IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

For more than a century, humanity has been guided by a threefold motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. Who could close their mind to the powerful impulsiveness of these three ideals? Nevertheless, very clever people of the nineteenth century, they have rightly, I say expressly rightly, pointed out the contradictions between these three great human ideals and said: If one is to develop the freedom of individuality, if the individualities are really to come into their own alongside each other, how is equality to prevail? Or again: How is fraternity to come into its own alongside equality, alongside the expansion of pure right? Well, you see, there is a capital, fundamental contradiction here. Why? Because these three great ideals of humanity, liberty, equality and fraternity, were still being formulated at a time when people were hypnotized by the idea of the unitary state, that unitary state which has actually led us into today's catastrophe. But something right, something lofty, something powerful was felt in these three impulses, and this can only be realized when it is known that each of these three ideals is suitable for the member of the three-part social organism placed on its own ground. In the future, the free spiritual organism must develop out of the impulses of freedom, the state and political organism out of the impulses of equality, and the economic organism out of the principle of fraternity on a large scale, from experience gained from person to person, from organizations, associations, cooperatives, and so on.