The problems presented by social life for solution in our times can be
understood by nobody who approaches them with the thought of any kind
of utopia in his mind. One's views and sentiments may lead one to the
belief, that certain institutions, which one has mapped out according
to one's own ideas, must be for the happiness of mankind. This belief
may carry all the force of passionate conviction; and yet one may be
talking quite wide of the actual social question, when one tries to
obtain practical recognition for what one believes.
One will find this assertion hold true at the present day, even when
pushed to what may appear an absurd extreme. Suppose, for instance,
somebody possessed a perfect theoretical solution of the social
question, he might nevertheless be acting on an utterly unpractical
conviction, if he tried to press this carefully thought-out solution
upon mankind. For we are no longer living in an age, when one is
justified in believing that public life can be affected in such a
way. Men's souls are differently constituted; and they could never
say about public affairs: Here is somebody who understands the social
institutions that are needed; we will take his opinion and act on
it. Ideas concerning social life simply cannot be brought home to
people after this fashion; and it is a fact that is fully recognised
in this book, which is already known to a fairly large public. Those
who have set it down as utopian, have totally missed its whole aim
and intention. Especially has this been the case with those, who
themselves cling to a utopian form of thought:--they attribute to the
other person what is essentially their own mental characteristic. A
practical thinker to-day recognises as one of the experiences of
public life, that nothing can be done with an utopian idea, however
convincing it may be in appearance. Nevertheless, many people have
some idea of this type, which they feel impelled to bring before their
fellow-men, especially in the field of economics. They will be forced
to recognise that their words are wasted. Their fellow-men can find
no use for what they have to offer.
This should be treated as a piece of practical experience; for it
points to a fact of importance in public life: namely, the remoteness
of people's thoughts from real life:--how wide their thoughts are
from what reality,--economic reality for instance,--demands.
Can one hope to master the tangled intricacies of public affairs, if
one brings to them a mode of thought altogether remote from life? This
question is not one likely to find general favour; for it involves
the admission that one's way of thought is remote from life. Yet,
until this admission is made, it is not possible to approach the
other question--the social one. For the remoteness of thought from
life is a question of grave concern for the whole modern civilised
world; and only when people treat it as such will they see light as
to what is needed for social life.
This question brings us to the consideration of the form taken by
modern spiritual life. Modern man has evolved a spiritual life,
which is to a very great degree dependent on state institutions
and on economic forces. The human being is brought whilst still a
child under the education and instruction of the state; and he can
be educated only in the way permitted by the industrial and economic
conditions of the environment from which he springs.
It might easily be supposed, that this would ensure a person's
being well qualified for the conditions of life at the present day,
for that the state must possess every opportunity of arranging the
whole system of education and instruction (which constitutes the
essential part of public spiritual life) in the best interests of
the human community. It might well be supposed too, that the way
to make a person the best possible member of the human community is
to educate him in accordance with the economic opportunities of the
environment from which he comes, and then pass him on, thus educated,
to fill one of the openings that these opportunities afford him.--It
devolves upon this book,--an unpopular task to-day,--to shew, that
the chaotic condition of our public life, comes from the spiritual
life's dependence on the State and on industrial economy--and to
shew further, that one part of the burning social question is the
emancipation of spiritual life from this dependence.
This involves attacking very widespread errors. That the State should
take over the whole system of education, has long been regarded as
a beneficial step in human progress; and persons of a socialistic
turn of mind find it difficult to conceive of anything else, than
that society should educate the individual to its service according
to its own standards.
People are loathe to recognise, what nevertheless, in this field,
it is absolutely necessary should be recognised; namely, that in the
process of man's historic evolution a thing, that at an earlier period
was all right, may at a later period become all wrong. In order that
a new age might come about in human affairs, it was necessary that
the whole system of education, and with it public spiritual life,
should be removed from those circles that had exclusive possession
of it all through the middle ages, and entrusted to the State. But to
continue to maintain this state of things, is a grave social mistake.
This is what the first part of the book is intended to shew. The
spiritual life has matured to freedom within the framework of the
state; but it cannot rightly enjoy and exercise this freedom unless
it is granted complete self-government. The whole character assumed
by the spiritual life requires that it should form a completely
independent branch of the body social. The educational and teaching
system, lying as it does at the root of all spiritual life, must
be put under the management of those people who are educating and
teaching; and none of the influences at work in state or industry
should have any say or interference in this management. No teacher
should spend more time on teaching than will allow of his also being
a manager in his own sphere of activity. And in the way that he
himself conducts the teaching and education, so too he will conduct
the management. Nobody will issue instructions, who is not at the same
time actively engaged in teaching and educating. No parliament has any
voice in it,--nor any individual, who once on a time may have taught,
but is no longer personally teaching. The experience learnt at first
hand in actual teaching passes direct into the management.--In such
a system, practical knowledge and efficiency must, of course, tell
in the very highest possible degree.
