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Bronk puts Kant squarely within the Romantic camp, andsays it was from Kant that the poets learned that we “half-create”the world we see and experience, and that what we understandof the world is always partial. The Romantics’ fondnessfor fragments and aphorisms reflects this view, since the formsthemselves suggest an incompleteness of thought and the sensethat “we see by glimpses.” This is one area in which anthroposophicalreaders might disagree with Bronk’s assessment ofRomantic thought, i.e., that they believe “what exists is bruteand nameless” (262), and that the human mind orders thatchaos according to its own necessities, for example, through thefilters of time and space. Bronk doesn’t highlight the ways manyRomantics differed from Kant, i.e., in believing that reality is infact knowable on its own terms, but demands a spiritual trainingon the part of the observer to meet the challenge of participatingin and thinking along with world processes. (This is an areain which Goethe would have been particularly helpful.) Nevertheless,emphasizing Romantic skepticism about conventionalattitudes toward perception is salutary. Romanticism’s insistenceon a multifold language moves us in a fruitful direction.The first part of the book offers a fascinating history of challengesto standard economics not only from Romantic thinkersbut from some of its purported champions, chiefly Adam Smithand John Stuart Mill. Their thinking was much less disciplineboundand much more open to other approaches than we tendto assume. Similarly, he draws on economists whose thinkingresonates with the Romantics, notably Alfred Marshall, GeorgeShackle, and recent economists who are employing ideas fromcomplexity theory. These thinkers flesh out a context that supportsthe Romantic critique and bolsters it.As a Romantic scholar, I was gratified to see these thinkersvalued as they themselves hoped to be, as having contributionsto make not only about individual experience, but alsoabout how we relate to and see ourselves within society. Bronk’swriting is clear and accessible; he holds himself to the Wordsworthianstandard he wishes economists would follow of beingunderstandable to a broad audience.However practical Bronk makes the Romantics sound, atheart what he and they offer is an ethics: the ideal of developingflexible thinking, of using the imagination and feeling as themeans of empathizing with perspectives very different fromour own. Globalization, undertaken Romantically, would lookvery different from any models currently under consideration; itwould appreciate difference and not regard other ways of beingas unintelligible or primitive.Anthroposophists may finish the book wishing that Bronkhad gone even further in envisioning different ways of structuringeconomies, but he has made an excellent start at thinkingabout how to reorient how we consider embedding economicswithin larger philosophical social and political contexts,and he proceeds so cogently and reasonably that he may lullsome people into not noticing that he is actually advocating afull-scale reevaluation of the way we approach the economicsphere. Readers who are convinced of the helpfulness of hisideas will have come a long way toward readiness to entertainthe more radical ways of doing business that Steiner’s ThreefoldSocial Order advocates.New Books on Curative Education, continued from page 10.can see Rudolf Steiner’s deep respect for the developing child,especially one with a heavy karmic burden to carry.Following Steiner’s lectures, children from Ita Wegman’s ClinicalTherapeutic Institute (both from Arlesheim and the Lauenstein)were brought into the room and Rudolf Steiner spoke withand about them. Steiner had a life-long connection to childrenwith developmental challenges, as his brother Gustav, bornin 1866, was both deaf and mute, and persons with all sorts ofspecial needs appeared at the train stations his father managed.This book takes us into the lives of eighteen such children thatSteiner was intimately acquainted with, including the sixteenwho were a part of the curative course in 1924.Uhlenhof devotes a chapter to each child describing his orher encounter with Rudolf Steiner, Steiner’s words about thechild, and the reactions of his audience. He also includes lifeportraits of the children—some very short (two died in 1925)and some quite long (1996!). He also presents, when possible,personal accounts by these children as adults, and some reminiscencesby their family members and friends, of this encounterwith Rudolf Steiner and its significance in their lives. This isthe most fascinating study I have seen of Rudolf Steiner’s impacton individual destinies, and it is presented in a most readableform, complete with photographs spanning the subjects’ lifestages. This book weaves the content of the curative course, aportrait of Rudolf Steiner as a teacher and healer, and the personalaccounts of the children and their families into a cogentand absorbing work.••Fall-Winter 200951