We call attention to Stirner's book, "The Only One and His Ownhood,"
not because we are strongly impressed by the profundity of his thought
but because we believe that here is a man who ought to be answered,
whose world-conception deserves a careful analysis which finally would
lead to a justification of society, the state and the ideals of right
and truth.
Society is not, as Stirner imagines, an artificial product of men who
band themselves together in order to produce a state for the benefit of
a clique. Society and state, as well as their foundation the family,
are of a natural growth. All the several social institutions (kind of
spiritual organisms) are as much organisms as are plants and animals.
The co-operation of the state with religious, legal, civic and other
institutions, are as much realities as are individuals, and any one who
would undertake to struggle against them or treat them as nonentities
will be implicated in innumerable struggles.
Stirner is the philosopher of individualism. To him the individual,
this complicated and fluctuant being, is a reality, indeed the only
true reality, while other combinations, institutions and social
units are deemed to be mere nonentities. If from this standpoint the
individualism of Stirner were revised, the student would come to
radically different conclusions, and these conclusions would show that
not without good reasons has the individual developed as a by-product
of society, and all the possessions, intellectual as well as material,
which exist are held by individuals only through the assistance and
with the permission of the whole society or its dominant factors.
Both socialism and its opposite, individualism, which is ultimately
the same as anarchism, are extremes that are based upon an erroneous
interpretation of communal life. Socialists make society, and
anarchists the individual their ultimate principle of human existence.
Neither socialism nor anarchism are principles; both are factors, and
both factors are needed for preserving the health of society as well
as comprehending the nature of mankind. By neglecting either of these
factors, we can only be led astray and arrive at wrong conclusions.
Poor Stirner wanted to exalt the ego, the sovereign individual, not
only to the exclusion of a transcendent God and of the state or any
other power, divine or social, but even to the exclusion of his
own ideals, be it truth or anything spiritual; and yet he himself
sacrificed his life for a propaganda of the ego as a unique and
sovereign being. He died in misery and the recognition of his labors
has slowly, very slowly, followed after his death. Yea, even after his
death a rival individualist, Friedrich Nietzsche, stole his thunder and
reaped the fame which Stirner had earned. Certainly this noble-minded,
modest, altruistic egotist was paid in his own coin.