Steiner and His Followers

I. The Anarchist

In 1898, Rudolf Steiner published an open letter in the Magazin für Litteratur to John Henry Mackay, the biographer of Max Stirner and advocate of individualist anarchism.

A year later, in 1899, Steiner married his longtime landlady Anna Eunike. His best man: John Henry Mackay.

This was neither coincidence nor footnote. During the 1890s, Steiner moved in circles of radical individualism. His Philosophy of Freedom of 1894 had so impressed Mackay that he sought contact. Both shared an admiration for Max Stirner, whose main work The Ego and Its Own (1844) had formulated the most radical individualism ever committed to paper.

Steiner himself wrote about this period: "What path would Nietzsche have taken if not Schopenhauer but Max Stirner had been his educator!" He called Stirner "the freest thinker that modern humanity has produced."

The friendship between Steiner and Mackay broke when Steiner turned to Theosophy. He experienced himself, as he later wrote, as being "dragged into a kind of abyss." The individualist anarchist became General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society.

II. The Philosopher of Freedom

Four years before his confession to anarchism, the 33-year-old Steiner had published his philosophical magnum opus: The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). In a letter to Rosa Mayreder, he described the book as a "radical this-worldly doctrine" and — here the crucial phrase — as "emancipation of higher human consciousness from all authority whatsoever".

The book was a manifesto of ethical individualism. Moral intuition: Every person must gain their ethical concepts through their own intuition. There are no predetermined moral rules that apply to everyone. Moral imagination: The free human being creates their actions from within themselves. And the key sentence: "The individual alone is authoritative."

The first edition of 1894 sold poorly — of 1,000 printed copies, only 400 had been sold by 1907. Historian Helmut Zander describes the Steiner of this period as an admirer of Nietzsche and Stirner with an atheist bent.

In 1918, a second, heavily revised edition appeared. Steiner had since transformed — from anarchist to founder of Anthroposophy. Historian Miriam Gebhardt points out that passages were removed from the second edition that showed Steiner as a radical individualist and atheist. The book was now reinterpreted as the foundation of Anthroposophy.

III. The Social Reformer

In 1917, in the midst of the World War, Steiner developed his third major concept: the Threefold Social Order. After individualist anarchism and the philosophy of freedom, now a blueprint for reorganizing society.

The most radical demand concerned capital. Steiner called for its transformation into trust property: Capital should neither be sold nor inherited, but only transferred to new owners through a kind of gift. This would remove it "from capitalist abuse through profit-seeking resale or stock speculation."

About wage labor, Steiner said it was a "realized impossibility with fatal social consequences." Labor could never be bought, never be paid for — a position not unfamiliar to Marx.

In 1919, the "Appeal to the German People and to the Civilized World" appeared in the major newspapers of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Over 250 personalities from culture and business signed. A year later, on March 13, 1920, "Der kommende Tag AG" (The Coming Day Inc.) was founded — a corporation "for the promotion of economic and spiritual values" based in Stuttgart. Rudolf Steiner: Chairman of the Board.

Anthroposophist entrepreneurs contributed their companies: weaving mills, flour mills, farms, agricultural machinery dealerships, a clinical-therapeutic institute. The first Waldorf school belonged to it, as did research institutes. It was the attempt to practically implement the Threefold Order.

In 1925, "Der kommende Tag AG" was liquidated. Inflation had plunged the company into crisis. Steiner himself had died the same year. What remained was Weleda AG — today a company with about 485 million euros in revenue (2025), three quarters of whose voting rights lie with the Anthroposophical Society and the Klinik Arlesheim.

IV. The Straitjacket

What have the followers made of this legacy?

The man who publicly confessed to individualist anarchism in 1898 became a guru whose words are sacrosanct. The Philosophy of Freedom, which demanded "emancipation from all authority whatsoever," became a dogma not to be questioned. The Waldorf schools, which arose from the impulse of a "free cultural life," follow a strictly prescribed curriculum according to Steiner's specifications.

The Waldorf movement presents itself as "holistic" and "alternative" — and is more dogmatic than many churches. Creativity is preached, but methods are prescribed. Freedom is invoked, but the framework is tight. The free cultural life that Steiner demanded became a system where deviation from pure doctrine counts as betrayal.

