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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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World Economy
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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World Economy
On-line since: 13th November, 2000
All Rudolf Steiner's work in the sphere of practical human affairs is
founded upon knowledge of Man as a being of body, soul and spirit.
In The Threefold Commonwealth, his fundamental work in the
field of social life, published in 1919, Dr. Steiner shows that man
has a threefold relationship to the social order. He has the task of
developing his own soul and spirit, his individuality; he has the
right and the obligation to live in peace with his fellow-men; and he
needs certain material things for his bodily and spiritual life. The
true form of social order is, therefore, one which
orders aright these three relationships in social life.
The spiritual requires freedom for its full development; the
man-to-man relationships call for laws which embody simply what is
fair and just, and before which all members of the community have
equal rights and obligations; the economic life needs full scope for
individual ability together with the impulse of brotherly trust
working through an organisation of economic
associations. In such associations the practical experience of
all those persons engaged in the economic life could flow together
with a force capable of applying a practical Economic Science to the
new problems created by the transition (partial as yet) from national
economies to World-Economy.
In 1922, Dr. Steiner, in response to a
request from students of Economics, gave, in the fourteen lectures
contained in this book, advice for the formation of an Economic
Science which would enable mankind to master the complicated facts of
world-economics. In these lectures he shows that the economic process
is an organic one in constant movement and that it can be known in its
reality only by a method of thinking which immerses itself in the
phenomenon and creates living mobile pictures of all its changing
phases. The lectures themselves manifest a new way of economic
thinking and demonstrate the method by which the economic life can be
mastered by the human spirit in association. It is, the author says,
the task of the economic scientist to make this contribution to
the healing of our civilisation and to the reconstruction of our human
life.
Because the subject is dealt with in this fundamental
way, no previous knowledge of Economics is necessary for an
understanding. What is needed on the part of the reader is the
goodwill to apply an activity of thinking free from pre-conception and
bias. The method of presentation allows the reader to think for
himself and stimulates him to do so. The diagrams, which have had to
be printed in their completed form, were, in fact, built up in the
course of the lecture, and the student who actually does this for
himself in the course of his reading will gain a fuller understanding
of them.
Economic problems are but a part of the social problem of how
people can live together in such harmonious relationships that each
may have scope for the exercise of individual capacities while uniting
with others to satisfy the spiritual and bodily needs of the whole
community. Dr. Steiner, therefore, so treats the problems of Economics
that what belongs to the economic and what to the legal and spiritual
members of the threefold social organism is clearly seen.
The advice for the solving of social problems which the author gives in these
lectures, and in his other social works, takes the form of general
ideas which can be acted upon in freedom under changing conditions of
time and space. Readers who experience from these works a moral
stimulus to their social aims may wish to seek in his Philosophy of
Spiritual Activity enlightenment upon the way in which general
ideas can be translated into free human deeds.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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