Steiner, Rudolf

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was an Austrian-born innovative academic whose extraordinarily wide-ranging ideas founded the basis for Anthroposophy as a global spiritual movement, after Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society in 1913 over a dispute about the spiritual status of the philosopher J. Krishnamurti. Steiner applied his ideas to schooling and education as well as to a range of other fields, including agriculture, medicine, architecture, and social reform. Steiner is the founding inspiration for modern-day Steiner Waldorf schools around the world.

In the history of ideas, one of the most abiding mysteries is how one of humankind’s most original and wide-ranging thinkers and seers—Steiner—is so comparatively little recognised, or even known of, in the range of disparate fields on which he has had, and continues to have, ...