Social Threefolding - "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

Steiner held that the French Revolution's slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, expressed in an unconscious way the distinct needs of the three social spheres at the present time:

• Liberty in cultural life (education, science, art, religion, media),
• Equality in a democratic political life, and
• Uncoerced solidarity in economic life.

According to Steiner, these values, each one applied to its proper social realm, would tend to keep the cultural, economic and political realms from merging unjustly, and allow these realms and their respective values to check, balance and correct one another. The result would be a society-wide separation of powers. Steiner argued that increased autonomy for the three spheres would not eliminate their mutual influence, but would cause that influence to be exerted in a more healthy and legitimate manner, because the increased separation would prevent any one of the three spheres from dominating. In the past, according to Steiner, lack of autonomy had tended to make each sphere merge in a servile or domineering way with the others. Among the various kinds of macrosocial imbalance Steiner observed, there were three major types:

• Theocracy, in which the cultural sphere (in the form of a religious impulse) dominates the economic and political spheres.
• State Communism and state socialism, in which the state (political sphere) dominates the economic and cultural spheres.
• Traditional forms of capitalism, in which the economic sphere dominates the cultural and political spheres.

Steiner points toward social conditions where domination by any one sphere is increasingly reduced, so that theocracy, state socialism, and traditional forms of capitalism might all be gradually transcended.

For Steiner, threefolding was not a social recipe or blueprint. It could not be "implemented" like some utopian program in a day, a decade, or even a century. It was a complex open process that began thousands of years ago and that he thought was likely to continue for thousands more.