Rudolf Steiner and Democracy — Understanding His Relationship to the Democratic Impulse Through the Organizations He Helped Design

Rudolf Steiner’s relationship to democracy can be easily confusing. At times he seems to articulate a political vision akin to direct democracy (“the truly political element… must allow the judgment and feelings of every single responsible adult to come to expression”), while at other times he ridicules the modern faith in parliaments and rejects the basic tenets of Western-style democracy (“[Central European political development] should not be the imitation of Western European so-called democracy”). This research explores this confusion and how it can be resolved through a deeper analysis of his threefold sociology. 

Fundamental to this analysis is an understanding of the basic social laws he articulated, especially his “fundamental sociological law” (or “law of individualism”) and his “fundamental social law” (or “law of socialism”). These two laws demonstrate the inevitable tension between the individual and the collective, a balancing act that Steiner resolves by showing how individual freedom is the guiding star of cultural life, and how collective solidarity (meeting everyone’s needs) is the guiding star of economic life. When it then comes to political life, we find the collectivist (democratic) element has its rightful place in making laws concerning that which every adult citizen is equally fit to judge, and the individual element has its rightful place in refraining from making laws wherever individual expertise is required. 

The research then turns to the organizations that Steiner consulted. We see how every institution, because of its circumstances and purpose, balances these competing interests differently. In the “college of teachers” at the first Waldorf school, for instance, some decisions were made democratically while others were made according to mandates given to individuals. This was understood to be a balance between democracy and aristocracy — what Steiner referred to as a “republic.”