Rudolf Steiner : Economist

by Rudolf Steiner, Christopher Budd

An anthology of writings by and about Rudolf Steiner qua economist that documents his search for a deeper understanding of modern economic life. This book throws light on many of the problems that face us today, problems that we cannot solve unless we take hold of the economic life in a conscious, human way and resist the temptation to defer to market forces alone.Though well-known as a seer, the idea of Rudolf Steiner as an economist may seem surprising. Seers do not usually have much concrete to say about economic life, beyond laments about its evils and injunctions that it be guided by some moral dimension. Rudolf Steiner, however, gave many lectures and wrote many articles about modern economic life, which he saw as the arena in which humanity has to find a new relationship to the spirituality that formerly came from above or outside -- from churches and external principles. Today the human being has to find morality within, which one cannot fully do unless one takes hold of the economic realm in a conscious, human way. Whether through concrete references to the meaning and working of money, or in attempting to give a fuller understanding of work or of the significance of market economics in our time, Steiner shows himself to be well versed in the subject. This publication presents a selection of his articles in a context of essays by Christopher Houghton Budd.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.