Social Life: Threefolding & Economics

Steiner's method of running economic life through associations where producers, traders and consumers meet to set fair prices by agreement rather than by the market.

The economic sphere where, because labour is divided, each person works for the wants of others rather than their own.

The sphere of Steiner's social order that produces and circulates goods to meet need, governed by fraternity rather than by profit.

Steiner's view that capital is not the enemy of labour but labour raised by human spirit, a value-pole to be guided by ability rather than abolished.

Steiner's term for the false sale of human labour-power as a market good, which his threefold order seeks to end.

Steiner's principle that land cannot be bought and sold like goods, because what passes in a land sale is a right of use, never the soil itself.

Steiner's reading of the 1789 slogan: liberty belongs to cultural life, equality to the rights-state, fraternity to the economy, one ideal per sphere.

The universal medium of exchange that, for Steiner, the economic body should administer on its own basis rather than the state stamping its value.

In Steiner's threefold social order, the self-governing sphere of education, art, science and religion, where individual capacity is freed to develop on its own terms.

Steiner's name for the constant movement of goods through the economic body, where labour first lifts a natural product into the flow and value comes alive.

Steiner's demand that culture, the schools, sciences and religion, run its own affairs, released from state command and economic interest.

Steiner's true price: the maker gets, in exchange, enough to cover all needs until a like product can be made again.

Capital, for Steiner, is human ability piled up in the means of production, neither enemy nor master, but a working power that must be guided by competence.

The democratic middle sphere of Steiner's threefold social order, where every adult stands equal before the law and human relations are settled by right.

The rights-state is Steiner's name for the political sphere stripped to one task: securing equality before the law among all adults, owning neither culture nor economy.

Steiner's name for a social order grown from spiritual insight, not class war, set out in his six Zurich lectures of 1919.

Steiner's view of society as a living body, not a machine, whose three members each follow their own law as the head, lungs and limbs do.

Steiner's 1919 name for modern society's unrest, which he read as a crisis of consciousness rather than a quarrel over wages alone.

Steiner's plan for a society organised in three independent members: a free cultural life, a democratic rights-life, and an associative economic life.

Steiner's name for the one earth-wide economic body that has absorbed the old national economies into a single circulating process of goods.