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.1

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.