The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

There is, however, another element again, which enters into everything that is contributed towards the organisation of social life, whether by the economic life or by the “rights-consciousness.” This element comes from a third source: the personal abilities of the individual. This third domain includes everything from the loftiest achievements of the human mind to that element in all the works of men which comes from their bodily ability to render greater or less service to the body social. A healthy social organism must necessarily receive and assimilate whatever comes from this source in quite a different manner from what comes to it from the life of the State or that finds expression in the interchange of commodities. To absorb this element healthily into social life can only be done in one way, and that is, by leaving it entirely to men’s free receptivity and to the impulses which personal ability itself brings with it. What is performed at the promptings of personal ability, loses to a great extent the very groundwork of its existence, when subjected to artificial influences from the State organisation or from the economic system. For the only true groundwork of such performances lies in that inherent force that finds its evolution through human performance itself. If again the way in which such individual performances are taken up into the body social directly depends on the economic life,—or if the State organises it,—there is then a check upon that free spontaneous receptivity, which is the only sound and wholesome channel for their reception. For the spiritual life of the body social, there is but one possible line of healthy evolution;—and it must not be forgotten, by what innumerable fine threads this spiritual life is connected with the evolution of all other individual potentialities in human life. What it does, must be the outcome of its own impulses; and those who receive its services must be closely bound up with it in sympathy and understanding. Such, as here sketched, are the requisite conditions for a sound evolution of the spiritual life of the body social. What prevents them from being clearly perceived, is that people’s eyes are blurred through constantly seeing the spiritual life in great part fused and confounded with the political State system. The fusion has been taking place through several hundreds of years, and they have grown accustomed to it. They talk, it is true, about “freedom of knowledge” and “freedom of education”; but, all the same, they consider it a matter of course that the political State should have control of this “free” knowledge and “free” education. They do not see nor feel, how in this way the state is bringing all spiritual life into dependence on state requirements. The notion is, that the State provides the educational posts, and that the spiritual life then unfolds “freely” under the hands of the people who fill these State posts. Through long thinking in this way, people come to forget what an intimate connection there is between the inmost nature of man and the substance of the spiritual life growing up within him, and how impossible it is for the growth of this spiritual substance to be really free, if it owes its place in the body social to any other impulses than those alone which proceed from the spiritual life itself. Science, with all that part of spiritual life which it affects, has received its whole cast from the fact of its management forming part of the State system in recent centuries. And not only so, but this fusion with the State has set its stamp on the substance of science as well. Of course, the results of mathematics or physics cannot be directly influenced by the State. But consider history and other subjects of general culture:—Have not they come to reflect the connection of their professional representatives with the State system?—to be an obedient mirror of State requirements?

The peculiar stamp thus acquired by our present-day mental conceptions, in which the scientific turn of thought predominates over every other, is just what makes them a mere ideology as they affect the working-class. The workers have observed, how men’s thoughts acquire a certain character, arising out of the requirements of state life,—a State life that suits the interests of the ruling classes. It was a reflection of material interests, and of the war of interests, that the worker saw when he looked into his thoughts. Thus there arose in him a sense that all spiritual life whatever was ideology, a mirrored image of the economic order of affairs. Such a view of things works havoc with men’s spiritual life. But its blighting effects will cease, once it becomes possible for them to feel that in the spiritual domain there reigns a reality that transcends material outward life and bears its own substance within itself. No such sense of a spiritual reality can, however, possibly arise, unless the spiritual life is free within the body social to expand and govern itself according to the impulses inherent in it. Only those, who have their part in a spiritual life thus freely expanding and freely governed, can represent it with that strength and vigour which shall ensure it its due place within the body social. Such an independent position within human society is indispensable for art, science and a philosophy of life, with all that goes with these. The freedom of one cannot prosper without the freedom of all. Although in their substance mathematics and physics may not be influenced directly by State requirements, yet how they are applied, the estimate people form of their value, the effect their pursuit has upon the rest of spiritual life, all these and many other points are determined by State requirements, whenever some of the branches of spiritual life are under State control. It is one thing, when the teacher of the lowest grade in the school follows the line along which the State impells him; it is another, when he takes his line from a spiritual life that rests on its own independent footing. Here again, social democracy has done no more than take over a habit of thought and conventions inherited from the ruling classes. Social democracy sets before itself as an ideal the incorporation of spiritual life in a social structure based on a system of industrial economy. But, were its aim attained, it would be only a further step along the same road that has led to the present depreciation of spiritual life. It was a right feeling, but a one-sided one that found expression in the socialist maxim: “Religion is a man’s private affair”; for, in a healthy society, all spiritual life must in this sense be a private affair, so far as concerns the State and economic life. Only, social democracy does not relegate religion to the sphere of private affairs with any idea of thus establishing its status as spiritual wealth, and giving it a position within the social order where it may attain to a higher and more worthy development than under the State’s influence. No; it’s idea in so doing is, that the resources of the body social should only be used to cultivate what it needs for its own existence, and that the religious kind of spiritual wealth does not come under this head. This is not the way in which one branch of spiritual life can prosper, singled out as an exemption from public life, whilst all the rest remain in bondage. The religious life of mankind in this new age will go hand in hand with emancipated spiritual life in every form, and grow to a force able to bear up the souls of the men of the new age.

