid per solution. Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1971, the finding was that the paid group spent less free time with the puzzles once payment stopped. Deci and Richard M. Ryan built Self-Determination Theory on that result at the University of Rochester, setting it out in Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (Plenum Press, 1985); their 1999 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 128 experiments to confirm the undermining effect. The theory names three conditions under which motive arises from within: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Thalira synthesis: those three conditions do not sit together in one sphere of Steiner’s threefold picture, they distribute across it, with autonomy and competence belonging to the free spiritual life where ability is cultivated, and relatedness belonging to the rights sphere where adults meet as co-equals, which is precisely where GA 24 places the will to work. Deci and Ryan did not find a parallel to Steiner, they recovered part of his architecture from the opposite direction. The practical consequence is the one Steiner drew: pay fairly, then stop asking pay to supply the motive.
Where to Read More