Mervyn Hyde has written a thoughtful review of Free, Equal and Mutual: Rebalancing Society for the Common Good for the AHPB newsletter of Self & Society, the international journal for humanistic psychology.
… Free, Equal and Mutual offers a great insight into the failings of a capitalist society, how neo-liberalism has permeated into every level and how Rudolf Steiner’s forward thinking could offer a more balanced world for everyone. What I feel he could not have envisaged was how important the state actually is, as witnessed by the bailing out of the banking and financial sector. What he also could never have foreseen is the way in which money now enters the economy, and completely changes the dynamic of how society pays its way. We no longer have to sit around waiting for entrepreneurs or wealthy capitalists to create industries, utilizing our talents to make even more money for them; but the state can itself create those self-same industries for the benefit of people.
People are the wealth creators anyway; it is just that most people do not understand that. Our government does not have to raise taxation in order to spend into the economy, which was not how it was in Rudolf Steiner’s day when our currency was on the Gold Standard …
Mervyn Hyde
Download the whole review here (PDF).
Free, Equal and Mutual: Rebalancing Society for the Common Good
Martin Large and Steve Briault, editors
A centenary anthology that draws on Rudolf Steiner’s vision for a free, equal and mutual society, a threefold commonwealth. Twenty cutting edge articles by 13 contributors show how the social threefold social order offers practical alternatives to the prevailing neo-liberal social order.