It is a matter for the soul’s own free demand, how the spiritual life is received into men, no less than how it comes forth from them. Teachers, artists and others will find, that they have an altogether different influence, and are able to awaken an understanding amongst the public for what they are creating, when they themselves have a place in the social order which has no direct connection with any legislature or government, but only with such as arise from impulses that lie in the course of the spiritual life itself; when too they are appealing to people, who are not simply under compulsion to labour, but for whom an autonomous and independent political State also ensures the right to leisure,—leisure which awakens the mind to an appreciation of spiritual values. Here one will very likely be told by someone, that his own “practical experience,”—of which he has a great opinion,—convinces him, that if this notion were carried out,—if the State made definite provision for leisure hours, and if school attendance were left to people’s own sense, it would simply mean that people would spend all their leisure in the public house and relapse into a state of brute ignorance. Well, let such “pessimists” wait and see what will happen when the world is no longer under their influence. Their line of action is all too often prescribed by a subtle feeling, a secret voice, that whispers in their ear, how they themselves like to spend their leisure hours, and the steps that were necessary to ensure themselves having a decent education. Of the free spiritual life, of its power to fire and kindle, when left to itself within the body social,—of this such persons naturally take no account. They know the spiritual life in bondage only, and so it has no power to kindle any spark within themselves.

Both the political State and the economic system will obtain from the body spiritual, when under its own self-administration, that steady inflow from the spiritual life, of which they are in need. Practical training too for economic life will for the first time fully develope its full possibilities, when the economic system and the body spiritual can co-operate in freedom. People will come with a suitable training into the economic field and will put life into all they meet with there, through the strength that comes from spiritual endowment set free from restraint. And people, who have won their experience in the economic field, will find their way into the spiritual organisation, and help to fertilise what there needs fertilising.

The effect within the political State of spiritual abilities being left free, will be the growth of sane and sound views, such as are needed in this field. The man who works with his hands will be able to feel contented with the place his own labour fills in the body social. He will come to realise that the body social cannot float him, unless his hand-work has the guidance requisite for its organisation. He will acquire a sense of the solidarity of his own labour with those organising forces which he can trace to the development of personal talent. The political State will afford him a ground on which he can establish the “rights” that secure to him his share in the proceeds of the commodities he produces; and he will freely allot to the spiritual property, from which he benefits, a portion sufficient to keep it productive. There will be a possibility for producers in the spiritual field, too, to live on the proceeds of their work. What anyone chooses to do in the matter of spiritual work, will be nobody’s affair but his own; but for any service he may render to the body social he will be able to count on willing recompense from people to whom spiritual goods are a necessity. Anyone, who is not satisfied with the recompense he receives under the spiritual organisation, must have recourse to one of the other fields, either to the political state, or to economic life.