It may no doubt be objected, that even under such a selfgoverning
spiritual life things will not be quite perfect. But then, in real
life, that is not to be looked for. All one can aim at, is the best
that is possible. With each child of man there are new abilities
growing up, and these will really be passed on into the life of
the community, when the care of developing them rests entirely with
people who can judge and decide on spiritual grounds alone. How far
a particular child should be brought on in one direction or another,
can only be judged in a spiritual community that is quite free and
detached. What steps should be taken to ensure their decision having
its "rights," this too is a matter only to be determined by a free
spiritual community. From such a community the State and the economic
life can receive the forces they need, and which they cannot get of
themselves when they fashion spiritual life from their own points
of view.
It follows from the whole tenor of the following pages, that the
directors of the free spiritual life will have charge also of the
arrangements and course of teaching in those institutes also, which
are specially directed to the service of the State or of the economic
world.--Law-schools, Trades-schools, Agricultural and Industrial
Colleges, would all take their form from the free spiritual life. Many
prejudices are bound to be aroused, when the principles stated in this
book are pursued to these, their right consequences. But from what
do such prejudices proceed? The anti-social spirit in them becomes
evident, when one recognises, that at bottom they proceed from an
unconscious persuasion, that people connected with education must
necessarily be unpractical persons, remote from life,--not the sort of
people whom one could for a moment expect to institute arrangements
that would be of any real use for the practical departments of life,
and that all such arrangements must be instituted by the people
actively engaged in practical life, whilst the educators must work
on the lines laid down for them.
In thinking like this, people do not see, that the educators need
to fix their lines of work themselves, from the smallest things up
to the biggest, that it is when they cannot do so that they grow
unpractical and remote from life. And then you may give them any
principle to work on, laid down by apparently the most practical
persons, and yet their education will not turn out people really
practically equipped for life. Our anti-social conditions are brought
about, because people are turned out into social life not educated
to feel socially. People with social feelings can only come from
a mode of education that is directed and carried on by persons who
themselves feel socially. The social question will never be touched,
until the education question and the question of the spiritual life
are treated as a vital part of it. An anti-social spirit is created
not merely by economic institutions, but through the attitude of the
human beings within these institutions being an anti-social one. And
it is anti-social, to have the young brought up and taught by persons,
who themselves are made strangers to real life by having their lines of
work and the substance of their work laid down for them from outside.
The State establishes law-schools. And it requires, that the substance
of the jurisprudence taught in these law-schools should be the same
as the State has fixed for its own constitution and administration,
from its own points of view. When the law-schools proceed wholly
from a free spiritual life, this free spiritual life itself will
supply the substance of the jurisprudence taught in them. The State
will wait to take its mandate from the spiritual life. It will be
fertilised by the reception of living ideas, such as can issue only
from a spiritual life that is free.
But the human-beings, growing up to life, are within the spiritual
domain, and will go forth with views of their own to put into
practice. The education given by people who are strangers to life,
inside educational institutes planned by mere practicians,--this is
not an education that can be realised in practice. The only teaching
that can find practical realisation comes from teachers who understand
life and its practice from a point of view of their own. In this book
an attempt is made to give at least a sketch of the way in which a
free spiritual organisation will shape its details of working.
In Utopian minds, the book will rouse all manner of questions. Artists
and other spiritual workers will anxiously ask whether genius will
find itself better off in the free spiritual life than in the one
at present provided by the State and the economic powers? In putting
such questions, however, they must please to remember, that the book
is in no respect intended to be Utopian. Hence it never lays down a
hard and fast theory. This must be so and so, or so and so.
Its aim is to promote the formation of such forms of human social life,
as, from their joint working shall lead to desirable conditions. And
anyone, who judges life from experience, and not from theoretic
prejudice, will say to himself "When there is a free spiritual
community, whose dealings with life are guided by its own lights,
then anyone who is creating out of his own free genius will have a
prospect of his creations being duly appreciated."
The "social question" is not a thing that has cropped up at this
particular point in the life of man, which can be solved straight
away by a handful of people, or by parliaments, and, once solved,
will remain solved. It is an integral part of our new civilised life;
and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved afresh for each
moment of the world's historic evolution. For man's life has entered
with this new age upon a phase, when what starts by being a social
institution turns ever and again into something anti-social, which
has each time continually to be overcome afresh. Just as an organic
body, when it has once been fed and satisfied, passes after a while
into a state of hunger again, so the body social passes from one
state of order again into disorder. There is no more a panacea for
keeping social conditions in good order, than there is a food that
will satisfy the body for ever and always. Men can however enter into
forms of community, which, through their joint action in actual life,
will bring man's existence constantly back into the social path. And
one of these forms of community is the self-governing spiritual branch
of the body social.
