Social Threefolding is a social reform movement which aims to achieve constitutional reorganization of society by harmonizing its three realms of economy, polity and culture . It is based on the philosophy of Anthroposophy founded by Austrian Rudolph Steiner. It aims to reintegrate the human into economics and commerce through the proper interaction of the three elements of - Civil society, State and Market.

Three kinds of increased social seperation

Steiner sought three kinds of Social Separations which has become known as Social Threefolding.

Separation between the state and cultural life

Examples: A government should not be able to control culture; i.e., how people think, learn, or worship. A particular religion or ideology should not control the levers of the State. Steiner held that pluralism and freedom were the ideal for education and cultural life.

Separation between the economy and cultural life

Examples: The fact that churches, temples and mosques do not make the ability to enter and participate depend on the

Separation between the state and the economy (stakeholder economics)

Examples: A rich man should be prevented from buying politicians and laws.A politician shouldn’t be able to parlay his political position into riches earned by doing favors for businessmen. Slavery is unjust, because it takes something political, a person’s inalienable rights, and absorbs them into the economic process of buying and selling. Steiner also advocated more cooperatively organized forms of capitalism (what might today be called stakeholder capitalism) precisely because conventional shareholder capitalism tends to absorb the State and human rights into the economic process and transform them into mere commodities.

Education's relation to the state and the economy

Steiner’s view of education’s social position calls for special comment. For Steiner, separation of the cultural sphere from the political and economic

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

Steiner saw three examples of macrosocial imbalance:
1) Theocracy,
2) Communism/State Socialism,
3) Conventional Capitalism.

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,
• Equality in a democratic political life, and
• (Uncoerced) fraternity/sorority 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.

For example:-

• under theocracy, the cultural sphere (in the form of a religious impulse) fuses with and dominates the economic and political spheres.
• Under communism and state socialism, the political sphere fuses with and dominates the other two spheres.
• under the typical sort of capitalist conditions, the economic sphere tends to dominate the other two spheres.

Steiner points toward social conditions where domination by any one sphere is increasingly reduced, so that theocracy, communism, and the standard kind 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.

References

Apart from his central book on social questions, Toward Social Renewal, there are at least two others available in English: World Economy (14 lectures from 1922) and The Social Future (revised edition 1972).