V. The Islands

And the Social Threefold Order? Steiner's most radical concept?

As a programme for society as a whole, it has vanished from public debate. There is an "Institute for Social Threefolding," a few advocates keep the flag flying, but there is no movement demanding the Threefold Order for everyone. Yet precisely the most radical demand, that capital should not be inheritable, has survived. Not in Sunday speeches, but in forms of ownership.

Where anthroposophists run companies, many have in fact taken capital out of inheritance.

The brothers Hermann and Ernst Mahle, inspired by Steiner's lectures on the social question, transferred 99.9 percent of their piston company to the non-profit Mahle Foundation in 1964; the voting rights lie with an association, not with heirs. WALA, the maker of Dr. Hauschka, has belonged to a foundation since 1986 and, in its own words, "cannot be bought, sold or inherited like a commodity." In 2010 Götz Werner transferred his half of dm to the non-profit dm-Werner-Stiftung; his seven children received no shares. GLS Bank, founded in 1974 by Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff as an anthroposophical initiative, is a cooperative. Waldorf schools are run by non-profit associations that may not distribute profits. Many Demeter farms belong to non-profit associations or land cooperatives such as BioBoden and Kulturland, which take the land off the speculative market and lease it to the farmers. And Germany's first community-supported agriculture, a community of producers and consumers of the kind Steiner described as an association, began in 1988 on a Demeter farm, the Buschberghof near Hamburg.

Even Weleda is no ordinary corporation. The General Anthroposophical Society and the Klinik Arlesheim together hold about three quarters of the voting rights. Registered shares pass to new owners only with the board's consent, and the board may refuse a buyer who is not a member of the Anthroposophical Society, expressly including cases of inheritance. Profits are still distributed: holders of participation certificates receive a small dividend. Weleda is a hybrid, not trust ownership in Steiner's sense, but not a company like any other either.

The criticism that remains is a different one. The islands have remained islands. Whoever places a company in a foundation has taken his own capital out of inheritance, but has not reshaped economic life. Foundation-owned companies compete in the same markets as everyone else, with the same prices, margins and advertising budgets. And a foundation is not free of what Steiner feared either: those who sit on its boards answer to no one but the statutes they themselves interpret. Capital is no longer inheritable, but power over it can still harden.

Anthroposophy was domesticated where the public sees it: Demeter apples, Weleda skin cream, Waldorf pedagogy, all very digestible and very bourgeois. The root race doctrine is discussed, the color theory studied, eurythmy cultivated. The demand for a restructuring of economic life has not been forgotten. It has been privatised: many anthroposophical entrepreneurs apply it to their own house. For society as a whole it is no longer relevant.

VI. The Philosophy of Freedom in a Straitjacket

Rudolf Steiner underwent a remarkable development in his life: from individualist anarchist to Theosophist, from atheist to founder of a spiritual movement, from philosopher of freedom to author of 350 volumes of Collected Works.

His followers have made a simple hagiography from this complex biography. The early Steiner — the friend of Mackay, the admirer of Stirner, the proclaimer of a "radical this-worldly doctrine" — is suppressed or reinterpreted. What remains is the late Steiner: the clairvoyant, the initiate, the master.

The Philosophy of Freedom is still read, but as an introduction to Anthroposophy, not as what it originally was: a manifesto of radical individualism. The Threefold Social Order is still cited, but as a historical curiosity, not as a program for transforming society.

The straitjacket into which the Philosophy of Freedom was forced is made of the same fabric as all religious orthodoxies: fear of freedom. It is easier to follow a master than to think for oneself. It is more comfortable to adopt a doctrine than to develop one's own intuitions. And it is easier to put one's own capital into a foundation than to stand up for a different economic order.

Steiner himself had written in 1898 that he "put very little stock in such designations" as "individualist anarchist." More important was "to express one's views clearly and positively in one's writings." His followers have reversed this: The designation "Anthroposophist" has become more important than the content. The label replaces thinking.

The individualist anarchist of 1898 would have had only one word for this development: betrayal.