Who is this person that you call "All"?--It is "society"!--But is it
corporeal, then?--_We_ are its body!--You? Why, you are not a body
yourselves;--you, sir, are corporeal to be sure, you too, and you, but
you all together are only bodies, not a body. Accordingly the united
society may indeed have bodies at its service, but no one body of its
own. Like the "nation" of the politicians, it will turn out to be
nothing but a "spirit," its body only semblance.
The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from _persons_,
from personal dominion, from the _master_; the securing of each
individual person against other persons, personal freedom.
No one has any orders to give; the law alone gives orders.
But, even if the persons have become _equal_, yet their _possessions_
have not. And yet the poor man _needs_ the rich, the rich the poor, the
former the rich man's money, the latter the poor man's labor. So no one
needs another as a _person_, but needs him as a _giver_, and thus as one
who has something to give, as holder or possessor. So what he _has_
makes the _man_. And in _having_, or in "possessions," people are
unequal.
Consequently, social liberalism concludes, _no one must have_, as
according to political liberalism _no one was to give orders_; _i. e._,
as in that case the _State_ alone obtained the command, so now _society_
alone obtains the possessions.
For the State, protecting each one's person and property against the
other, _separates_ them from one another; each one _is_ his special part
and _has_ his special part. He who is satisfied with what he is and has
finds this state of things profitable; but he who would like to be and
have more looks around for this "more," and finds it in the power of
other _persons_. Here he comes upon a contradiction; as a person no one
is inferior to another, and yet one person _has_ what another has not
but would like to have. So, he concludes, the one person is more than
the other, after all, for the former has what he needs, the latter has
not; the former is a rich man, the latter a poor man.
He now asks himself further, are we to let what we rightly buried come
to life again? are we to let this circuitously restored inequality of
persons pass? No; on the contrary, we must bring quite to an end what
was only half accomplished. Our freedom from another's person still
lacks the freedom from what the other's person can command, from what he
has in his personal power,--in short, from "personal property." Let us
then do away with _personal property_. Let no one have anything any
longer, let every one be a--ragamuffin. Let property be _impersonal_,
let it belong to--_society_.
Before the supreme _ruler_, the sole _commander_, we had all become
equal, equal persons, _i. e._ nullities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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