Anthroposophy and Ecofascism 108

Continuing my commentary on the 33rd paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.

That the Munich communists denounced Steiner is hardly surprising; communism has an extraordinarily fractious history and denouncing each other and the world at large is something of an art form in those circles. Steiner was certainly no communist, and openly hostile to the Bolsheviks, so the fact that he earned their distain is to be expected.

For Staudenmaier, it is pity that the basic facts ruin the otherwise smooth flow of polemic. It is a nice picture to imagine a cabal of industrialists huddling around Steiner while the proletariat spit on the group of them. Steiner's idea of the Threefold Social Order was taken very seriously in the broader society for a short time. Working-class audiences by the thousands turned out to hear him speak, and his book was reviewed in a generally favorable light as far away as the Times of London and the New York Times. But that popularity faded under the attack of right-wing groups, and Steiner died five years later, in 1925. His Threefold Social Order became a historical curiosity.