Rudolf Steiner / Maynard Keynes

Builders of a World Economy - with Christopher Houghton Budd, PhD. The aim of this workshop is to explore the possibility that today’s economic life is more autonomous than we think, and to see if the supposed gulf between current realities and what Rudolf Steiner had in mind is as wide as we sometimes believe.

At the end of the First World War, Rudolf Steiner described how the Anglo-American community would dominate social life for a hundred years through an economics seemingly devoid of spirit. But he also said the same people had the talents to do the opposite. Now we are nearing the end of that time, what is the situation? Steiner said this in the context of his conception of society as having three independent yet coordinated spheres, each with its own modality of governance – an idea strongly resisted then and ever since. And yet, the world economy is now dominated by the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, a fact that shows that the principle of economic self-governance, far from being strange, is the basis of modern economic life.

Except that the way these institutions are understood disguises the deeper possibility Steiner pointed to. On the other hand, prior to their birth in 1944 they were conceived by one of their main architects, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, as something other than they became. Not as instruments of foreign policy but as the organs of a world economy. In this sense, can Keynes be seen as giving practical expression to what Steiner hoped for?

Saturday 2 June 2012, 10.00am-5.30pm
Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Rd, London (near Baker Street Tube)