The social creed of the anarchist is a curious fusion of Liberal and socialist doctrines. Its economic criticism of the State, its enthusiasm for individual initiative, as well as its conception of a spontaneous economic order, are features which it owes to Liberalism; while its hatred of private property and its theory of exploitation represent its borrowings from socialism.
Doctrinal fusions of this kind which seek to combine two extreme standpoints not infrequently outdo them both. Dunoyer, for example, was the extremest of Liberals, but he took great care to remind his readers of at least one function which none but the State could perform: no other authority, he thought, could ever undertake to provide security. True bourgeois of 1830 that he was, Dunoyer always considered that “order” was a prime social necessity.[1292] But, armed with the criticism of the socialists, the anarchists soon get rid of this last vestige of the State’s prerogative. In their opinion the security of which Dunoyer spoke merely meant the security of proprietors; “order” is only necessary for the defence of the possessors against the attack of the non-possessors. The socialists themselves (with the exception of Fourier, perhaps, whom the anarchists claim as one of themselves), however opposed to private property, were exceedingly anxious to retain considerable powers in the hands of the State, such as the superintendence of social production, for example. Armed this time with the criticism of the Liberal school, the anarchists experience no difficulty in demonstrating the economic and administrative incapacity of the State. “Liberty without socialism means privilege, and socialism without liberty means slavery and brutality”—so writes Bakunin.[1293]
It is only fitting that a few pages at the end of this book should be devoted to a doctrine that attempts to fuse the two great social currents that strove so valiantly for the upper hand in nineteenth-century history.
It is not our first acquaintance with anarchy, however. It has already been given a “local habitation and a name” by Proudhon, who is the real father of modern anarchism. This does not imply that similar doctrines may not be discovered in writings of a still earlier date, as in Godwin’s, for example. But such writers remained solitary exceptions,[1294] while the links connecting the anarchical teaching of Proudhon with the political and social anarchy of the last thirty years are easily traced. Not only is the similarity of ideas very striking, but their transmission from Proudhon to Bakunin, and thence to Kropotkin, Reclus, and Jean Grave, is by no means difficult to follow.
Alongside of the political and social anarchism which form the principal subject of this chapter there is also the philosophical and literary anarchism, whose predominant characteristic is an almost insane exaltation of the individual. The best known representative of this school, which hails from Germany, is Max Stirner, whose book entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum appeared in 1844.[1295] The work was forgotten for a long time, although it enjoyed a striking success when it first appeared. Some twenty years ago, just when Nietzsche was beginning to win that literary renown which is so unmistakably his to-day, it was seen that in Stirner he had a precursor, although Stirner’s works probably remained quite unknown to Nietzsche himself, with the result that Stirner has since enjoyed posthumous fame as the earliest immoraliste. A few words only are necessary to show the difference between his doctrines and those of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin.[1296]
I: STIRNER’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND THE CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Stirner’s book was written as the result of a wager. The nature of the circumstances and the character of the epoch that gave birth to it were briefly these. Stirner was a member of a group of young German Radicals and democrats whom Bruno Bauer had gathered round him in 1840. They drew their inspiration from Feuerbach, and accepted the more extreme views of the Hegelian philosophy. Their ideal was the absolute freedom of the human spirit, and in the sacred name of liberty they criticised everything that seemed in any way opposed to this ideal, whether nascent communism, dogmatic Christianity, or absolute government. The intellectual leaders of the German Revolution of 1848 were drawn from this group, but they were soon swept aside in the reaction of 1850. A few of them who were in the habit of meeting regularly in one of the Berlin restaurants assumed the name die Freien. Marx and Engels occasionally joined them, but soon left in disgust. Their joint pamphlet, which bears the ironical title of The Holy Family, is supposed to refer to Bauer and his friends. A few of the German Liberal economists, including Julius Faucher among others, paid occasional visits to the Hippel Restaurant. Max Stirner, who was one of the most faithful members and a most attentive listener, although it does not seem that he contributed much to the discussion, conceived the idea of preparing a surprise for his friends in the form of a book in which he attempted to prove that the criticism of the supercritics was itself in need of criticism.
The extreme Radicals who formed the majority of the group were still very strongly attached to a number of abstract ideas which to Stirner seemed little better than phantoms. Humanity, Society, the Pure, and the Good seemed so many extravagant abstractions; so many fetishes made with hands before whom men bow the knee and show as much reverence as ever the faithful have shown towards their God. Such abstractions, it seemed to him, possess about as much reality as the gods of Olympus or the ghosts that people the imagination of childhood. The only reality we know is the individual; there is no other. Every individual constitutes an independent original force, its only law its own personal interest, and the only limit to his development consists in whatever threatens that interest or weakens its force. Every man has a right to say, “I want to become all that it is within my power to become, and to have everything I am entitled to.”[1297] Bastiat had already expressed it as his opinion that there could be no conflict of legitimate rights, and Stirner declares that “every interest is legitimate provided only it is possible.” “The crouching tiger is within his rights when he springs at me; but so am I when I resist his attacks.” “Might is right, and there is no right without might.”[1298]
Granting that the individual is the only reality, all those collective unities that go by the name of the family, the State, society, or the nation, and all of which tend to limit his individuality by making the individual subservient to themselves, at once become meaningless. They are devoid of substance and reality.[1299] Whatever authority they possess has been ascribed to them by the individual. Mere creatures of the imagination, they lose every right as soon as I cease to recognise them, and it is only then that I become a really free man. “I have a right to overthrow every authority, whether of Jesus, Jehovah, or God, if I can. I have a right to commit a murder if I wish it—that is to say, unless I shun a crime as I would a disease. I decide the limits of my rights, for outside the ego there is nothing.… It may be that that nothing belongs to no one else; but that is somebody else’s affair, not mine. Self-defence is their own look-out.”[1300] The workers who complain of exploitation, the poor who are deprived of all property, have just one thing which they must do. They must recognise the right to property as inherent in themselves and take as much of it as they want. “The egoist’s method of solving the problem of poverty is not to say to the poor, ‘Just wait patiently until a board of guardians shall give you something in the name of the community,’ but ‘Lay your hands upon anything you want and take that.’ The earth belongs to him who knows how to get hold of it, and having got hold of it knows how to keep it. If he seizes it, not only has he the land, but he has the right to it as well.”[1301]
But what kind of a society would we have under such conditions? It would simply be a “Union of Egos,” each seeking his own and joining the association merely with a view to greater personal satisfaction. Present-day society dominates over the individual, making him its tool. The “Union of Egos”—for we cannot call it a society—would be simply a tool in the hand of the individual. No scruples would be felt by anyone leaving the union if he thought something was to be gained by such withdrawal. Every individual would just say to his neighbour, “I am not anxious to recognise you or to show you any respect. I simply want you to be of some service to me.”[1302] It would be a case of bellum omnium contra omnes, with occasional precarious alliances. But it would at least mean liberty for all.