The Ego and His Own

by Max Stirner

In expropriations, disarmaments, and the like (as, e. g., the exchequer confiscates inheritances if the heirs do not put in an appearance early enough) how plainly the else-veiled principle that only the people, "the State," is proprietor, while the individual is feoffee, strikes the eye!

The State, I mean to say, cannot intend that anybody should for his own sake have property or actually be rich, nay, even well-to-do; it can acknowledge nothing, grant nothing to me as me. The State cannot check pauperism, because the poverty of possession is a poverty of me. He who is nothing but what chance or another—to wit, the State—makes out of him also has quite rightly nothing but what another gives him. And this other will give him only what he deserves, i. e. what he is worth by service. It is not he that realizes a value from himself; the State realizes a value from him.

National economy busies itself much with this subject. It lies far out beyond the "national," however, and goes beyond the concepts and horizon of the State, which knows only State property and can distribute nothing else. For this reason it binds the possession of property to conditions,—as it binds everything to them, e. g. marriage, allowing validity only to the marriage sanctioned by it, and wresting this out of my power. But property is my property only when I hold it unconditionally: only I, as unconditioned ego, have property, enter a relation of love, carry on free trade.

The State has no anxiety about me and mine, but about itself and its: I count for something to it only as its child, as "a son of the country"; as ego I am nothing at all for it. For the State's understanding, what befalls me as ego is something accidental, my wealth as well as my impoverishment. But, if I with all that is mine am an accident in the State's eyes, this proves that it cannot comprehend me: I go beyond its concepts, or, its understanding is too limited to comprehend me. Therefore it cannot do anything for me either.

Pauperism is the valuelessness of me, the phenomenon that I cannot realize value from myself. For this reason State and pauperism are one and the same. The State does not let me come to my value, and continues in existence only through my valuelessness: it is forever intent on getting benefit from me, i. e. exploiting me, turning me to account, using me up, even if the use it gets from me consists only in my supplying a proles (prolétariat); it wants me to be "its creature."

Pauperism can be removed only when I as ego realize value from myself, when I give my own self value, and make my price myself. I must rise in revolt to rise in the world.

What I produce, flour, linen, or iron and coal, which I toilsomely win from the earth, etc., is my work that I want to realize value from. But then I may long complain that I am not paid for my work according to its value: the payer will not listen to me, and the State likewise will maintain an apathetic attitude so long as it does not think it must "appease" me that I may not break out with my dreaded might. But this "appeasing" will be all, and, if it comes into my head to ask for more, the State turns against me with all the force of its lion-paws and eagle-claws: for it is the king of beasts, it is lion and eagle. If I refuse to be content with the price that it fixes for my ware and labor, if I rather aspire to determine the price of my ware myself, i. e. "to pay myself," in the first place I come into a conflict with the buyers of the ware. If this were stilled by a mutual understanding, the State would not readily make objections; for how individuals get along with each other troubles it little, so long as therein they do not get in its way. Its damage and its danger begin only when they do not agree, but, in the absence of a settlement, take each other by the hair. The State cannot endure that man stand in a direct relation to man; it must step between as—mediator, must—intervene. What Christ was, what the saints, the Church were, the State has become,—to wit, "mediator." It tears man from man to put itself between them as "spirit." The laborers who ask for higher pay are treated as criminals as soon as they want to compel it. What are they to do? Without compulsion they don't get it, and in compulsion the State sees a self-help, a determination of price by the ego, a genuine, free realization of value from his property, which it cannot admit of. What then are the laborers to do? Look to themselves and ask nothing about the State?— —

But, as is the situation with regard to my material work, so it is with my intellectual too. The State allows me to realize value from all my thoughts and to find customers for them (I do realize value from them, e. g., in the very fact that they bring me honor from the listeners, and the like); but only so long as my thoughts are—its thoughts. If, on the other hand, I harbor thoughts that it cannot approve (i. e. make its own), then it does not allow me at all to realize value from them, to bring them into exchange, into commerce. My thoughts are free only if they are granted to me by the State's grace, i. e. if they are the State's thoughts. It lets me philosophize freely only so far as I approve myself a "philosopher of State"; against the State I must not philosophize, gladly as it tolerates my helping it out of its "deficiencies," "furthering" it.—Therefore, as I may behave only as an ego most graciously permitted by the State, provided with its testimonial of legitimacy and police pass, so too it is not granted me to realize value from what is mine, unless this proves to be its, which I hold as fief from it. My ways must be its ways, else it distrains me; my thoughts its thoughts, else it stops my mouth.

The State has nothing to be more afraid of than the value of me, and nothing must it more carefully guard against than every occasion that offers itself to me for realizing value from myself. I am the deadly enemy of the State, which always hovers between the alternatives, it or I. Therefore it strictly insists not only on not letting me have a standing, but also on keeping down what is mine. In the State there is no—property, i. e. no property of the individual, but only State property. Only through the State have I what I have, as I am only through it what I am. My private property is only that which the State leaves to me of its, cutting off others from it (depriving them, making it private); it is State property.

But, in opposition to the State, I feel more and more clearly that there is still left me a great might, the might over myself, i. e. over everything that pertains only to me and that exists only in being my own.