The Social Archetype

We live in a time of multiple challenges to our rights and freedoms not only in authoritarian regimes but also in liberal democracies around the globe. As the storm clouds of crisis gather, Rudolf Steiners social vision now a century old offers a clear way forward. Radical in his time and still so today, Steiners social threefolding is not conceived as a logical system. Rather, his picture of society as a living threefold unity, as a social organism, is an artistic insight that needs to be grasped imaginatively. To understand its three dimensions the economic, the political-legal and cultural-spiritual spheres and how they relate to each other, is to experience them inwardly. This requires a living, creative thinking that is able to enter the archetypal forces behind the concepts: a modern-day, truly Goethean approach to the social sciences. In an illuminating study, Hoffmanns dynamic presentation enables us to develop precisely such an artisticimaginative understanding of the threefold social organism. He achieves this through clear descriptions of its principles and practical governance, whilst offering wise advice regarding the adaptation of education at school and tertiary levels for a threefold society.