Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 19, 2025
The realisation of the self is, for Stirner, the key to the solution of the problems of work, property, and pauperism. He will have no division of goods, no organisation of labour.
Stirner had begun with the intention of slaying Feuerbach's idea of "man" as a retrograde idealist fallacy, and of creating, like Prometheus, a new man, the Unmensch, in the Ego completed into a microcosm, and, as such, complete in itself, separate and independent.
The result would be just the same, but there is a well-understood contradiction in first declaring all property as a common possession in which the reality of society which Kropotkin denies is thereby recognised and then giving to each person the right to dispose as he pleases of everything. Stirner was at least logical when he declared: "All belongs to me!"
Political Liberalism, says Stirner, created a few people, but not one free individual. Absolute monarchy only changed its name, being known formerly as "king," now as "people," "State," or "nation."
The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
All parties have in his eyes only this in common, that they all strive to actualise conceptions and ideas which lie beyond them, whether these be called God, State, or humanity. Stirner stands in the same relation to the philosophic tendencies of his own and earlier times. He sees them all run into the great ocean of generality the absolute, nothingness.
Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical." Academy, London. "No modern musical critic has shown greater ingenuity in the attempt to correlate the literary and musical tendencies of the nineteenth century." Spectator, London. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Hello, Blake, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Max Stirner.
For Proudhon every piece of work is the result of a collective force, for Stirner the most valuable works are those of "individual" artists, savants, and so on, and their value is always to be determined only from the egoist standpoint.
Stirner is the German thinker who is carried away by the unchecked flow of his thoughts far from the path of the actual life into a misty region of "Cloud-cuckoo-land," where he actually remains as the "only individual," because no one can follow him. There is no trace in Stirner's book of any intention of being an agitator.
The regulation of society by itself is accepted by Stirner just as little as in the question of property, when it comes to the question of obtaining for the labourers a full reward of their labour. "They must rely upon themselves and ask nothing from the State," he answers. Only to a third very difficult question does this thoroughgoing theorist fail in an answer.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking