Christopher Houghton Budd

Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925) was born in Kraljevic, at that time in Austro-Hungary but now in Croatia. He regarded human experience as straddling two realities - the physical world and a universe of experience, ranging from worries to questions of destiny and the meaning of life, that physical knowledge alone cannot explain. Steiner saw the development of the scientific method as the means to comprehend this dual experience. In his view, the scientific method first arose in connection with humanity's preoccupation with the physical world - especially the time after the Enlightenment - an event closely connected with the rise of industrial society with its strong emphasis on individualism and production-based economics.

For Steiner, however, the scientific method is not peculiar to and should not be captured by humanity's fascination with the physical world. The discovery of truth through observation transcends our preoccupation with physical life. It is in some ways easier to achieve in the physical realm because the physical world provides immutable reference points, anchors, which enable us to orient our consciousness. But the scientific method can equally be applied without any loss of reality or scientificness to that part of human experience that is not physical.

This aspect of scientific enquiry can be variously described as 'spiritual science', a

'science of the invisible', or just precise thinking. The name is not as important as the reality to which it points - namely, that the scientific method enables the human being to understand the totality of his experience, not just the physical part of it and not by trying to explain all experience in terms of the physical paradigm alone.

Steiner is well-known for his contributions to the fields of agriculture, education and medicine, the outcome of many lectures and courses through which he sought to deepen humanity's understanding of life and thus to enrich and ennoble its practical conduct. Less known is the course of lectures on modern economic life that he gave in 1922, the content of which displays a profound conceptual and practical awareness of the subject. His aim was to show that economic phenomena - values, prices, money, inflation, etc. - are not physical. If they are to be understood scientifically, therefore, they need to be approached in terms of invisible or spiritual science, not by analogy to the physical sciences.

Because economic phenomena are non-physical they provide no clear bearings for our ordinary consciousness. Everything becomes relative and there is no clear starting point. This is especially true of finance and of the, now elapsed, use of the gold standard. For Steiner, therefore, the key was reciprocity; everything finding its meaning reflected in everything else. Thus economics cannot model itself on physical science but needs instead to be a theorem grounded in itself - an exercise, in fact, in persistently precise thinking.

This radical approach and the conceptual and practical conclusions it leads to account for Steiner's absence from the field of economics generally. His seminal and far-reaching contribution to the discipline has lost none of its relevance, however. Indeed, we now live in a time when economic life increasingly defies physical explanation. In this sense, associative economics seeks to give expression to the wider reality Steiner had in mind but in terms of current events - the better to understand them and thus to contribute to practical resolutions of the problems they entail.