Just as we again recognise in this loose and always breakable union (although Stirner does not say so) that union whose mission he had declared it to be "to render secure property gained by force," to arrange the relations of production and consumption, and at the same time to create a certain unity of the means of payment; so, too, we have in this "union of egoists," as its author called it, all the constructive thought that Stirner's book either can or does contain. For a man who only acknowledges one dimension, and only operates with one, considering everything not contained therein as non-existing, cannot form any of the combinations of which life consists, without coming into hopeless conflict with his principles. This Stirner has done, in spite of the vague and imaginary nature of his "union of egoists."
As Stirner had to acknowledge that this union or society cannot exist without freedom being limited in every way, he declared—since after all he requires union for some things—"absolute freedom" a creature of the imagination, as the opposite to "individuality," which is the main thing. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. But that is, as a matter of fact, not the "no-man" but the superhuman Prometheus himself, the idea of Man which he attacked in Feuerbach. "Might," he says in one part of his book, "goes before right, and rightly too." This is exactly the logical scheme of the whole book. Away with everything absolute! Individuality goes before every idea, just because it is itself the absolute idea of the much-despised Hegel.
But suppose we do not take into consideration this fundamental contradiction. 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? It is so, if one regards only that which is absolute as entitled to exist; but Stirner would drive everything absolute from its very last positions. And does it follow further from the circumstance that one of these factors has lost its controlling influence over mankind that all the others, because they too are not absolute, should be denied all practical significance? Put in concrete form, the question stands thus: (1) Has the idea of Deity lost its practical significance, because it has been divested of its absolute character, and its purely empiric origin has been recognised? and (2) If the idea of Right is no more an absolute one than the idea of Deity, does it follow that the influence of Right must be placed upon the same plane as the influence of conscience?
As to the first point, I am relieved from any answer in view of the thorough treatment of these questions by the light of modern investigation. The second question I prefer to leave to some professional jurist, who knows the nature of law, and at the same time has every intention of doing justice to Stirner.
Dr. Rudolf Stammler says,[20] after showing that the necessity of the influence of Law for human society cannot be proved a priori: "It is the theory of Anarchism which must lead us with special force to a train of thought that has never yet appeared in the literature of legal philosophy, although it makes clear, in a manner universally valid, the necessity of legal compulsion in itself and justifies legal organisation. For the antithesis of our present mode of social life, based on law and right, is, as conceived by Anarchism as its ideal and goal, the union and ordering of men in freely formed communities, and entirely under rules framed by convention. Though the individual Anarchist may regard a union of egoists as a postulate, or may desire fraternal Communism, yet each must determine for himself his connection with such a community. Let him enter freely into the supposed agreement and break it again as seems good to him, it is still the stipulations of the agreement that bind him as long as the agreement exists; an agreement which he must first enter into and can at any time break regardless of conditions by a new expression of his will. From this it is that this kind of organisation, which forms the core of the theory of Anarchism, is only possible for such of mankind as are actually qualified and capable of uniting with others in some form of agreement. Those who are not capable of acting for themselves, as we jurists say, such as the little child, those who are of unsound mind, incapacitated by illness and old age, all these would be entirely excluded from such an organisation and from all social life. For as soon as, for example, an infant has been taken into this society and subjected to its rules, the compulsion of law would have been again introduced, and authority would have been exercised over a human being without the proper rules for his assent being observed. The Anarchist organisation of man's social life therefore fails, inasmuch as it is possible only for certain special persons, qualified empirically, and excludes others who lack these qualifications. I therefore conclude the necessity of legal compulsion, not from the fact that without it the small and weak would fare but badly; for I cannot know this for certain beforehand and as a general rule. Nor do I deduce the recognised and justified existence of legal arrangements from the fact that only by these can the 'true' freedom of each individual be attained without the interference of any third person; for that would not be justified by the facts of history, and would certainly not follow from formal legal compulsion in itself. Rather, I base the lawfulness of law and the rightness of right, in its formal state, upon the consideration that a legal organisation is the only one open to all human beings without distinction of special fortuitous qualifications. To organise means to unite under rules. Such a regulation of human relationships is a means to an end, an instrument serving the pursuit of the final end of the highest possible perfection of man. Hence only that regulation of human society can be universally justified which can embrace universally all human beings without reference to their subjective or different peculiarities. Law alone can do this. So even under a bad law legal compulsion in itself retains its sound foundation. Its existence does not cease to be justified, nor is it even touched, by any chance worthlessness of the concrete law in question: it is firmly founded, because it alone offers the possibility of a universally valid, because universally human, organisation. Therefore social progress can only be made by perfecting law as handed down by history, according to its content, and not by abolishing legal compulsion as such."
These conclusions block the way for the mischievous misapplications of distorted expressions of an exact thinker such as Ihering. Ihering certainly took away ruthlessly the ideological basis of law, but he never denied or attacked necessity of legal compulsion as Stirner did. We might just as well ascribe to Darwin the intention of disowning man because he set forth man's natural descent.
It is of just as little use to claim that past master of sociology, Herbert Spencer, in support of Stirner's views, because Spencer too recognises the purely egoistical origin of law and of social organisation. Egoism and Anarchism are not so mutually interchangeable as Stirner thinks. The question is, first of all, whether egoism after all really finds its account in the "union of egoists." It has been already more than once remarked that here too, as in the case of Proudhon, we only have to do, at bottom, with the logical extension of the present order of society that rests on free competition. "Make your value felt" is still to-day the highest economic principle; and he whose value, whose individuality consists in knowledge alone without an adequate admixture of worldly wisdom, would probably fare no better in the more perfect Anarchist world than the poor schoolmaster Caspar Schmidt in our bourgeois society, who suffered all the pangs of hunger and greeted Death as his redeemer.
Stirner did not form any school of followers in Germany in his own time, but Julius Faucher (1820-78) who was known as a publicist and a rabid Freetrader, represented his ideas in his newspaper Die Abendpost (The Evening Post), published in Berlin in 1850. This paper was, of course, soon suppressed, and the only apostle of Stirner's gospel thereupon left the Continent and went to England, to turn to something more practical than Anarchism, or (to use Stirner's own jargon) to realise his "Ego" more advantageously. How strange and anomalous Stirner's individualism appeared even to the most advanced Radicals of Germany in that period appears very clearly from a conversation recorded by Max Wirth,[21] which Faucher had with the stalwart Republican Schlöffel, in an inn frequented by the Left party in the Parliament of Frankfort. "Schlöffel loved to boast of his Radical opinions, just as at that time many men took a pride in being as extreme as possible among the members of the Left. He expressed his astonishment that Faucher held aloof from the current of politics. 'It is because you are too near the Right party for me,' answered Faucher, who delighted in astonishing people with paradoxes. Schlöffel stroked his long beard proudly, and replied, 'Do you say that to me?' 'Yes,' continued Faucher, 'for you are a Republican incarnate; you still want a State. Now I do not want a State at all, and, consequently, I am a more extreme member of the Left than you.' It was the first time Schlöffel had heard these paradoxes, and he replied: 'Nonsense; who can emancipate us from the State?' 'Crime,' was Faucher's reply, uttered with an expression of pathos. Schlöffel turned away, and left the drinking party without saying a word more. 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.[22] On the other hand, Proudhon's doctrines, which in their native France could not find acceptance, gained a few proselytes among the Radical Democrats, and especially among the Communists of Switzerland and the Rhine.