Leijenhorst, Cees (2005). Hanegraaff, Wouter J.; Faivre, Antoine; van den Broek, Roelof; Brach, Jean-Pierre (eds.). Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism: I. Brill. p. 1090. ISBN978-90-04-14187-2. Retrieved 2 January 2024. Steiner outlined his vision of a new political and social philosophy that avoids the two extremes of capitalism and socialism.
"Where the old conditions still exist, these can be taken as the basis from which to work towards the new separation of functions. Where the old order has already melted away or is in process of dissolution, individuals and small groups of people must find the initiative to start reconstructing along new lines of growth. To try in twenty-four hours to bring about a transformation in public life is recognized by thoughtful socialists themselves as midsummer madness. They look to gradual, opportune changes to bring about what they regard as social welfare." Threefold Social Order, Chapter 1
"To-day we should, after all, be learning to see, how at bottom nothing is to be accomplished except by treating things on a big scale, as I might say." (...) [S]o long as we cannot find a sufficient number of people with the courage at last to say, 'A new day will have to come, with new people! There must be a clean sweep of everything to do with these horrible old parties; something quite new must come to life!’ — Until we can do this, all discussion as to the most effective ways of [threefold] propaganda is so much talk for the cat! We are not living to-day in an age when anything whatever can be done by little measures. We are living in an age when it is an urgent necessity, a sufficiently large number of people, holding the same language and the same ideas (values), should be capable of throwing themselves actively into the thing (action), — not merely being 'quite enthusiastic' about it." The Threefold Order of the Body Social – Study Series II
"No circumstances of party, no schemes of party, have any share in what comes before the world today as the impulse for the Threefold Social Order. Nothing has any share in this impulse, save what can be acquired in the course of a life spent in learning to know the needs, the demands, the conditions and circumstances of all the many human beings living side by side in the various classes. When a practical way of life is then sketched out today on premises such as these, then one is told this practical way of life is a 'Utopia,' an 'ideology!'" The Threefold Order of the Body Social – Study Series I
"The most significant aspect of the rising forces of our more recent times is humanity can no longer remain stuck on mere instinctive will impulses. That's simply out of the nature of development it must prepare the form of the social structure out of a (deliberate) conscious will." "The Social Will as the Basis Towards a New, Scientific Procedure."
A few of many possible examples from Steiner's work:"...there is no reason why the free spirit in man should defer to any stereotyped pattern in the interest of the state; it [the free spirit] is not to be limited by the condition that only those shall receive education who can command economic resources," – from Lecture V of Steiner's, The Social Future. In the same lecture, he says, "everything relating to the spiritual and intellectual department of life should be detached from the political or equity state, and the spiritual organization should be independently administered in freedom." In his main work on social questions, Toward Social Renewal, Steiner repeatedly says society needs freedom for all the activities in the cultural sphere – education, science, art, religion – they must be independent of state and economic power. He argues that education, like other cultural activities, should no longer be administered by or under the authority of the State, and should be based on pedagogical freedom for teachers, as well as for the families who will choose freely among teachers and schools. With regard to independence from economic power, he writes, for example on page 92 of his main sociological work, Toward Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question, that all "children shall have the right to receive an education," i.e., not just those children whose parents happen to have sufficient economic power to afford decent schooling. In the same book, on pages 3–4, he writes that "education, from which all spiritual and cultural life emerges and develops, must be administered by the educators, without any interference from political or economic quarters." Toward Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press; 4th edition (April 2000), ISBN1-85584-072-3; ISBN978-1-85584-072-0.
Preparata, Guido Giacomo (Fall 2006). Perishable money in a threefold commonwealth: Rudolf Steiner and the social economics of an anarchist Utopia. Review of Radical Political Economics, 38(4):619–648. Reprint copy
