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Updated: May 19, 2025
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?
In the movement for emancipation in modern times Stirner distinguishes three different varieties, the political, social, and humanitarian Liberalism. Political Liberalism, according to Stirner, culminates in the thought that the State is all in all, and is the true conception of humanity; and that the rights of man for the individual consist in being the citizen of the State.
Herewith began a new epoch; just as formerly human thought had proceeded from the individual up to the universal, so now it descended from the highest generalisation down again to the individual; to the process of getting free from self followed the regaining of self. Here was the point at which an Anarchist philosophy could intervene, and, as a matter of fact did intervene, in Stirner.
Freedom is the absence of every outside influence; it may be understood in an exoteric or esoteric sense; and throughout his whole book Stirner has done nothing but strip the "Ego" from every sign of outside compulsion; he has made it the "only one" by freeing it with relentless logic from everything external.
"Before the highest Ruler," says Stirner in his rough language, "before the only Commander, we all become equal equal persons, that is, nonentities. Before the highest owner of property we all become vagabonds alike.
The ancient world did not get beyond the rule of formal reason, the Sophists; Christianity put the heart in the place of reason, and cultivation of sentiment in that of one-sided cultivation of the intellect. Even in the Reformation Stirner recognises nothing more than the continuation of the same process.
He has depicted this act of liberation as the goal of all culture; and it finally emerges that all this story of the "only Ego" is a delusion, for "union" excludes "absolute individuality" as well as "absolute freedom" because the two are identical. Stirner, indeed, only spoke of an "absolute freedom" to represent it as a fiction of the imagination, and on the other hand only of an individuality.
Stirner proceeds from the fact, the validity of which we have placed in the right light at the beginning of this book, that the development of mankind and of human society has hitherto proceeded in a decidedly individualistic direction, and has consisted predominantly in the gradual emancipation of the individual from his subjection to general ideas and their corresponding correlatives in actual life, in the return of the Ego to itself.
That which Stirner, finally, under the name of humanitarian Liberalism, places side by side with the two tendencies just mentioned has nothing to do, generally speaking, with the political and material relations of mankind, and is the philosophical Liberalism of Feuerbach, who places freedom of thought in the same position as his predecessors put freedom of the person.
Both Stirner and Proudhon have assumed as the necessary pre-supposition of the abolition of government, individuals who are able to govern themselves, i. e., moral individuals, which means "persons."
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