Book project on Rudolf Steiner’s aesthetic education
Nathaniel Williams, leader of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, is preparing a new publication on Rudolf Steiner’s economics, the modern environmental movement and Aesthetic Education.
This book is being written for a diverse public audience and is intended for publication by an academic press, with a focus on English-speaking readers. It aims to position Steiner’s work within the well-known discourse on aesthetic education and build upon the positive portrayal of anthroposophy’s influence on the modern environmental movement and socio-ecological banking, as presented in Dan McKanan’s book Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism (2018).
McKanan has shown how famous milestones of the modern environmental movement, such as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, as well the emergence of the community supported agricultural movement, b-lab and the efforts to promote benefit corporations, involved collaboration and intersections with students of anthroposophy. This new book describes an aesthetic education for the Anthropocene that encompasses art, natural science and economics and which helps to illumine how it is that individuals working with anthroposophy have been able to contribute in the positive ways McKanan has described. This includes contextualizing the contributions from the recently published On the Earth We Want to Live (October 2025, Springer Nature), edited by Johannes Kronenberg and Edith T. Lammerts van Bueren, which was also inspired by McKanan’s research. In this context, the book will also address critiques—particularly those by Peter Staudenmaier and from the ideology of social ecology.
Challenges of ecological and economic alienation
The research for the new book began as a dissertation on how Goethe’s phenomenological natural science can be understood as ‘aesthetic education’ in relation to the challenges of ecological and economic alienation and sustainable development. The book is informed by experiences developing a one-year college-level course along these lines (2020–2022) with colleagues at the Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. In 2023, Williams became a member of the faculty at the Goetheanum. The new book integrates research on the connection between ideas of sustainability and associative economics. This publication serves as a timely intervention regarding the representation of Steiner’s work in English-language academic discourse. A first draft of the book will be finished in December 2025, which will be followed by a revision process before submission for peer review and publishing in the USA.
The costs for this project include a writing fellowship and a research assistant position.
Costs for Author:
- 26,250 CHF (average of 10 hours of writing per week, 875 CHF per week)
Costs for Research Assistant:
- Rent – 4,200 CHF (12 months at 350 CHF/month)
- Insurance – 600 CHF (12 months at 50 CHF/month)
- Food – 4,200 CHF (12 months at 350 CHF/month)
- Administration – 600 CHF (one-time costs, e.g., visa, etc.)
- Total: 9,600 CHF
Overall total: 35,850 CHF
More funding is required for this project. Members and friends who would like to learn more or contribute can contact nathaniel.williams@goetheanum.ch