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Updated: June 14, 2025
But can it be believed that Stirner has set up an "absolute freedom" all of his own making, to place it in contrast with individuality. In other words, freedom is merely the possibility of living one's individuality, of being an "individual" in Stirner's sense.
One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other revolutionists.
Let us suppose there is none, and that all Stirner's other assumptions are indisputable, that God, Humanity, Society, Right, the State, the Family are all classed in one category, as were abstractions and creations of my own "Ego," what follows? That these ideas, now that they have lost their absolute character, are no longer to be reckoned as factors in the organisation of life?
Have not some already done so with the idea of God, because they thought it merely a product of their own mind? Here we may remember Stirner's argument, which was only rendered possible because he placed society upon exactly the same level as the Deity, i. e., regarding both as mere conceptions.
At first, attracted by Weitling's Communism, he later on came into decided opposition to it from his accentuation of the individualist standpoint, which he, as an ardent follower of Feuerbach, pursued according to Proudhon's rather than Stirner's views. In conjunction with a certain Hermann Döleke, Marr endeavoured to instil these views into the above-mentioned Swiss workmen's unions.
Now his union does not exclude individuality and freedom, but only absolute individuality. But this last Stirner cannot admit, because it also he regards merely as a "spectre," an "obsession," a "fixed idea." But whether he admits it or not, what is Stirner's "individual" but an idea, something absolute?
"My power is my property; my power gives me property; I am myself my own power, and am thereby my own property." This is, in a nutshell, Stirner's positive doctrine. Right is power or might. "What you have the power to be, that you have the right to be. I derive all right and justification from myself alone; for I am entitled to everything which I have power to take or to do.
But one gift Anarchism certainly did receive from Nihilism: "the propaganda of action" does not spring from the logical development of Proudhon's and Stirner's ideas, and cannot be extorted or extracted from it in any way; it is rather the consequence of the mixture of these ideas with Nihilism, a result of Russian conditions.
The others broke out laughing at the proud demagogue being thus outdone: but no one seems to have suspected in the words of Faucher more than a joke in dialectics." This anecdote is a good example of the way in which Stirner's ideas were understood, and shows that Faucher was the only individual "individual" among the most Radical politicians of that time.
Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously assertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists. Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank. But social and religious codes curbed the most narcissistic of kings and conquerors.
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