Steiner's name for the one earth-wide economic body that has absorbed the old national economies into a single circulating process of goods.
World Economy is the term Rudolf Steiner gave, in his 1922 economics course of the same name, to the fact that the whole earth now forms one economic body. Trade, raw materials and finished goods cross every border, so the older picture of a country managing its own self-enclosed economy no longer matches what actually happens. Economics, Steiner held, must learn to read this single moving whole.
In Steiner's Own Words
The first concepts and ideas that we have to develop, particularly in the field of economics, will be somewhat complicated, and this is for a very practical reason. You must imagine that the economy, even if we consider it as a global economy, is in constant motion, that, I would say, just as blood flows through the human body, goods flow as commodities through the entire economic body in all possible ways. In this context, we must consider the most important things within this economic process to be those that take place between buying and selling. At least, that must apply to today's economy.
What it Means Today
The course where this idea is worked out, World Economy (GA 340), was given in fourteen lectures to a group of economics students and young practitioners at the Goetheanum in Dornach between 24 July and 6 August 1922. Its starting point is historical and concrete: somewhere in the long nineteenth century the separate national economies of Europe grew into each other until they formed one body that runs round the whole earth. A cotton price set in Liverpool, a harvest in Argentina and a tariff in Berlin now belong to the same process. For Steiner this was not a slogan but a working premise. He told his listeners that the science of economics had gone on reasoning as though a country were still a closed household, and that this is why its definitions of value, price and capital kept missing the mark. You cannot pin down a figure that is always in flux.
What he proposed instead has carried forward under the name associative economics. Rather than leaving the world process to blind competition or to a central plan, producers, traders and consumers form economic associations that observe the actual flow of goods and adjust toward a price each party can live on. Initiatives in this lineage, from the early Kommender Tag enterprise around the 1922 course to present-day associative-economics study groups and community-supported agriculture, all begin from the premise Steiner laid down: the economy is one earth-wide organism, and the task is to read its movement together rather than to fix it from outside. The world-economy is the field; the economic associations are how human judgement enters that field.
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