A Legacy Restated

A Legacy Restated: The Work of Bernhard Behrens: Four Essays with Current-day Reviews

“Until true individualism—meaning not the continuation but the overcoming of egoism—has the strength to win through against and transform the artificially galvanized group spirits [from the past], the task of culture cannot be fulfilled. Group interests will continue to act as mutual enemies.” — Bernhard Behrens

These essays, written just after World War II by a German economist who arrived in the United States in 1940, provide an unexpectedly helpful contribution to an understanding of our present moment, writ large. Today, when the U.S. is coming to terms with its destiny and its true (as distinct from geopolitical) place in current and world history, seems a propitious time to republish these essays, which first saw the light of day in the mid-twentieth century.

Updated from the 1950s, the view of the challenges and possibilities that Bernhard Behrens provides remain as perceptive and insightful now as when written, especially in regard to economics and democracy.

C O N T E N T S:

1. Bernhard Behrens’s Legacy
2. Some Biography
3. Behrens’s Relevance to the Social Question
4. Bernhard Behrens 75 Years On
5. Commentary on Behrens’s Essays
6. Goethe and the Social Question
7. Conditions Vital to the Social Organism
8. Death and Life of Democracy
9. The Economic Essentials of the Cultural Life
10. Editorial Afterword

About the Author

Christopher Houghton Budd is an economic and monetary historian with a doctorate in banking and international finance (Cass Business School, London). As director of the Centre for Associative Economics he works independently in many contexts ranging from mainstream to “green,” from central banks to organic farms. He has made a special study of the economics works of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Houghton Budd writes frequently on economic affairs and has published a number of books including Prelude in Economics (1979), Of Wheat and Gold (1988), The Metamorphosis of Capitalism (2003), Rare Albion: A Monetary Allegory (2005), and Finance at the Threshold (2011).

Bernhard Behrens (1892–1952) was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States via London and Canada in 1941. While still in Germany he published a seven-volume series on anthroposophically oriented economics—placing the free human spirit at the center of his considerations. Beyond his writings on economics and on Rudolf Steiner’s “fundamental social law,” little is known about his biography.