Toward a Threefold Society

Basic Issues of the Social Question

This book was first published in Germany in 1919, immediately after the First World War. It recommends that Germany, still suffering the “calamity” of the war, organize itself in a Threefold Society with autonomous economic, political and cultural systems. He wrote at the end of the book:

• "One can anticipate the experts who object to the complexity of these suggestions and find it uncomfortable even to think about three systems cooperating with each other, because they wish to know nothing of the real requirements of life and would structure everything according to the comfortable requirements of their own thinking. This must become clear to them: either people will accommodate their thinking to the requirements of reality, or they will have learned nothing from the calamity and will cause innumerable new ones to occur in the future."
  

The “calamity” referred to is the First World War, and since that time history has shown these words to be prophetic. Rudolf Steiner’s suggestions were ignored in Europe at that time, and the calamities have been occurring “innumerably” ever since. The “social question” has not been resolved, nor have the steps been taken which are necessary to initiate the healing process. Is it not now time to reconsider them for the world in a new age?