Into the economic life pass those technical ideas which originate in the spiritual life. Their origin is in the spiritual life, even although they proceed directly from persons belonging to the State or to the economic world. In the spiritual life originate all those ideas and organising capacities that enrich the life of the State and of industrial economy. For everything thus supplied to both these fields of social life from the spiritual source, the recompense will either, as in the other cases, be raised through voluntary recognition on the part of those who directly draw from this source, or else it will be regulated by the “rights” that gradually become built up in the political sphere. What the political State itself needs for its own maintenance, will be raised by a system of taxation, which will be the outcome of a harmonious co-ordination of the claims of economic life, on the one hand, and those of the “rights-consciousness” on the other.

Alongside the political sphere and the economic sphere in a healthy society, there must be the spiritual sphere, functioning independently on its own footing. The whole trend of the evolutionary force of modern mankind is in the direction of this threefolding of the social organism. So long as the life of the community could be guided in all essentials by the instinctive forces at work in the mass of mankind, so long there was no urgent tendency towards this definite separation into three functions. At bottom, there were always these three distinct sources; but in a yet dim and dully conscious social life they worked together as one. Our modern age demands conscious co-operation on the part of man, and that he should take his place open-eyed in the workings of the body social. This new social consciousness must, however, be directed from three aspects, if it is to shape men’s life and conduct healthily. It is this threefold line of evolution towards which modern humanity is striving in the soul’s unconscious depths; and what finds outlet in the social movement is but the stormy light cast up from the fires below.

At the end of the eighteenth century, under different circumstances from those in which we are living to-day, there went up a cry from the hidden depths of human nature for a re-formation of human social relations. Through all the scheme of the new order ran like a motto the three words, Fraternity, Equality, Liberty. Of course, no one with an unprejudiced mind and normal human feeling for the realities of human evolution can fail to sympathise with all that these three words imply. But still, in the course of the nineteenth century there were keen thinkers who were at pains to point out the impossibility of realising the three ideas of brotherhood, equality and freedom in any homogeneous and uniform order of society. It seemed to them clear, that these three impulses must contradict one another in social life, if carried actually into practice. It was, for instance, very cleverly demonstrated, that if the impulse towards equality were realised there would be no possible room for that freedom which is so inherent in every human being. And whilst one cannot but agree with those who see the contradiction between them, yet at the same time, one’s human sympathies must go out to all and each of these three ideals in itself!

These three ideals appear contradictory, until one perceives the necessity for establishing a threefold order of society; and then their real meaning for social life first becomes apparent. The three divisions must not be artificially dovetailed together and centralised under some theoretical scheme of unity, parliamentary or other. They must be one living reality. Each of the three branches of the body social must centre in itself; and the unity of the whole will first come about through the workings of the three, side by side and in combination. For in actual life it is the apparent contradictories that make up a unity. Accordingly, one will come to comprehend what the life of the body social is, when one fully perceives the part played by these three principles of brotherhood, equality and freedom in a real, workable form of society. It will then be recognised, that men’s co-operation in economic life must rest on that brotherhood that springs out of the Associations. The second system is that of “common rights,” where one is dealing with purely human relations between one person and another; and here one must strive to realise the idea of equality. Whilst in the spiritual field, which stands comparatively alone within the body social, it is the idea of freedom that needs to be realised. Seen in this way, these three ideals reveal their value for real existence. Thy cannot find their realisation in a chaotic stream of social life, but only in the threefold working of a healthy social organism. No social state, constructed on an abstract centralised scheme, can carry freedom, equality and brotherhood pall mall into practice. But each of the three branches of the body social can derive its strength from one of these ideal impulses; and then all three branches will work fruitfully in conjunction.

Those people who, at the end of the eighteenth century, first demanded the recognition of these three ideas, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, and those who took up the cry again later on,—they had already a dim sense of whither the forces of human evolution were tending in modern times. But they had not got beyond belief in the onefold State. And in the onefold State these ideas involve a contradiction. They pinned their faith to the contradiction, because, deep-down in the sub-conscious depths of their souls, there was this striving towards the threefold order of society, in which their trinity of ideas can actually achieve a higher unity. To lay hold on those evolutionary forces, which through the growth of mankind all through these latter times, are working towards the threefold order,—to make of them a conscious social will and purpose,—this is what is demanded of us at the present day in unmistakeable language by the hard facts of the social situation.