All the experiences of the present time make it plain, that what is
socially needed is, for the spiritual life free self-administration,
and for the economic life associative labour. Industrial economy
in modern human life is made up of the production of commodities,
circulation of commodities and consumption of commodities. These
are the processes for satisfying human wants; and human beings and
their activities are involved in these processes. Each has his own
part-interest in them; each must take such a share in them as he is
able. What any individual actually needs, only he himself alone can
know and feel. As to what he himself should perform, this will be
judged by him according to his measure of insight into the mutual life
of the whole. It was not always so; nor is it so to-day all the world
over; but in the main it is so amongst the at present civilised portion
of the Earth's inhabitants. Economic evolution has kept widening
its circles in the course of mankind's evolution. Household economy,
once self-contained, has developed into town economy, and this again
into State economy. To-day we stand before world economy. No doubt,
in the New much still lingers on of the Old; and much that existed in
the Old was already a forecast of the New but the above evolutionary
order is the one that has become paramount in certain relations of
life, and the destinies of mankind are conditioned by it.
It is altogether a wrong-headed notion to aim at organising the
economic forces into an abstract world-community. Private economic
organisations have, in the course of evolution, become to a very
great extent merged in State economic organisations. But the State
communities were created by other forces than the purely economic
ones; and the endeavour to transform the State communities into
economic communities is just what has brought about the social
chaos of these latter times. Economic life is struggling to take
the form its own peculiar forces give it, independent of State
institutions, and independent also of State lines of thought. It
is only possible through the growth of Associations, having their
rise in purely economic considerations, and drawn jointly from
circles of consumers, traders and producers. The actual conditions
of life will of themselves regulate the size and scope of these
Associations. Over-small Associations would prove too expensive in
the working; over-large ones would get beyond economic grasp. The
needs of life as they arise will shew each Association the best way
of establishing interconnections with the others. There need be no
fear, that anyone, who has to spend his life moving about from place
to place, will be in any way hampered by Associations of this kind. He
will find removing from one group to another quite easy, when it is not
managed by the State-organisations, but by the economic interests. One
can conceive possible arrangements within such an associative system,
that would work with the facility of a money-currency.
Within any single Association, where there is practical sense
and technical knowledge, a very general harmony of interests can
prevail. The production, circulation and consumption of goods will
not be regulated by laws, but by the persons themselves, from their
own direct insight and interests. People's own active share in the
life of the Associations will enable them to acquire the necessary
insight; and the fact, that the various interests are obliged to
contract a mutual balance, will ensure the goods circulating at their
proper relative values. This sort of agreed combination, determined
by economic considerations, is not the same as the form of combination
that exists in the modern trades-unions. The activities of the modern
trades-unions are expended in the economic field; but the unions are
not framed primarily according to economic considerations. They are
modelled on the principles taken from practical familiarity in modern
times with political considerations, considerations of state. They
are parliamentary bodies, where people debate, not where they come
together to consider economic aspects and agree on the services
to be reciprocally rendered. In these Associations, it will not be
"wage-workers" sitting, using their power to get the highest possible
wages out of the work-employer; it will be hand-workers, co-operating
with the spiritual workers, who direct production, and with those
interested in consuming the product, to effect a balance between one
form of service and another, through an adjustment of prices. This
is not a thing that can be done by general debate in parliamentary
assemblies. One must beware of these. For who would ever be at work,
if an endless number of people had to spend their time negotiating
about the work! Everything will take place by agreement between man
and man, between one Association and another, whilst the work goes
on alongside. For this, all that is necessary is, that the joint
agreement should be in accordance with the inside knowledge of the
workers and with the interests of the consumers.
In saying this, one depicts no Utopia. No particular way is laid down
in which this or that matter must be settled. All that is done, is
to point out how people will settle matters for themselves, when once
they set about working in forms of community which are in accordance
with their special insight and interests.
There are two things that operate to bring men together into
communities of this kind: The one, is human nature,--for it is nature
that gives men wants. Or, again, a free spiritual life, for this
engenders the insight that finds scope in communal life. Anyone,
who bases his thoughts on reality, will admit, that Associative
communities of this kind can spring up at any time, that there is
nothing utopian about them. There is nothing to hinder their springing
up, except that the thought of "organisation" has been so suggested
into the man of the present day, that he is obsessed with the notion
of organising industrial and economic life from outside. In direct
contrast to such organising of men for the combined work of production,
is this other kind of economic organisation, that rests on voluntary,
free Association. Through this mutual Association, one man establishes
ties with another; and the orderly scheme of the whole is the resultant
of what each individual finds reasonable for himself.
