Threefold Social Organism

What it Means Today

Steiner's threefolding (Soziale Dreigliederung) was first a practical answer to the wreckage of 1919. Defeated Germany was being asked to choose between Bolshevism and Wilsonian capitalism, and Steiner argued that neither side had perceived the problem. The slogan of 1789 was correct, he said, but its three terms had been pressed into one centralized state where they cancel each other. Liberty inside the rights sphere becomes license. Equality inside the cultural sphere becomes mediocrity. Fraternity inside the economic sphere is a slogan because nothing in the market structure asks anyone to think of anyone else.

The proposal was structural. Schools, universities, religious bodies, and the press belong to a cultural sphere that governs itself by free initiative. Law, courts, voting rights, and the protection of the person belong to a rights sphere where every adult counts equally. Production, distribution, and consumption belong to associative bodies where producers and consumers coordinate by mutual obligation. A century of social praxis has tested the model. The Stuttgart movement of 1919 to 1922 launched the first Waldorf school, the Threefold Educational Foundation in Spring Valley, New York, the Camphill villages, the GLS and Triodos ethical banks, and the contemporary commons-economics work of writers like Christian Felber and Marjorie Kelly. Each of these takes one sphere and tries to free it from the other two. The point of the threefold organism today is not to abolish the state but to stop asking the state to do every kind of work at once.