It may of course be said: What is the use of a man, who has no
property, Associating himself with a man, who has? It might seem
better for all production and consumption to be regulated "fairly"
from outside. But such organising kind of regulation checks the flow
of free individual creative power, through which economic life is fed,
and cuts the economic life off from what this source alone can give
it. Putting aside any pre-conclusions, just make the experiment of an
Association between those, who to-day have no property, and those who
have; and, if no forces other than economic ones intervene, it will be
found that the "Haves" are obliged to render the "Have-nots" service
for service. The common talk about such things to-day does not proceed
from those instincts of life, that experience teaches, but from certain
attitudes of mind, that have arisen out of class or other interests,
not out of economic ones. Such attitudes of mind had a chance to grow
up, because, in these latter times, just when economic life especially
was becoming more and more complicated, the purely economic ideas were
unable to keep pace with it. The cramped and fettered spiritual life
has acted as a drag. The people, who are carrying on economic life,
are fast caught in life's routine; they are unable to see the forces
that are at work shaping the world's industrial economy. They work
on, without any insight into the totality of human life. But, in the
Associations, one person will learn from another what it is necessary
that he should know. A collective experience of economic possibilities
will arise from the combined judgment of individuals, who each have
insight and experience in their own particular departments.
Whilst, then, in the free spiritual life the only forces at work
are those inherent to the spiritual life itself, so in an economic
system modelled on associative lines, the only values that count will
be those economic values that grow up under the Associations. The
particular part that any individual has to play in economic life will
become clear to him from actual life and work along with his economic
associates. And the weight that he carries in the general economic
system will be exactly proportionate to the service he renders within
it. There will be those who are unfitted to render service; and how
these find their place in the general economy of the body social is
discussed in the course of the book. In an economic system, that is
shaped by economic forces alone, it is possible for the weak to find
shelter against the strong.
Thus the body social falls apart into two independent branches,
which are able to afford each other mutual support owing to the very
fact, that each has its own special method of working, shaped by the
forces inherent to itself. But between these two must come a third,
whose life lies betwixt both. This is the true "state" branch of the
body social. Here all those things find a place that must depend upon
the judgment and sentiments of every person who is of age to have
a voice. Within the free spiritual life, everyone busies himself
according to his special abilities. Within the economic life, each
fills the place that falls to him through his connection with the
rest of the associative network. Within the political state-life of
"rights," each comes into his own as a human being, and stands on his
simple human value, in so far as this is apart from the abilities
which he exercises within the free spiritual life, and independent
too of whatever value that the associative economic system may set
upon the goods he produces.
Hours of labour and modes of labour are shewn in this book to
be matters for the political "Rights-life," for the state. Here,
every man meets his fellow on an equal footing, because, here, all
transactions and all control are confined to those fields of life
in which all men alike are competent to form an opinion. It is the
branch of the body social where men's rights and duties are adjusted.
The unity of the whole body social will spring from the separate,
free expansion of its three functions. In the course of the book
it is shewn, what form the energies of capital and of the means of
production, as well as the use of land, may take under the joint action
of these three functions of the social organism. To someone, who is
bent on "solving" the social question by a device of economics, by some
economic scheme that has come up or been thought out on paper,--to
him this book will seem unpractical. But anyone, who is trying from
life's experience to promote forms of combination amongst men, in which
they may be able to see, what the social problems, and duties are,
and how best to fulfil them,--he may perhaps admit, that the writer
of this book is endeavouring after a genuine working-practice of life.
The book was first published in April, 1919. Since then, I have
published a series of articles, explanatory and supplementary to it,
which have now appeared as a separate volume. [2]
It may be thought, that in both books a great deal is said about the
paths that should be pursued in social life, and very little about the
"ultimate ends" of the social movement. Anyone, who thinks along the
lines of life, knows, that, as a matter of fact, particular ends may
present themselves in various forms. It is only those who live in
abstract thoughts, who see things in single outline, and who often
find fault with the person in practical life for not putting them
definitely, "clearly" enough. There are many such abstractionists to be
found amongst people who pride themselves on their practicality. They
do not reflect, that life can assume the most manifold forms. It
is a flowing tide; and if one would travel with it, one must adapt
oneself even in thought and feeling to the flux that is its constant
feature. Thought of this kind alone can seize and keep its hold on
social problems.
It is from the observation of life that the ideas in this book have
been won; it is from the observation of life that they ask to be
understood.